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The Power of Group Work with Youth: Creating

Activists of the Future

Bernard J. Wohl MSW

To cite this article: Bernard J. Wohl MSW (2000) The Power of Group Work with Youth: Creating
Activists of the Future, , 22:4, 3-13, DOI: 10.1300/J009v22n04_02

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 The Power of Group Work with Youth:
Creating Activists of the Future
Bernard J. Wohl

NOTE: The following was a keynote address at a conference, ‘‘The

Power of Group Work with Kids,’’ that was sponsored by the Long
Island Institute for Group Work with Children and Youth.

The title of our conference today is The Power of Group Work with
Kids. Its subheading states: ‘‘Across Settings and Disciplines.’’ We
could add ‘‘Across Borders,’’ ‘‘Across Generations,’’ across any of
the barriers that limit or thwart kids from knowing their world with
immediacy and depth. And knowing their world can range from un-
derstanding the meaning of ‘‘dissing,’’ the outcomes of unprotected
sex, planning a canoe trip, to giving back Nike sneakers in the struggle
against poverty world-wide.
I have kept as a reminder for crossings, a letter dated May 12, 1966,
thirty-three years ago, sent to a kid’s parent who had given the United
Community Center in East New York, Brooklyn, where I was then
Associate Director, the classic permission slip for a group trip to
Albany on a school day to tell the legislators what the students in the
group wanted. The letter was signed by the District Superintendent of
School District 19. It said: ‘‘After my conference with the group of
parents on last Monday, I studied all of the factors in the case of the
pupils who were kept out of school by their parents on March 30 to

Bernard J. Wohl, MSW, was formerly executive director of The Goddard River-
side Community Center. He was an honoree of the Association for the Advancement
of Social Work with Groups at its 1999 Symposium in Denver. He is an adjunct
instructor at the Hunter College School of Social Work, teaching a course on com-
munity organization. He can be reached at 160 Riverside Drive, New York, NY
10024.
Social Work with Groups, Vol. 22(4) 2000
E 2000 by The Haworth Press, Inc. All rights reserved. 3
4 SOCIAL WORK WITH GROUPS

attend a session of the legislature in Albany. The principal and I have

decided that in view of the nature of the trip, the absence of these
pupils will be excused. The letters have been withdrawn from the
pupils’ files.
I have long since forgotten what the kids went to Albany to fight
for, probably something as disturbing as books, or athletic equipment,
or playground repair, but I have not forgotten their sense of power at
having planned the trip, explained it to their parents and the legislators
in Albany, and found that their parents supported them even when the
school officials challenged what they had done. Whatever it was they
had gone to Albany to fight for, school officials found it upsetting
enough to enter ‘it’’ in the school files, parents had found their chil-
dren’s effort worthy of support, and the kids had found a new power in
themselves.
Group work with kids is very hard work. And it is definitely subver-
sive. It is almost always about change in one way or another, to get rid
of a difficulty, or achieve something hard to negotiate. It is about
conflict, about choice among alternatives, which the planning process
produces for every endeavor that has meaning.
In this past year, youth groups in almost all of the thirty-eight
community centers within the United Neighborhood Houses of New
York City developed protest activities in their agencies to fight against
drastic cuts in youth programs proposed in Mayor Guiliani’s fiscal
year 2000 budget. Protest activities varied from agency to agency. But
throughout the city, youth groups organized protests, drew up petitions
clamoring for restitution and increase of funds, demonstrated outside
their own agency or joined the demonstrations across neighborhood
lines. They phoned and wrote and leafleted and demonstrated. They
conferred and found allies. In the end, a victory was won for youth
programs. The Fiscal Year 2000 budget was passed with a full restora-
tion of the youth cuts proposed in the Mayor’s executive budget and
an additional $4.5 million was added through the intervention of the
New York City Council. I am in no way implying that the youth
groups carried the day alone. There were struggles throughout the city;
senior centers also won restorations and additions.
I am retired now from Goddard Riverside Community Center, but I
received excited reports from staff and parents about the growth in
confidence and command among the youngsters in the agency’s many
groups, their ability to reach out, confer and coordinate, speak from
 Bernard J. Wohl 5

