Survey: Invite young people to return home

Every four or five years for the past two decades, the McCook Community Foundation Fund has conducted a survey of McCook High School students. From freshman through seniors, students are asked about everything they like to do in their hometown and what they would like to see changed. Over the five surveys, more than 1,500 McCook High School students have given their thoughts and opinions about their community.

The questions have changed a bit over the years, so it is hard to compare apples to apples. But with pages and pages of data, there is a lot of information that can be gleaned from the young people’s answers. The data include their perception of their hometown and what young people are looking for in a community to call home for a lifetime – or at least at some point in their future.

When the survey was first conducted in 2006, one of the biggest lessons learned was that many of our young people had never heard the important statement, “We would like you to return to your hometown.” A majority of the responses noted that no one had ever invited them or asked them to stay or return to their hometown.

I admit that I had never said it to my own children, much less to another student in our community.

We just take it for granted that our young people know that we’d like them to live in their hometown. We just assume that our students know that we want them to get a higher education and then return home to raise their families. We just presume that recent high school graduates know that they are valued and wanted in their community.

But judging by the initial youth survey two decades ago, our young people didn’t know that. Why? Because no one had said to them, “We want you to move home.” “We want you to stay here.” “We want you to go to college, have adventures, travel the world but then return to the community that helped raise you, that shaped the person you are, and that wants to be part of your future.”

Over the years, that issue has been addressed with adults encouraged to ask our young people to return to their hometowns. One of the projects that came out of the survey is graduation gifts for McCook seniors from MCFF, which put it in writing that they are wanted in their hometowns. They have received mailboxes to remind them that they will always have a place to return to McCook, battery chargers to take the power of McCook with them and water bottles with a written reminder that their hometown wants them to return home.

At graduation practice, the high school seniors also hear from McCook alumni, who share the story about why they returned to their hometown to start a business, to raise a family, to enjoy recreational opportunities or to be near friends and family.

It is hard to know the impact of these projects and these suggestions but doing nothing is not an option. We need our young people to return and raise their families if we want our communities to grow and thrive.

This is just the tip of the iceberg of what we have learned talking to our young people. For example, we know that recreation was previously the biggest priority but they value safety more now than ever. We learned that they prefer living in the same-sized town that they grew up in. And they don’t think there is a stigma to staying in your hometown.

Over the next few months in this column, I will be sharing statistics, anecdotes and information that we have learned over the past 20 years thanks to this youth survey, which is sponsored by the Nebraska Community Foundation and conducted by the Center for Public Affairs Research at the University of Nebraska-Omaha.

MCFF’s youth group, Youth Change Reaction, will be visiting with these same students who took the survey to ask deeper questions that can be asked on an online survey, hoping to learn more about what they want for their community.

And members of MCFF’s advisory committee will be visiting local groups to share information about the youth survey, how it is applicable in our community and why it is important to listen to what our young people are saying.

If this is something that interests you and you’d like more information about the survey, please reach out on the MCFF website, mccookfoundation.org.

In the meantime, we need to continue to encourage our young people to return to their hometowns, ask them what they would like to see in their communities and invite them to get involved in making their hometowns the best place to call home.