**The Power of Proximity: Why We Need to Get Youth Closer to Their Communities**
Sarah Fanslau is the CEO and founder of KinCorps, a Portland-based company focused on creating experiential opportunities for young people aged 5-13 and their parents to get close to and learn from new and different people.
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When I was 11 years old, my family and I traveled with members of my mother’s church to Kensington, Philadelphia, for a service trip. We volunteered with a nonprofit organization that provided shelter, food, and medical care to those in need in the area. Having volunteered frequently as a child, including at homeless shelters in Maine, I thought I’d be prepared for Philly. I wasn’t.
The area surrounding the organization looked desolate. The buildings were empty, boarded up, and covered with graffiti. People lay on the sidewalk and fell into the street. They came into the organization in wheelchairs, with few clothes, hungry, afraid—some crying. I’d never been that close to so much suffering.
This experience, along with others, led me to work with and volunteer for several organizations dedicated to engaging youth in service, particularly through service-learning.
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As a young adult in New York City, I earned some extra cash on weekends by working for an organization focused on educating young people about homelessness. Groups of middle and high school-aged youth would arrive for an overnight at the Quaker meeting house on the Lower East Side. Before each overnight, we discussed homelessness—the causes and consequences. Many of the kids held assumptions that reflected larger societal stereotypes related to drugs, mental illness, or laziness.
Each night, the youth joined the men for dinner, played checkers or chess, and then helped with clean-up. At night, in a room just down the hall from the men, the youth would again reflect on their experiences. Nearly all were surprised to learn that most of the men had jobs but couldn’t afford rent. Many shared stories they had heard—about medical problems, successes and the joys of children or grandchildren, and about hard times. All realized how much they had in common with these men, who had seemed so different just hours before.
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As an adult, I’ve continued this work, running service programs at national and global organizations for youth and families from ages 5 to 25. While this work has been meaningful, too many of the programs I’ve led have been devoid of what Bryan Stevenson, a public interest lawyer and social activist, calls *proximity*—getting close to those who are different from us, who are excluded, who are suffering.
Through proximity, Stevenson notes, we can grow empathy and compassion, recognize our shared humanity, challenge and undermine dehumanizing narratives, and advocate for justice. But proximity is challenging these days, and while many experts and academics—including former surgeon general Vivek Murthy—highlight service as a fundamental prescription for our current malaise, opportunities for young people have become increasingly limited and sanitized. In large part, this is because involving youth in volunteering that gets them proximate is seen as too risky.
Organizations concerned about liability and the associated insurance premiums for accepting volunteers, particularly young people, have stopped doing so altogether or have focused primarily on older youth. The pathway to volunteering that many of us took decades ago through the church has receded as church attendance has fallen.
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If I had to give one answer to how we found ourselves here, it would be that we are afraid. We’ve let fear of others, injury, and risk outweigh our better judgment. We’ve become so good at asking “why” that we’ve failed to ask “why not,” or to consider what happens if we don’t act. We have failed to realize that some of the structures, rules, laws, and regulations we’ve put in place aren’t making us safer but are pushing us farther apart—all while reducing our quality of life.
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The solution lies with all of us—parents, institutions, and the government. It is predicated upon realizing that if youth aren’t given an opportunity when they are young (really young) to get involved in and proximate to their community, and especially to those who are different from them, then by the time they are 13 or 18, community won’t matter to many of them. They won’t trust it, they won’t know how to engage with or benefit from it, and may not feel compelled to protect it when it is at risk.
Let’s give young people the chance to build connections that last a lifetime—and to discover what we all have in common.
https://www.sunjournal.com/2025/11/16/fear-of-risk-is-killing-community-opinion/