the platform and talk one-on-one with reporters, answering questions

and conducting an argument for investment in their current lives and
futures. The ability to do this is won in hard struggles within every
social group of youngsters . . . in conflicts about dissing, irresponsibil-
ity, cliques, choice, favoritism, absence and just ‘‘no’’ to any proposal
that isn’t immediately social and familiar.
But the hard conflicts, in social groups, with a worker committed to
the possibilities the kids can engender for each other, can become the
necessary field of struggle about choice, about values and outcomes,
about mutual goals and the impact of each on the other in the search
for personal recognition and social regard. An essential motor is the
social group worker who finds germinal ways to capture with kids the
blazing insight of the old German poet-philosopher, Goethe, who said,
‘‘Man only knows himself insofar as he knows the world–the world
which he only comes to know in himself and himself only in it.’’
Our kids live in a tough time. There has been a large change in the
climate of our country. Although the excess of the Gingrich political
performance removed him from visible public office and command,
his influence was broad and it remains. His virulent attack on any
concept of mutual aid or common human needs corrupted the meaning
of individual responsibility and turned it into its opposite. . . . a hatred
of any measure of social concern and social welfare. It is not Gingrich
alone by any means, but he fostered a climate safe only for the rich and
the powerful, for whom he became spokesman and clarion. Hate,
scorn, dismissal, exclusion, contempt for ‘‘the other,’’ proliferate in
that miasma and afflict the public atmosphere. Our common world
becomes polluted by dissonance and contempt. It is a poisonous cli-
mate for everyone to live in, adults and children alike. But kids who
are trying to find themselves in their world take the hardest hits,
objects of influence; without input in most arenas of school and com-
munity.
No one has a compelling answer to the shooting of children by
children in schools that has afflicted us recently–why and how it
occurs with easy access to guns–but the shooters, even shooters with
partners, seem to have no definition of self or other, seem discon-
nected from their world except for the copycat violence of the hate
group adults. Kids need to connect with a world they can understand
and act upon. They need social groups which give them the instrument
for acting together to know the world that is and the world they want,
6 SOCIAL WORK WITH GROUPS

and how they may change it if they learn how to plan and work
together. For this, they need the support of social group workers who
can help them learn how to merge individual and social needs into one
struggle.
This is not an easy try. There is no consensus of what is wrong, if
anything, since the economy is still considered strong. Still, there are
shocks. Burned into the public retina is the image of police leading a
line of day care children with clasped hands out of a Jewish Communi-
ty Center in Los Angeles after the rampage of Buford Furrow Jr. There
are other images, too many, of death by gunfire in the schools. How do
we understand the gunfire in the schools? And in nice middle class
areas, too, to which parents fled to save their children from the vio-
lence of those others–immigrants from everywhere, speaking foreign
languages but mostly Spanish, Black and other colors and poor. Al-
ways the poor. Parents fled the noxious fumes of poverty, even pover-
ty at something of a distance, to gain breathing space away from
‘‘them.’’ And there was space, space in broad garages, big enough in
which to manufacture mayhem which nobody had eyes to notice.
The Op-Ed page of the New York Times on August 26 this year
carried an article by Alvin F. Poussaint, clinical professor of psychia-
try at Harvard Medical School, in which Poussaint writes that extreme
racism is a mental health problem. He says, ‘‘Clinicians need guide-
lines for recognizing delusional racism in all its stages so that they can
provide treatment.’’ KKK burning/gun fire/bombing/racism is not a
personal mental health problem. As long as thirty years ago, the Amer-
ican Psychiatric Association was asked to have racial bigotry classi-
fied as a mental disorder. The association’s officials ‘‘rejected the
recommendation, arguing that since so many Americans are racist,
racism in this country is normative–a cultural problem rather than an
indication of personal pathology.’’
It is true that ‘‘so many Americans are racist’’ but that doesn’t make
it ‘‘normative.’’ Terroist/gunfire racism is neither a personal mental
health problem nor normative. Racism is the most bitter unsolved
social problem of this century. It has corrupted our national life. Rac-
ism historically is the longest, bloodiest conflict that has torn us apart
as a nation and a people. Despite significant gains won in the civil
rights struggle of the past against discrimination and exclusion, racism
remains our deepest social abscess. And not only in our national life.
The global economy, in which we are supreme, entangles us with the
 Bernard J. Wohl 7

