Community engagement - National Youth Leadership Council

Celebrating 40 Years of Generating Change!

nylcstaff — Wed, 01 Mar 2023 18:18:37 +0000

On March 16, 1983, the National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC) was founded by Dr. James Kielsmeier to train young people to be servant leaders, originally in response to tension caused by court-mandated school integration. Students were coached to respond to racial injustices and utilize acts of service to create inclusion in their schools. NYLC’s original mission statement stated that “young people are necessary resources to society with inherent ideals, boundless energy and flexibility making them important co-creators and co-workers with older adults”.

From this early start, NYLC has led a movement linking youth, educators, and communities to redefine the roles of young people in society. The movement is service-learning, and it empowers youth to transform themselves from recipients of information and resources to valuable, contributing members of a democracy.

Throughout its history, NYLC’s work has centered around young people’s power to make meaningful change happen. Whether hosting the National Youth Leadership Training (NYLT), coordinating initiatives like Youth as Solutions, Project Ignition, or PODER en SALUD (Power in Health), hosting the National Service-Learning Conference or The Power of Young People to Change the World podcast, or working alongside its Youth Advisory Council, NYLC has provided young people with spaces to lead and learn by working in partnership with adults in their communities.

Soua Thao of Minnesota and Riley Quinlan of Arizona attended NYLT, joined the Youth Advisory Council, and worked on the NYLC board of directors for many years. “NYLC was a very pivotal and critical part of my life. It opened up many doors of opportunity. It was a new way of looking at the industry of service-learning, community engagement, and evaluating service,” says Quinlan. “Since I started with them so young, I learned a lot of leadership and professional development skills during my time at NYLC,” states Thao.

So what is next for the organization who has led the service-learning movement for so long?

“NYLC knows that the Implementation of service-learning in schools will go a long way to addressing issues of deterioration of community, decline of civic engagement, improved academic performance, and improved involvement of young people in the principles and actions of democracy.

We want service-learning to be considered by every policy group that is concerned with the conditions of education and society. We want every young person to have the opportunity for service-learning experiences as part of the K-12 education. We want to transform education globally so that young people graduate as civically informed and engaged global citizens. We want communities to see youth as assets. And, we want to empower young people to address the injustices they see around them and act – not with hatred, racism, or threats – but with compassion, caring, and love to make meaningful change happen.

NYLC’s future is dedicated to meeting its mission to create a more just, sustainable, and peaceful world with young people, their schools, and communities through service-learning.” – Amy Meuers

In honor of our 40th anniversary, NYLC sat down with some of the people who have been important to our work along the way! Check out these interviews to learn more about our passionate service-learning community.

In honor of our 40th anniversary, NYLC sat down with some of the people who have been important to our work along the way! Check out these interviews to learn more about our passionate service-learning community.

The post Celebrating 40 Years of Generating Change! first appeared on National Youth Leadership Council.

Latinx Youth Saving Lives Through Culturally-Specific Service-Learning

nylcstaff — Fri, 01 Jul 2022 19:19:36 +0000

When Minerva Garcia and Izabella Varela noticed the effects of COVID-19 on Latinx communities, they jumped at the opportunity to involve the Ascendencia affinity group at Northside College Prep in Chicago to be part of the solution. They joined a national initiative of Latinx people serving their communities and country to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 through targeted bilingual messaging in English and Spanish.

As of September 2021, only 39% of Latinx people in the United States had been fully vaccinated, and Latinx groups continue to have disproportionately higher hospitalization and death rates due to COVID-19.

As a national partner in “PODER en SALUD” (Power in Health), a project of PROCEED, Inc. with funding from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, the National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC) is engaging youth to reduce these disparities and build capacity in Latinx communities.

Through NYLC’s program model that uses “service-learning” — a teaching and learning approach in which students use academic and civic knowledge and skills to address genuine community needs, teams of middle and high school students have worked to provide bilingual messages to prevent the spread of COVID-19 in Latinx communities. Through focus groups, interviews, and surveys with community members, they identified and targeted the effects of COVID-19 vaccine hesitation, misinformation and disinformation, and lack of culturally relevant resources.

“Being a part of PODER en SALUD has been an empowering, captivating experience,” said youth leader, Minerva. “PODER en SALUD is an investment in Latino lives, and I’m so proud to have taken part in it.”

As just one of 19 youth teams across the country selected by NYLC to participate in this program, Ascendencia Northside Prep students created a video, poster, and flyer about youth vaccination and the importance of keeping families safe, by appealing to culturally significant familial values.

