Background
In June of 2016, I started volunteering with my local YMCA branch. When I reached out to the branch to inquire about volunteer opportunities with high school students (that’s the age range I’d like to work with), the staff members replied that they were planning on creating a teen leadership program from scratch – would I be interested in helping out? That was a dream come true for me! At the beginning of the summer, the three of us met several times to discuss the program, our retreat, and the content we wanted to create.
Using students who’d been in a similar program at the Y, we conducted interviews and selected 45 students for our Teen Leadership Board (TLB). The model we chose was to have three cohorts that would meet at different times once a month. Each student would join one of seven different service groups, which would meet every week and be student directed. We brought everyone together the second weekend of school for an overnight retreat.
TLB in 2016-2017
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We were very ambitious and quickly learned some lessons about the kinds of content, activities, and expectations we could have. The staff didn't have much time, so we often didn’t have a curriculum for the month’s meeting until the day before. The model we had of the cohorts really didn’t work the way we intended and I feel like our program fell apart sometime around February.
