Whimsy and Wonder: Giving Youth a Voice, Not Just a Place to Wait
by theToledo Tribune
There was a time when young people were put to work on the farm by the age of ten, handed a hoe, and told to mind the rows and keep their eye out for crows and anything that slithered. It wasn’t glamorous, but it was something, and it gave a kid the sort of purpose you can’t find in a waiting room. These days, we’ve replaced the hoe with smartphones and the field with fluorescent-lit youth rooms where we expect kids to stay safe, stay busy, and stay quiet until adulthood arrives.
But what if we changed that? What if we stopped babysitting our teenagers and started inviting them in—not as projects to be managed, but as partners in building a town?
Right here in Toledo, we’ve got more young minds than we know what to do with—and most of them are more than ready to do something meaningful. Not just crafts and chore charts, but real work. The kind that smells like ink and sawdust and ambition.
Imagine a youth-run media collective where teenagers are behind the cameras, asking questions of the mayor, recording stories from elders, and editing podcasts with headphones too big for their heads but hearts too big to quit. Give them microphones, and they’ll give us truth—honest, unfiltered, and sometimes inconvenient. But it’s their truth, and it matters.
Picture a youth advertising agency—kids with sketchpads and Canva accounts, pitching logos to local businesses who’ve grown tired of ClipArt and want something fresh. You give a 15-year-old the task of branding a coffee shop, and you’ll get something no adult committee could dream up in a year of meetings.
Think about pop-up youth markets on the corner of Main and Graham with kids selling handmade soaps, printed T-shirts, and hand-carved dice trays for tabletop games you’ve never heard of but that make them light up like Christmas. They learn inventory, pricing, customer service—and they walk away with a little cash and a lot of pride.
These aren’t new ideas. They’re old ones, really. The idea that a person can contribute before they’re old enough to vote. That their voice matters even if it’s changing pitch. That work and creativity aren’t reserved for after high school—they’re meant to start now.
We’ve got room for this in Toledo. We’ve got empty storefronts and full imaginations. We’ve got business owners who remember what it felt like to be underestimated and teachers who’d love to see their students do something more than memorize facts for a test they’ll forget by Friday.
So here’s the call: let’s build a Youth Voice Civic Series. Let’s mentor microbusinesses. Let’s fund a storytelling lab where kids record the lives of our elders before those stories fade. Let’s stop waiting for them to grow up and start growing with them.
It’s not babysitting. It’s the business of becoming. And if we do it right, someday they’ll write about us—and they’ll say we gave them not just a place to wait, but a place to begin.