world and the conflicts about borders, tribes, holy lands, mountain
escarpments–a globe of marauders.
What sense can kids make of such an embroiled world? What about
adults? At the beginning of this century, Jane Addams of Hull House
had excrement smeared on her door for her pacifism against World
War I and suffered such bitter isolation she had to warn herself against
the pit of self pity. After the war she led the efforts to feed the hungry
children in Europe and helped to organize the Women’s International
League for Peace and Freedom. Years after the agonies of ostracism
during the first World War, she won the Nobel Prize for Peace.
In our time we have our own desperate dilemmas. Economic glob-
alization has produced technical miracles, but also the globalization of
poverty. Nadine Gordimer, South Africa’s great writer and Nobel
Prize winner for Literature, was appointed Goodwill Ambassador for
the United Nations Development Program’s ‘‘Decade for the Eradi-
fication of Poverty.’’ In an Op Ed article in the New York Times on
August 1, 1998, headlined ‘‘Dare to Dream of Eradicating Poverty,’’
she writes, ‘‘Poverty is not in the nature of things. Poverty is not
inevitable in the world today. There are the resources–food, shelter,
work, skills, training-- and means to make them available to all.’’ She
writes of the coalition of nongovernmental organizations that engage
in frank debate on issues affecting poverty, ‘‘This exchange is essen-
tial if we are to discard, everywhere, once and for all, the cop-out of
charity: handouts that salve the conscience and perpetuate the prob-
lem.’’ Citing some of the projects all over the world, she writes,
‘‘Capacity building projects . . . are the scaffolding of dedication to
material and spiritual reconstruction of people’s damaged and unreal-
ized lives.’’
Can kids in groups understand the globalization of poverty and
choose to ‘‘Dare to Dream of Eradicating Poverty’’? Settlement House
Youth in New York City made a challenging attempt to do so in the
last two years in their NIKE sneaker give-back campaign.
The NIKE ‘‘Give-Back’’ campaign among the United Neighbor-
hood Houses of New York City settlements began in the Bronx two
years ago. As part of a specially funded ‘‘youth services collabora-
tive’’ among several Bronx houses, youth workers were charged with
developing youth leaders and they tried to involve youth in communi-
ty organization and social action. Especially prominent in this effort
were the youth workers at Edenwald Gun-Hill Neighborhood Center.
8 SOCIAL WORK WITH GROUPS

