If you catch her at the right time of the morning,
Diana Manee, Program Coordinator of the Real Food,
Active Living Initiative at Youth Empowered Solutions—
also known as YES!—might be doing little more than
cutting up strips of paper.
“I know, right? I’m thinking, ‘I have a
master’s degree, and here I am cutting up
paper.’ But I know it’s really going to help
these students.”
Though Diana’s office is in Asheville,
YES! works statewide to help young
people make positive changes in their
communities, hiring them in paid positions
doing advocacy and outreach mostly
related to helping North Carolinians make
healthier choices. And sometimes that
work also involves some light crafting.
“The exercise we do involves having
our youth fill out interesting facts about
themselves on the paper, then sharing
with the group. It’s actually a great way
to break the ice with newcomers and get
them more comfortable speaking in a
public setting. For some of them, like for
example Carmen when she first got here,
that’s really important.”
This isn’t the only paper making a
difference for the YES! staff. The paychecks
these young people receive help them
take their work seriously, with real
ownership of what they’re doing. The pay
also helps them recognize the value of
their efforts—particularly now that YES! is
increasingly able to charge organizations
a fee for benefiting from these students’
skills and services. In fact, this year the
fee-for-service model YES! worked to
implement through a BCBSNC Foundation
grant paid off big—the organization
has increased its annual fee-for-service
revenue from $80,000 to $510,000, now
covering 40% of its overall budget. One
representative moment in this transition
began with Carmen, the initially reserved
student Diana mentioned, at the 2011
Southern Obesity Summit:
“Well, when she came to us, she had all
these skills already—super-organized, just
so willing to do whatever is asked of her—
but definitely shy, and she wasn’t really
prepared to speak in a group of people.
And even though she’d been working hard,
revealing new skills and abilities, I wasn’t
sure how she or the other staff would
respond to such a big event, when we all
went to the Summit, with people from
many states coming together.”