Carina Hernandez, a youth team leader working with the Latin American Youth Center, Maryland Multicultural Youth Center, and Camp Fire Patuxent in Prince George’s County, Maryland, said, “Most of our community doesn’t speak English, so when they see someone that speaks their language, they get so happy. The youth can help them in anything they need with being bilingual. That’s a reason why I think that youth should do this type of work, helping out their community and learning things, and it opens up paths for them.”

Generation 1 Club students at Princeton High School in Princeton, New Jersey, created a brochure and gave a community presentation for current native Spanish speaking high school students, their parents, and local community members. These students collaborated with local resource providers in order to educate their community.

Kudos to all of the teams who have fulfilled their commitment to reducing the overall health disparities in their communities across the country.

The post Latinx Youth Saving Lives Through Culturally-Specific Service-Learning first appeared on National Youth Leadership Council.

Connecting Girls Across the World to Change the World

nylcstaff — Tue, 04 Feb 2020 19:11:26 +0000

By Christian Buonfiglio, Guest Writer

Daisy Leonard and her sisters, Coco and Sunny, have problems of global importance to solve. Racial and religious hatred, the decline in the mental health of young people, and the marginalization of girls drove them to create Dynamic Champions of Sisterhood, an online reading club that connects girls from all over the world to help them build confidence, challenge old ideas, and change the world.

The Leonard sisters created DCS with funding provided by the Points of Light Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to engaging with people from all walks of life to help the world meet the UN Sustainable Development Goals. The sisters presented their ideas at the 2019 Youth Leadership Summit, which was hosted by the National Youth Leadership Council as part of the POLF Conference.

“My colleague Maddy Wegner, Director of Youth Engagement at NYLC, invited us to the Points of Light Foundation Youth Summit when she heard about DCS,” said Daisy, 16. “She saw its potential and knew that the financial and networking support we could gain at the Summit would immensely help us carry out our vision.”

The support from POLF helped the Leonard sisters transform DCS from an informal group to a full-fledged nonprofit organization. “We wanted a bigger platform to reach more forgotten girls around the world, and be able to give them a stage and unlock the voice inside of them,” said Coco, 15. “By creating the non-profit, not only would we have a better business model that would be long-lasting and sustainable … but also a better way to reach out to foreign organizations in other countries.”

With the help of Facebook and the hard work of skilled translators, DCS has been hosting multiple book clubs with girls from Afghanistan, India, and Togo. The girls from Afghanistan, who call their group Kahari – “sisterhood” in the Dari language – have been reading Les Miserables and discussing isolation and prison. The Indian girls, who call their club Aghnipankh, or “Wings of Fire” in Marathi, have been reading The Diary of Anne Frank and discussing tradition and individuality. The largest group, Le Papillon, French for “The Butterfly,” is made up of girls from Togo, who are all students from a boarding school.

“They all are girls that would ordinarily have no voice and wouldn’t be asked what their opinion is, and they have all felt the feeling of being forgotten by the world,” said Coco. “They all are not only wanting a voice, but are taking the opportunity presented to them and thriving.”

These book clubs are held in order to bring girls together and discuss difficult and often vulnerable subjects openly. “The truth is that the books pushed participants past personal differences, and into a world where universal truths faced by all girls worldwide could be unearthed,” Daisy said. “Participants could externalize and express their thoughts and feelings through characters in a book.”

The discussions were enlightening, and Coco said that they also corrected many of her misconceptions about girls from other countries. “I truthfully always thought they just followed whatever their elders told them without question,” Coco said. “But after speaking to them I realized that they do question the ways of their elders, and that they don’t always get along with their parents, and that they also feel like nobody understands.”

A large part of hosting these discussions is healing the rift between human beings caused by the isolation, anxiety, and depression frequently caused by today’s social climate. “[American girls] aren’t having meaningful conversations,” said Sunny, 13. “Today teens are so caught up in comparing themselves on social media, as well as in everyday stresses, that they unknowingly create a powerful barrier of isolation through ignorance.”

Through leading these discussions, the Leonard sisters and their participants have learned the importance of empathy across borders and the power that girls have in their collective voice. “This kind of an organization is so important to be able to connect the next generation of young people,” Sunny said. “It gives the next generation a strong sisterhood so that the world is not fearing one another, and so that no girl in this world feels that they are alone and have no voice.”

Learn more about DCS here.

The post Connecting Girls Across the World to Change the World first appeared on National Youth Leadership Council.