They proposed to their youngsters several issues to consider and the

youngsters chose to learn more about Nike exploitation of workers in
Asia and the high cost of Nike sneakers here. Many of the youngsters,
captured by the impact of NIKE advertisement, owned NIKE sneak-
ers, which their families could hardly afford. The kids, working with
staff, did some research and wrote letters to NIKE C.E.O. Phillip
Knight and to basketball hero Michael Jordan, NIKE’s star endorser,
asking for information about low wages and high prices. When they
did not get adequate answers to their questions, they began to organize
the first ‘‘sneaker give back’’ held at NIKETOWN on 57th Street in
New York City. Edenwald workers and youth reached out to other
community centers of United Neighborhood Houses to join in the
protest and sneaker give-back. Edenwald staff and youngsters spoke to
youth at many of the 38 settlements in the city and eventually ten of
the houses signed on to endorse the first sneaker give-back demonstra-
tion at Niketown on September 27, 1997.
Although about a third of the 38 community centers participated in
some aspect of the campaign, the base of support remained in the
Bronx, and the youngsters from Edenwald were overwhelmingly the
major contingent of two hundred demonstrators at the first and subse-
quent demonstrations and leaflet distributions in front of Niketown.
When reporters interviewed young girls from Edenwald about why
they had come to demonstrate in front of Niketown, one ten-year old
girl said that Nike did not pay women in Viet Nam and China enough
money to house their children with them so the mothers had to keep
children with relatives or others far away and that was bad for the
children and sad for the mothers. Another young girl said that it was
unfair to charge so much money for sneakers when Nike paid their
workers so little. When a reporter said Nike paid as much as other
companies overseas, the young girl answered that all those companies
were bad then but she didn’t have their addresses or she would write
and tell them so.
When the Edenwald buses from the Bronx arrived packed with
children and plastic bags filled with give-back sneakers, demonstra-
tors from Manhattan settlements marveled at the turnout. Other settle-
ments were represented–their youngsters distributed fliers, the Henry
Street Settlement drama group performed a street play–but no other
settlement turned out the numbers, enthusiasm, and evidence of youth
 Bernard J. Wohl 9

involvement in and grasp of the issues disclosed by the participation of

the Edenwald youngsters themselves.
In all, three demonstrations were held in the campaign to challenge
Nike’s low wages and high sneaker prices. Although participation
increased modestly, and adults from labor organizations joined the
demonstrations, youth involvement remained steady but did not
mount in settlements other than Edenwald. After the third demonstra-
tion, youth staff from a number of the settlements met informally to
analyze why staff had found it so difficult to engage youth in social
advocacy and action. Youth staff in the South Bronx had a longer,
continuous history of canvassing housing facilities in their community
on local issues, such as street lights, and knew the families better,
adults and children. Edenwald staff workers had a primary role in
outreach to the community and that built the ability to stretch into new
issues for examination and action.
In a Statement of Principles for the Nike Give Back Campaign,
Edenwald declared: ‘‘The Community Center NIKE Give Back cam-
paign started as a tool to empower youth in the Edenwald Public
Houses in the Bronx. We understood that one of the reasons that youth
felt the need to wear expensive sneakers and clothing was a need for
power and status within their community. We strove to teach the youth
about using a collective voice and community organizing as a way to
gain power as an alternative to wearing expensive clothing. Since then
it has spread to other youth programs and agencies.’’
All the youth staff, not only at Edenwald, searched for ways to
illuminate social needs through the translation of personal needs for
relationships and recognition into community organization activities.
All the staff workers acknowledged that kids needed the staff’s illumi-
nation of social issues and their impact on their own personal needs to
become involved in broader social campaigns. Staff was instrumental
in opening up new arenas of thought, concern, connection to self, and
the discovery of social action. Everyone admitted it was hard sledding
to push outward from the personal to the social arena. But all staff in
the agencies involved in pushing out the margins of involvement in
social issues found that the kids grew in confidence and skill develop-
ment in acting upon their grown-larger world.
In the New York Times, September 27, 1997, David Gonzalez, in
an articled headed, ‘‘Youthful Foes Go Toe to Toe with Nike,’’ re-
ported, ‘‘Dozens of young people from 11 settlement houses around
10 SOCIAL WORK WITH GROUPS

