“You can find anything in Lewiston-Auburn, if you look hard enough for it.”

Deacon Lasagna, a senior at Edward Little High School, heard this from an acquaintance who attends Bates College. It struck Lasagna, a teenager who thinks the Twin Cities gets a bad rap for having nothing to offer, given all the social and cultural outlets that do exist here.

If you look for them, that is. Or, with YADA – the Youth +Adults +Dialogue = Action group announced in Lewiston this week – somebody is looking for you.

YADA is the response to a good problem. Library employees were seeing its services overrun by teenagers, prompting the director, Rick Speer, to propose an effort for youth engagement. “There’s got to be more opportunities for kids,” Speer says, reflecting on his thinking.

The effort that’s being offered by YADA involves study circles and small subgroups tasked with devising solutions to prickly problems. For four Thursdays from Oct. 25 through Nov. 15, these study circles will agree, argue and, most importantly, work toward answers to a simple question:

“How do we make L-A a better place for youth?” says Larry Marcoux, a former Lewiston High School history teacher, currently with the United Way of Androscoggin County, who is a leader of YADA.

It’s a good question, too. YADA is taking the smart approach of engaging youth and adults equally in finding answers, because neither side has all of them. If anything, the optimism and energy of youth coupled with the wisdom and practicality of adults should lead to some interesting proposals.

YADA also has an ambitious timeline – it hopes to finish its process and report by Dec. 6 – that should serve it well. Marcoux knows what happens when community efforts are allowed to slow; they wind up shelved. Too many people are “sticking their neck out” for this process for that, he says.

There are many great community efforts underway at the moment. Along with YADA, the Visible Community’s “People’s Plan” for downtown is another grass-roots, seemingly house-by-house movement to help citizens influence policy making in their community.

Interestingly, according to the Maine People’s Alliance’s Kate Brennan, one of the themes from the first People’s Plan meeting on Oct. 3 was developing youth programs tied into a new downtown community center. It seems the people, and YADA, are on the same page.

We’re eager to see what these groups come up with. YADA has the speed, while the Visible Community has shown the patience. Both ways are right, as both are steering toward similar ends: letting people know there’s everything in L-A, if you only look for it.

We hope these efforts make them not so hard to find.