NYLT Participant Reflects

By EllaKate Wagner, NYLC Youth Advisory Council

Mosquitoes, mosquitoes, and more mosquitoes! I’ve never seen as many mosquitoes as the week that I spent in Mound, Minn. at the National Youth Leadership Training — but I wouldn’t trade that week for anything. This past July I attended NYLT with a group of other students from my high school, Belding High, in central Michigan.

Throughout NYLT, I had many new experiences including sleeping under the stars, eating a variety of ethnic foods, and discovering the achievement gap. The achievement gap is described as an observed disparity on a number of educational measures between the performance of groups of students, especially groups defined by gender, race/ethnicity, ability, and socioeconomic status. Before attending NYLT I had no knowledge of the achievement gap’s existence in my community or the world. After learning about the achievement gap at NYLT, my views on service-learning have definitely changed. Now, every time I work on a service-learning project I try to somehow include ways to help bridge the achievement gap in my community.

After NYLT, I applied to be a part of NYLC’s Youth Advisory Council because I wanted to continue with life-changing experiences. I soon discovered planning and implementing NYLT was not all the YAC does. I learned that we would be reviewing all the achievement gap mini-grants from NYLT attendees, presenting at the National Service-Learning Conference, putting on another NYLT in the summer of 2009, and so much more.

I was not only accepted to the YAC, but my group’s achievement gap mini-grant proposal was accepted as well. The mini-grant review process was quite intriguing: I was thrilled to read all the grants to see how other youth from NYLT took home their knowledge on the achievement gap to help their own community. We received many proposals, ranging from tutoring to health projects.

The project that will be happening in my community is called Healthy Minds, Healthy Bodies. We plan to address the achievement gap by helping stop childhood obesity in our community. We will sponsor a night during the week where families with kids K-5 can learn about how to be healthy. At each meeting there will be a lesson including the food pyramid, cooking healthy snacks, family workouts, and a time where parents can talk with a health occupation person about how childhood obesity can harm your child.  

There are so many things that I am looking forward to over the next year on the YAC that I don’t even know where to begin, but I think that I am most looking forward to NYLT this summer. I am so excited to part of the YAC’s NYLT sustainability team and I can’t wait to start planning and implementing NYLT. This summer the theme will be the achievement gap again and I am extremely eager to share ideas for tackling the achievement gap with other youth!