the city are planning to dump their old Nikes at the store to protest
what they say is the shoe company’s double exploitation of the poor.
They are part of a growing movement that has criticized Nike for
failing to pay workers in Asian factories a living wage–about $3 a day
in Indonesia, for example–while charging style-setting urban teen-
agers upward of $100 to $150 for the shoes.’’ In their argument with
Nike, the young people of the settlement houses joined the fight
against poverty world-wide.
In our own country, the gap between the rich and the poor has
widened dramatically. The New York Times reports that the wealthiest
2.7 million now have as much to spend as the poorest 100 million. The
top one-fifth of American households with higher incomes now takes
half of all the income in the United States.
In their own way the kids of the settlement houses who demon-
strated in front of Niketown and gave back their sneakers in protest of
the exploitation of workers in far countries joined the fight against
poverty in their time and their world. They were able to do so because
in their groups in their neighborhood centers they talked and argued
about themselves and what they wanted in their world. Whether they
knew it or not, they worked in the tradition of the American Settle-
ment movement’s emphasis on the small group as an instrument for
democracy and social reform.
Fourteen years ago, Alex Gitterman and Lawrence Shulman dedi-
cated their book, Mutual Aid Groups and the Life Cycle’’ (1986), to
the memory of William Schwartz for his contributions to the under-
standing of social group work dimensions and the concept of mutual
aid. Schwartz (1971) had written: ‘‘First, the group is an enterprise in
mutual aid, an alliance of individuals who need each other, in varying
degrees, to work on common problems. The important fact is that this
is a helping system in which the clients need each other as well as the
worker. This need to use each other, to create not one but many
helping relationships, is a vital ingredient of the group process, and
constitutes a common need over and above the specific task for which
the group was formed.’’
In the announcement for this conference on the Power of Group
Work with Kids, across settings and disciplines, the workshops were
addressed to the needs of kids with chronic medical illness, to kids
who have experienced loss from divorce and death, to kids confront-
ing substance abuse, to kids suffering from abuse and neglect, to
 Bernard J. Wohl 11

Lesbian and Gay kids, and to hard to reach alienated kids. The power
of group work with all of these groups is of great significance and the
content of these workshops will demonstrate the magnitude of what is
possible, what has already been accomplished and what has now been
readied for larger commitment, involvement, resources and impact.
In addition to exploring further the power of group work with all of
these kids, we need to bring the power of group work to all our kids . . .
to kids who live in a time and place where the concept of mutual aid
and common human needs is under attack, where individual responsi-
bility has been besmirched to mean the death of concerns for others,
even the hatred of those who need the help of a caring world.
Andrew Malekoff, in Group Work with Adolescents (1997), recalls
what he calls the ‘‘first real definition of group work’’ by an early
researcher, Wilber Newstetter, in 1935. Newstetter illuminated a dual
vision, later described by William Schwartz as a focus on both the
‘‘near things of individual need and the far things of social reform.’’
Newstetter wrote in 1935, ‘‘Group work may be defined as an educa-
tional process emphasizing (1) the development and social adjustment
of an individual through voluntary group association; and (2) the use
of this association as a means of furthering other socially desirable
ends. It is concerned therefore with both individual growth and social
results. Moreover, it is the combined and consistent pursuit of both
these objectives, not merely one of them, that distinguishes group
work as a process.’’
In a later chapter on Violence and Youth, Malekoff writes in a
section subtitled, Where World Stage and the Group Intersect, ‘‘While
teaching a university course on group work in the spring semester of
1995 on the day following the Oklahoma City bombing, I asked my
students how the agencies that they were placed in, and how they
themselves, were dealing with the impact and aftermath of the bomb-
ing with their clients and group members.’’ The long silence was
broken by a lone voice accompanied by a growing wave of nodding
heads. ‘‘This is the first time anyone has mentioned it,’’ was the sole
response. This seems amazing in a university course with students
placed in social agencies. What was their world of reference for self,
and school and profession?
Now, four years later, in 1999, there is a plethora of comment in
memorial assemblies, churches, the media, focus groups and schools.
But we have not yet begun to explore the deep resonance of meaning
12 SOCIAL WORK WITH GROUPS

