Light Tomorrow with Today: Youth Summit 2009

Vital Stats

Taylor G

Fargo, ND

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The Problem

In Spring 2008 a bunch of area high school students got together and said, "Hey, let's set aside a day to get Key Clubs, Student Councils (StuCo), and groups Students Today Leaders Forever (STLF)together and tackle an issue." The issue that was decided was hunger. Hunger and Homelessness has a lot of student-led momentum behind it in the Fargo-Moorhead community. There's activities like Fill the Dome where students plan and execute the filling of the area's entertainment venue's floor with nonperishable food items and raise money and Homeless and Hungry, an awareness piece of sleeping outside in a cardboard box at a host site which is usually a church, raising money that goes to local food pantries, and making and delievering blankets to homeless people. The 2008 Youth Summit was very successful. There were over 170 students grades 9-12 from 14 different area High Schools in participation of the day which consisted of a key note speaker who was previously homeless, break out sessions from area leaders, and an afternoon of service in homeless shelters and food pantries. After the impact made on the community of Fargo-Moorhead it was decided the Youth Summit needed to happen again in 2009. The problem of Hunger will still be targeted in the 2009 Youth Summit, but as a planning committee we decided to change the focus of the event to empowering the children younger than us to be leaders. The Fargo-Moorhead community is very involved in helping others and is frequently there for other community members. We care about the world around us, the children are raised to do the same, and most people don't take what they have (whether it be personlly or it be the strong sense of community in the area) for granted.

Plan of Action

1. I have formed a committee of ten area high school students to plan the 2009 Youth Summit. Almost all the committee members go to different schools which added diversity to the group-one of the things we're trying to put forth the day of the event. We are all working together to design the themes, shirts, schedule, elementary activites, food/snacks, transportation, and registration. All of this is being done with the supervision of Barry Nelson from Metro Youth Partnership (MYP) a Moorhead, MN based non-profit organization that helps students reach their goals and design events while still leting them take charge and plan it. 2. Divide the group into sub-committees. Currently there is an executive sub-committee that is present at all sub-committee meetings and dedicates a lot of time to the planning of the event. The other sub-committees include registration/programming/transportation, elementary outreach, t-shirts, food/snacks, and marketing. 3. Each sub-committee meets twice before large group meetings and achieves a list of tasks pertaining to their committeee. An example of this is for the marketing committee, they must have a vision of the ad for the newspaper and posters for schools on paper for the next meeting along with finalizing the radio publicity. We bring this back to the large group and vote on the ideas discussed in small groups. 4. Our current goal is 200 participants focused on high school age, but allowing grades 7-12 to attend. The theme is "Light Tomorrow with Today" and the three goals are to 1. Engage, empower, and equip area elementary schools students to be the leaders of tomorrow through high school speakers and leadership/team building activites. 2. Tackle teen issues in mini sessions that will take place in the morning of the summit. These issues include: proper cell phone/email etiquette, sexting (texting sexy pictures), prescription drug abuse, going green, eliminating apathy, inspiring others: a focus on marketing, and round table- a session where representatives from area non-profits will be brought in and the teens in the session will tell the non-profit what they want to do to get involved. 3. The Impact Tomorrow program. We want to start a program that will carry on throughout the year for participants in the Youth Summit to work with the non-profits they visited with in the round table session and to continue elementary outreach throughout the year. Also to try and widen the range of students involved in Homeless and Hungry, STLF, and Fill the Dome.
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