Resources | Youth Programs | 2008 Confronting Concerns | All Saints Parish House
2008 Confronting Concerns
Accomplishments
All Saints Parish House Workshop
August 14, 2008
On August 13th we conducted our final workshop focused towards engaging youth in the surrounding neighborhood in a dialogue about the issues the Leadership Institute had been working on. The focus of the workshop were the issues of how youth experience violence, drug abuse and the negative aspects of sex. The four youth leaders from the Leadership Institute not only developed the workshop, but recruited 17 young women to attend the workshop, the workshop was held at the All Saints Parish House on 129th street. Most of the young women who attended were from the Harlem community.
The workshop started with a couple of icebreakers, including a name game and an activity called Mingle, Mingle. Through doing these activities, the participants were able to get to know one another and break the ice a little bit. Mingle Mingle also helped the facilitators to introduced the topics that would be covered in the workshops. The facilitators then guided the group to the main activity which allowed them to delve deeper into the issues addressed by the workshop. The participants were split up into three groups and asked to create skits or poems or raps about the topic they were given. All of the groups chose to do skits and presented their ideas to the rest of the group.
In the discussion after the skits, we were able to go deeper into many of the issues that had been brought up. While the group thought that students taking pills at school wasn't something that they experienced first hand, they all agreed that they knew people who had been pressured into having sex before they were ready or had friends who had been in abusive relationships. While they agreed that it was important for someone in an abusive relationship to speak up and tell someone, they acknowledged that it was difficult and that many times, girls in that situation did not know who to turn to. The facilitators helped the participants to think of people that they could talk to or contact if they or someone they knew were in that situation.
The workshop ended with a discussion about the fact that the participants enjoyed having the time to talk about these important issues and they all wanted to make a concerted effort to bring young men into the next workshop. While they felt it was good to have these discussions with other young women, they wanted to hear boys' perspectives as well.
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