Buffalo Area 4-H Program Empowers Teens, Opens Doors

In 2016, when she was a freshman in high school at Frederick Olmstead #156 in Buffalo, New York, Maimuna Mannan missed the afternoon bus - a stroke of luck.

Because that day, she sat in on an afterschool program that would change the course of her life.

At a meeting of the 4-H Youth Community Action Network (Youth CAN), a program run by Cornell Cooperative Extension Erie County (CCE Erie County), Mannan watched students, including her older sister, organize and collaborate to make a difference in their community. On the whiteboard behind them, one question was written: "What do you want to talk about?"

"It was so inspiring and intriguing to watch students take charge within that program," said Mannan, who joined the club the following year and has been involved with CCE Erie County ever since. "I'm eternally grateful for the program, because it opened so many doors."

For 10 years in the Buffalo area, the Youth CAN program has empowered students, including those from marginalized or underprivileged backgrounds, to plan and execute projects that contribute to their communities, while gaining skills that will help them build careers. The program runs afterschool throughout the school year, and students choose the challenges they want to address.

In the past, they've worked with local nonprofits to help the homeless; organized campaigns against hate crimes; and tackled local issues related to racism, food insecurity and mental health. A summer program connects students with paid internships in their areas of interest, and the students are invited to statewide and national 4-H events where they present their work, in public speaking and leadership roles that are a signature of 4-H programming.

"We believe that young people are assets, that they already have a lot of the skills they need to achieve what they want in their lives, and we're here to support that growth," said Sara Jablonski, a 4-H youth development educator with CCE Erie County who runs the Youth CAN program. "If they see their own idea come to fruition, they have much more belief in their own capacity to pursue whatever it is they care about."

Jablonski is currently running the program in two schools: South Park High School in Buffalo and Global Concepts, a charter school in Lackawanna, a suburb of Buffalo, where the program has been operating on and off since 2015, with ongoing support from the school's Chief Executive Officer Tracy McGee, Ph.D.

"I feel like we actually have shown change instead of talking about change," said Ivori Outteri, a freshman at Global Concepts. "We also learn a lot of compassion that I don't think a lot of us have at this age. It helps with learning about people in different situations and how we can help them, how we can be a community outside of school."

Empowering students

The philosophy underpinning Youth CAN came out of the College of Human Ecology more than 30 years ago. The late June Mead, Ph.D. '94, who spent more than 25 years in various positions at CCE Broome County, spearheaded its incorporation into New York state 4-H, making it a signature program and weaving it into all CCE 4-H program development. Along the way, Mead secured multiple rounds of funding through the U.S. Department of Agriculture's Children, Youth and Families at Risk (CYFAR) program and established programs for young people in Binghamton, Watertown, Albany, Syracuse, Rochester and Buffalo - all with the aim of giving urban youth the tools to make a difference in their communities.

Thirty years later, the model still works.

"I've seen a total change in the students in terms of them wanting to, on their own, come up with ideas and things they can do," said Renie Thanos, an English teacher at Global Concepts who serves as a teacher facilitator in the program. "This exposes them to the real community, the real people who live here with them … . When they graduate, they need to understand math and how to write an essay, but they also need to know how to be caring people."

Thanos said the empowerment can be particularly important for kids who are struggling in or outside of school. While many students at Global Concepts choose to attend the charter school, some are enrolled because they struggled elsewhere.

"Some students are here because they didn't make it somewhere else, and we have some students with rough home situations," Thanos said. "I feel like this club is a huge plus for all students but especially for those kids - because we're really focused on doing something positive."

This year, the students at Global Concepts ran an "anti-drama" campaign that involved putting up posters with positive messages around the school, and they invited, promoted and hosted a guest speaker who spoke to the entire student body about bullying. They also ran donation drives for the local Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Animals and Hearts for the Homeless, an organization committed to feeding and clothing the homeless. The students completed the final drop-off of their donations June 4.

"It wasn't just about collecting donations," Thanos said. "They were learning where these donations go, and about the people they're helping and how people end up homeless."

At South Park High School, the students wanted to reduce the amount of fighting in their school and initiated a "random acts of kindness" campaign. For students in the group who struggle with social skills, it gave them a structure for interacting with their peers.

"Some of the participating students have disabilities and spend their entire day in one classroom, so they mostly interact with a very small group of peers," said Jablonski. "Doing these random acts of kindness forced them out of that comfort zone."

Jablonski said the program also emphasizes teamwork. One of the major successes at Global Concepts, Thanos said, was how the students, initially in two different social groups, coalesced.

Outteri agreed. "I definitely learned how to work as a group, and to get other people's opinions," she said, adding, "I learned how to better myself as a person, because they helped us go step-by-step."

Shaping the future

For Maimuna Mannan and her sister Mahisa Mannan, the agency and voice they found in the afterschool portion of the program was only the beginning.

"The things we ended up doing shaped me as the person I am now," Mahisa Mannan said.

Both sisters took advantage of the summer internship component of the Youth CAN program and said the experiences gave them huge advantages, both on their resumes but also in their personal growth. Maimuna Mannan, who had her sights set on a career in medicine, learned through her internship that healthcare wasn't for her. After graduating with a degree in political science from the University of Buffalo in 2024, she plans to attend law school.

Mahisa Mannan, who now works for a software company, interned for a business with ties to her current employer. "I like to think that I ended up landing my current job because they knew people I'd worked with before," she said.

But the Mannan sisters said the main advantage of their experiences with CCE Erie has been engaging with broader swaths of the community.

"The internships gave you experience of how the workplace works, how you interact with people, how you present your ideas to people when they might not agree with you," Mahisa Mannan said. "It was a really important skill to learn when I was that young."

For Maimuna Mannan, presenting her group's work at Capital Days, a three-day statewide 4-H event in Albany, New York, was transformative. She remembers it vividly because it was her first time being away from family overnight, and she was fasting for Ramadan.

"But then I got to see the Capital, and we talked to a senator about our projects and presented about the importance of mental health," she said. "That was so special to me, because here I am, just a little high school student talking to everyone in the room, being that leader."

While in college, the Mannan sisters both worked for CCE Erie during the summers, sharing the 4-H programming with students of all ages and mentoring teens in internships coordinated by Youth CAN - work they describe as inspiring and a way of giving back what they received.

"We all worked in a collaborative space and mindset and walked out better speakers, better writers, better thinkers," Maimuna Mannan said. "As an educator, being with these students, having fun, having conversations, just seeing it all intertwined - it's changed how I view the world."