The August 18, 2026 work session focused on two main topics: a review of current youth engagement programs across city departments and a proposed youth protection curfew ordinance. The meeting began at 4:30 PM and was recessed for lunch at 12:36 PM, with plans to resume the curfew discussion at 1:00 PM. Presentations were given by representatives from the Community Engagement Department, Raleigh Parks, and the Raleigh Police Department.
Gabble us to order. Welcome back from our hiatus, and uh we have uh work session on youth engagement and of course the curfew. Uh Jonathan Lambert Melton will be 30 minutes late. If we can note that in the minutes, and then I will invite up Ken Um Tisler of Raleigh Parks, Taisha Mosley of Community Engagement, and Amanda Roll of the Police Department. Good morning. Um Taisha Mosley with the community engagement department. And yes, as the mayor stated, this is going to be a joint presentation. So you will see multiple faces here at the podium. I am just getting us started. Everyone will be available for questions on their specific programs as we wrap up. So today we will talk a little bit about context. We'll discuss briefly our current programs, we'll spend some time talking about the engagement efforts that took place this summer, and then next steps. So you'll hear that, and we're referring to individual that are individuals that are elementary school age. Uh over the age of 18. So you'll hear that throughout the presentation. Um, so in the youth area across all three departments, we have programs like Americor, Foster Grandparents, which is where we have individuals over the age of 55, volunteer in local elementary schools and daycare centers. Uh, the parks and recreation department does a wonderful job of identifying out of school time across all of those programs that you see on the screen, the Raleigh Police Department having Raleigh um youth summer camps, their leadership program, and mentorship opportunities. Uh it's an in its inception in 1983 was um young people working in community centers over the summer. And I just wanted to take a moment to point out the growth in the program since then. So within Summer Youth, they do additional programming with young people. We've had two mental health summits, job readiness training, which is open to anybody who even wants to apply to Raleigh Summer Youth, walking them through the application process there, several professional development opportunities, and some may not know that Raleigh Summer Youth also has a virtual pathway. So teenagers are able to work virtually with local businesses like York properties or nonprofits like the Garner Road Community Center. There they tackle real role challenges that the businesses identify, and a part of their job is proposing a solution at the end of their summer. We also have our digital impact program and both the connectors and the ambassadors work to bridge the digital divide. They pass out computers to low-income families, they host programs like advice about a device, where anyone can bring their cell phone, computer, iPad, and have the young people help them uh problem solve. And with that, I am going to turn it over to my colleague, Ken Histler in Raleigh Parks. Good morning, Ken Histor Assistant Director Raleigh Parks. Glad to be here with you today. Uh a nice little transition as we think about the collaboration that Tayshia just talked about is that Raleigh Summer Youth Employment Program. For those of you who may not be aware, a lot of those kids come and work with us. So they're in our summer camps, they're working in our park operations. So it's a great example of how our two groups work together. Now, as typical in some of my slides, you have a lot of information here and a lot of data to look at. You can but what I want to do today is talk about a couple things that you're going to see in there. And one is this is data that we can pull out of our registration system. What it doesn't capture is all of that self-directed passive use of our greenway trails, our our outdoor uh courts, our our disk golf courses, our and those other opportunities that people have to recreate within our spaces. The other thing I do want to draw attention to is things like I want to put in there is contact hours and also um connections. So contact hours are how often do we have those teens in our programs, and then how frequently are they interacting in our programs? What I did want to draw attention to is a couple things, and as Tane talked about out-of-school time is really important to Raleigh Park. So when that school bell ends, what are the opportunities that we have for both our youth, our teens, and we'll talk a little bit about adults in a minute. So two of those is our out-of-school time includes our camps, our specialty camps, our traditional camp, and our after-school programs. What we want to do is make sure those are geographically represented in our after-school programs spread out across Raleigh. We also want to make sure they have an opportunity to get into different things. So when we get into our specialty camps, we're talking about things like entrepreneur camps. You guys may have remembered right before you broke for the summer. We had a bunch of teams that were in here learning about what government looks like. Do you want to be in a job with RTN? Or we even had them out at our greenhouse. So we're looking at those opportunities that the youth, the teens want to be able to learn more about skilled trades, entrepreneur camp. We had them over to IronWorks.