in Newstetter and Schwartz about the ‘‘near things of individual need

and the far things of social reform.’’ We have not yet dared to address
the impact of white adult terrorism as a social disease, infectious and
malignant, on kids and teens. White adult bombers have loaded their
trucks and cars with explosives and driven them without concern in
their communities, never once being stopped before mayhem by local
police, while Black professors, racially profiled by the police, have
been stopped so often many have had to get rid of their prestigious
cars to avoid daily harassment.
I want to return here to Goethe’s illumination that ‘‘Man only
knows himself insofar as he knows the world–the world which he only
comes to know in himself and himself only in it’’ and the dual vision
of Newstetter that group work focuses on both ‘‘near things of individ-
ual need and the far things of social reform.’’ One of the annual staff
conferences of Goddard Riverside Community Center shortly before I
retired, dealt with the interpenetration of commitment to individual
needs and the commitment to social action and social change. An
excellent staff worker in one of our programs for young children wrote
in her evaluation of the conference that if she tried to add social action
to her already overcommited work load, ‘‘I would have no personal
life at all.’’ The New York Coalition on Immigration had asked our
agency to participate in their paper plate campaign to restore food
stamps for immigrants. All of the children in her program had created
imaginative art work on their paper plates calling for food stamps for
immigrant children and parents. The children in her program, a drop-
out prevention program in the schools, were children experiencing
deep problems of loss and grief, difficult foster placements, repeated
absence from school, poor performance in reading and math, and
extrusion from the classroom by overwhelmed teachers. But the chil-
dren in her group loved art and thought the paper plates were a great
idea. Many of them knew more than their share about hunger. The
paper plates were dazzling and every child in her program participated
in the group art sessions in which the individual artists produced their
plates. In a follow-up eight months later, the Coalition again requested
help. One of the youngsters wrote on the back of his second plate,
‘‘Remember me, I sent one last year.’’ He knew the world of hunger,
and he knew himself as actor and artist in that world. He had joined the
near and the far in his sense of himself, of himself in the world and the
world in himself . . . Remember me!
 Bernard J. Wohl 13

I am not rejecting the worker’s cry of overload. . . . that organizing

for social change takes time and effort and adds to the rigors of how
one thinks and works with kids, but a good deal of the work lies in the
region of concept, of how we perceive the ways in which we and the
kids give each other new possibilities across old borders.
I want to close as I began with another story from long ago in East
New York. We had had a knifing of one of our teens from East New
York in a fight with teens from Canarsie over some challenge. There
were endless meetings–our kids wanting reprisal, their kids insisting
our kids were the original perpetrators; there were proposals shouted
down and plans to invade each other’s turf; meetings separately and
attempts at meetings together which failed. I have forgotten most of
the detail, but the East New York staff kept raising alternatives; the
Canarsie kids had no staff, but in the end, the cry for revenge and who
was to blame faltered. What both groups wanted was the ability to go
freely across the East New York-Canarsie border for friends and free
access to parties and whatever was happening. What they wanted was
more of their world, unfettered by turf and exclusion.
Youngsters fighting city-wide for a youth budget commensurate
with their urgent needs is a long stretch. Fighting the exploitation of
Asian women by the Nike corporation, giving back their sneakers as a
signal they reject complicity in that injustice, is an even longer stretch
for kids today. But the global world is upon them, and upon us who
work with them, to weave together the near and the far.

REFERENCES
Gitterman, Alex and Lawrence Shulman, eds. (1986). Mutual Aid Groups and the
Life Cycle. Itasca, IL: Peacock.
Malekoff, Andrew (1997). Group Work with Adolescents: Principles and Practice.
New York: Guilford.
Newstetter, Wilber. (1935). ‘‘What is Social Group Work?’’ In Proceedings of the
National Conference of Social Work (pp. 291-299), Chicago: The University of
Chicago Press.
Schwartz, William. (1971). ‘‘On the Use of Groups in Social Work Practice.’’ In
William Schwartz and Serapio Zalba, eds. The Practice of Group Work. New
York: Columbia University Press, pp. 3-24.