Nothing beats a phone call

There are so many ways of communicating with youth these days, and as I have said in other posts, we need to use them all. Still, nothing beats a personal phone call. I tried to have a real, person to person phone call (cell phones or land line) with every youth every so often. I would use an upcoming event as the excuse for calling them, but after giving the invitation and before they could get into rattling off any excuses for not coming, I'd change subjects asking them something about there life “how's school going this semester,” “are you going out for track this year,” “how's the new choir director at school,” etc.