Organization working to involve youths in Topeka

Five Topeka high school students are founding members of a new organization focused on showing young people that Topeka offers them a future.

The five are part of the Greater Topeka Youth Partnership Commission, a new initiative housed at the Greater Topeka Partnership. GTYPC is working to involve youths ages 14 to 21 through a variety of activities, including serving on boards and getting involved in politics, said Bryce Liedtke, a junior at Shawnee Heights High School.

"I want to see youth stay in Topeka," he said. "If you would have asked me a year ago, my plan was to go to Kansas City, get out of Topeka. Through leadership and through Washburn and getting involved with the city and seeing how much people actually want to hear my opinion, that changed for me."

Liedtke said getting involved with the youth commission gave him a behind-the-scenes look at the city and made him feel as if returning to Topeka after college would be a viable choice.

Nicole Bloomquist, a senior at Shawnee Heights, said the idea for the youth council started after a 2018 Youth on Board conference, where professionals talked about how youths and adults could be better connected in the community.

"That day they introduced us to the concept of adultism and ageism and how we really don't understand each other," she said. "The adults are trying to make the community a better place, but they weren’t really involving the youth who they were making the community better for."

Youth on Board is a Boston-based organization that works in youth organizing and advocacy. The organization defines adultism as "the assumption that young people are inferior to adults simply because of their young age."

After learning about and being encouraged to support a voice for youths in Topeka, Bloomquist said, the founding members began meeting.

Makenna Orton, a junior at Shawnee Heights, said she has learned a lot about Topeka through the first months of working with GTP and community leaders.

"There were a lot of movements throughout Topeka trying to make it a better place that I hadn’t heard about before," she said, adding that she didn't know about many aspects of the community that people were trying to improve, including initiatives to address hunger and poverty.

"Before getting involved in all this, I didn’t really know how connected Topeka was and how much everyone cared," Bloomquist said. 

Meeting with business leaders and people in charge of a variety of area companies, and seeing how much they love Topeka, she added, "made me want to stay."

The young people, including two additional founding members Jacob Gernon and Lillian Holmberg, both Topeka High School students, have been drafting memorandums of understanding and bylaws, working to build the commission. They also have been seeking 20 to 40 youths to serve on the commission.

They have recruited 28 so far. Anyone interested in more information about the commission and its work, whether a young person or a nonprofit or business that would like to work with the students, can contact the group by emailing contact.gtypc@gmail.com or calling (785) 422-5644.

The group includes Mayor Michelle De La Isla's Mayor's Youth Council, which will launch at the end of March. Liedtke said the GTYPC has a political focus but also fills a wider community need, especially for young people who may not be interested in politics.

The commission will work closely with Forge, Topeka's young professionals group.

"Once these kids leave, they’ve got a place to go within Forge too," said Forge executive director Lindsay Lebahn. "That’s one of the hardest things about going off to college and coming back — you lose that sense of community. They’re doing a really good job of getting these young youth involved in the Topeka area and then having a place for them to step right in with Forge."

The idea of a youth commission was exciting for Lebahn, who works in her position to build a community in Topeka that attracts and retains young professionals.

"It’s literally like a talent pool just right there waiting for us, feeding our pipeline," she said.

Matt Pivarnik, GTP president and CEO, told the Shawnee County Commission about a month ago that this isn't a "one-way mentorship."

"This is not about adults telling the young leaders what to do," he said. "This is about the young leaders telling the adults what they want their community to be going forward. I’m excited, not because we want to placate youth in the community. I’m excited because this is critical. It occurs to me that when we are doing all this community development together that there are a lot of the crops that we are sowing right now that we might not ever reap the benefits. But we’re actually building this community for these young folks, for these young leaders."

It will be a growing experience for adults and young people. The first few  meetings were nerve-wracking, Bloomquist said.

"We did have a meeting at first with a bunch of adults that wanted to help us out," she said. "It was a formal meeting, and we had no idea what we were doing. Bryce has mentioned this a lot, we didn’t even know what the (Greater Topeka) partnership was."

Now, not only are they familiar with GTP's work, and have met with the mayor and other city and county leaders, but they hope to make a difference in Topeka.

"Get youth to stay in Topeka, that’s one of our big goals," Liedtke said. "Once I really got involved, I started seeing the positive changes I could make."

This story was updated Feb. 17, 2019, to correct information about the Mayor's Youth Council.