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The first meeting of the Leadership Institute got off to a great start. In attendance were Youth Leaders Roshelle Wickham, Jahmala Cornelius, Chloe Green, Erica Johnson and Brittany Anderson. The participants were eager to begin the process of taking part in the leadership institute and planning for the new series of Confronting Concerns workshops. The Institute began with all of the youth first agreeing on group guidelines in order to make the group a safe space and help everyone to feel comfortable sharing their ideas with each other.
The first activity of the afternoon was a Leadership Bingo game that enabled everyone to identify some of the leadership roles that both they and others play in their communities, their school and their families. They were able to identify that leadership takes on many roles and they can be leaders in many parts of their lives. We spent some time discussing some of the different meanings of leadership and ways that one can be a leader. Some of the ideas expressed were that you can be a leader as a an older sibling, you can be a leader among your friends by making good decisions, and that the youth felt they had all been leaders through their work with confronting concerns whether they lead the workshops or participated in them.
Following the leadership bingo activity, we moved on to working on building trust within the team. During the activity, Paper Towers, the youth were given a task to build a tower as tall as the tallest person in the group. Everyone in the group, however, was given different impediments-- some were not able to speak during the activity, while others were not able to touch the paper, and others were blindfolded. Each participant had a different impediment. As a group, the youth were able to work together despite the difficulties they each had. While they were ultimately not successful at building a free-standing tower, they felt that they were able to see that there are many different ways to communicate. They also recognized that at different points each person took a different role and leadership position. It was in the discussion afterwards that we were able to talk about the fact that a leader does not always have to be out front in the group, they can play a more supportive role and be as effective in helping to accomplish the goals.
After a break and a brief energizer, the group focused on selecting the issues that they felt affected teens the most. The issues that were chosen were based on the work done in Confronting Concerns II. The participants chose Violence as the issue they felt most affected youth, as well as sex and drugs. The students broke up in to different groups, with each group taking a different issue and answered the three questions:
a. What do you know about this issue? b. What do you still need to find out? c. What are the root causes of this issue? Because we were running out of time, the groups tried as best as they could to answer the questions and reported back on them to the larger group. We ended the day with thanking each other for all the participation and hard work and making plans to meet the following Sunday for the second session of the leadership institute.
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