Imagine a City… where teens are valued and appreciated for who we are, no matter what! The community this project is helping is every citizen, visitor, and friend of the City of Alexandria. Through the project, we have three main goals that will affect every Alexandrian. First, the Spectrum of Conversations, or roundtable discussions, will be and open, honest, and comfortable environment where teens will be able to express our true feelings, emotions, and experiences in a setting designed to facilitate change and understanding.

The reason this program was enacted was to help fund the AP Art students of Suttons Bay High School to be able to go to New York City for the first time every - all funds for the trip are student produced without any help from the school. For all of the years prior to this one the students could only afford to make it to Chicago and although it is a great experience the whole point for the students to travel to another city is to explore different motivations and ideas that they might be interested in.

The community of which we are in is called Okeechobee, FLorida. It's a small and quite community. Children here do not have anything contstructive to do. Forward Bound Youth Service Center will be the first youth program in this county. Our teens are amongs the top ranking children who are at risk of drug and alcohol use in the State of Florida at 60.4 % of our kids being at risk for these types and other risky behaviors. Teen pregenacy is on the rise and teenage deliquency.

OASIS (Outdoor Action for Social and Intrapersonal Stregth) is a project I am running at the Durham Nativity School in Durham, North Carolina. The Durham Nativity School is a nonprofit organization that provides free private school tuition to at-risk middle school students in the Durham area. OASIS is a supplemental retreat program for the students at this school. We take their students (approximately 15-35 students are expected to attend each retreat) on weekend long retreats to various areas that are relatively near (but outside of) the Durham area.

This summer the American Public Transportation Association (APTA) will host “Teening” Up for a Greener World Youth Summit June 22-25 in Washington DC. High school sophomores and juniors are invited to apply to attend this informative three day event which will focus on the environmental benefits of public transportation, as well as how communities can prosper with increased public transportation. The summit is all expenses paid, however only a limited number of participants will be accepted.