Virtual Leadership Programming kicks off!
September 2020
HIGH SCHOOL LEADERSHIP
Young Positive Agents of Change
During the year, students will work together to plan and promote an event and build skills in project management and collaboration. We hope to empower our students to tackle important social issues in their communities.
We kicked off our high school leadership programming with the first session of YPAC! Students were introduced to servant-leadership, defined civic engagement, and also shared their thoughts about how online learning has been so far and how they would improve it. To build community and collaboration, students played quarantine bingo and other icebreakers. Despite everything being online, we had a great turn out!
Mental Health Matters
During the year, students will work in groups to plan ways to spread awareness about mental health and tackle stigma.
We are grateful for our volunteers from the Asian Pacific American Medical Student Association of Loyola University Chicago for their time and for the students for their engagement online! We started our session with icebreakers to help students and the medical student volunteers get to know one another, including an activity called Common Ground in which students and volunteers tried to make lists in breakout room groups of all their similarities. Despite everything being online, students were still open and honest about sharing their thoughts about what it means to be mentally well or unwell, how to take care of one’s own mental health, why it’s important to address mental health, and what mental health stigma looks like, especially in the Asian community.
“If [mental health]’s not addressed, it feels like it doesn’t exist.”
Arts + Activism
Students will spend the year exploring the intersections of art and justice and work together to create a body of work that explores that cause and empower others to take action and be a catalyst for social change.
During the first session of leadership program Arts + Activism, students explored what arts and activism mean to them and how those concepts intersect. Students read articles of different definitions of activism.
“Activism is the act of bringing people together to create a dialogue among them (including exposure to opposing perspectives) to promote change for a cause.”
“Arts and activism fit well together because art can be a way to start activism.”
MIDDLE SCHOOL LEADERSHIP
We hosted our first middle school leadership workshops in partnership with the Civic Leadership Foundation! During this virtual workshop, the 6th-8th grade students first learned the difference between traditional and non-traditional leadership. They then shared their ideas about what traditional warriors are like (mostly using violent adjectives to describe) and learned about the idea of Shambhala warriors who use “weapons” of compassion and wisdom to deal with challenges in their lives without escalating into violence. They then brainstormed examples of these kinds of warriors they could think of, coming up, as well as some qualifications to be this kind of warrior (including being “thoughtful” and “compassionate”). Finally, they got a chance to learn how to apply this idea of warriorship in their daily lives by discussing how to deal with conflict and tackling a specific scenario.
