Project Description

Mission: The event will develop youth into community leaders through cultivation of individual strengths, team work, and leadership training.

Location: McKinny Roughs Nature Park

Nature of the Project:
The objectives of the project are to:
 Train approximately 50 youth in leadership techniques and club management including publicity, fundraising, member development, and organizational structure.
 Guide youth to discover and develop their strengths and recognize their weakness as leaders and organization members
 Inform participants about the American Red Cross and the services available to the community
 Direct participants through the event planning and execution process
 Teach youth about how to expand the number of community members served by American Red Cross
 Encourage collaboration between the individual clubs

Project Design:
Approximately eight years ago, the first ARC youth club was established at the University of Texas in Austin by a freshman student, James Norris. James had been involved in Red Cross youth clubs in high school and was surprised that there wasn’t as single club in the region. He and the other students he has recruited have been working ever since to help establish and mentor youth through Red Cross youth clubs. The Leadership Development Retreat (LDR) is a collaborative event continuing this effort. It is organized by participating youth club leaders as well as Chapter employees, especially the current Volunteer Services Coordinator (VSC), who specializes in youth and is also a youth club member.

The LDR will be located at McKinney Roughs Nature Park. Participants will stay overnight in dorms at the park for the three day retreat. Participants will participate in intense sessions involving personality and learning style tests to facilitate personality reflection and understanding of the different way people think and work, trust/team building exercises, leadership and management training, brainstorming activities, creating an annual calendar to turn their ideas into actions and facilitate collaborative events.

In December we would like to have a 1.5 day follow-up event retreat to discuss everyone’s progress as well as solutions to new problems. We also have shorter one-on-one meetings between individual clubs and the VSC throughout the year. To help fund the retreat in 2009 we are converting a general youth fundraiser into a fundraiser specifically for this event.

Proposed Events:
 Presentation on the History of the International Red Cross and Red Crescent Movement and local American Red Cross of Central Texas Services
 Diversity Training
 Meet and greet between members
 Personality (Myers-Briggs) and learning style test
 Trust/ team building exercises
 Leadership and Management Training
o Introduction to leadership theories and styles
o Long-term and short-term project management processes
o Follower styles
o How to run a meeting
o American Red Cross policies and procedures
o How to transition between outgoing and incoming officers
o Conflict management
o Time management
 Brainstorming activities
 Creating an annual calendar
 Training for club advisors on how to mentor and support youth

Project Description

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. Through these retreats, OASIS aims to allow students to grow and benefit from opportunities to partake of events that require them to move outside their comfort zones. These activities are also new, exciting, and fun for the students, and might include such things as parasailing, whitewater rafting, and snowboarding. While challenging, these activities are also both fun and easily possible to complete with a degree of courage and confidence. Also, throughout the weekend, OASIS incorporates small group discussions, large group talks, skits, journal writing activities, and other team-building events designed to bring home our message, connecting the values learned and practiced during the major activities to the serious challenges the students face in their home lives.

Our goal is to help students begin to realize that they have the ability to try new things and emerge successfully from challenges that may seem new or scary. While we do not expect to completely transform a student's character in one weekend, we do hope to positively supplement the character development that is already occurring at the Durham Nativity School and extend the things the students learn in school to a more casual and applicable environment with their peers and friends. This includes several opportunities for academic growth. The principle of the Durham Nativity School has identified writing as a lagging skill, so we are developing several journal writing activities that will help improve writing skills and also facilitate self-reflection and self-evaluation throughout the weekend. Also, the main OASIS activities are extremely fun for the students. These students come from very poor families and experience an extreme number of hardships in their lives. Their likelihood of encountering an opportunity to parasail or snowboard in a safe setting that encourages them to challenge themselves and try new things is very low, if at all existent. Therefore, OASIS provides these opportunities to a population of youth that would most benefit from them and be least likely to find them on their own.

OASIS also has the parallel goal of uniting students from various colleges nearby Durham. Currently, it involves students from Duke University, Elon University, and the University of North Carolina Chapel Hill. We are hoping to use OASIS as an opportunity for students from the schools surrounding the Durham area to meet each other, attend retreats together, and begin collaborating together on innovative projects and ideas.