In late May, eight youths from Douglas County participated in a leadership training and community service at Roger Hill Volunteer Center at the United Way Building.

The Prudential Youth Leadership Institute, sponsored by Prudential Insurance Co., was created to help youths become community leaders.

Instructed by Rachel Hulbert, the participants included Ben Allen, Ariel George, Ellie Ott, Caleb Powers, Beth Ruhl, Anastasia Rushmeyer, Lauren Smith and Peter Tuttle. Mary Thompson and David Morrissey also assisted. The students put in 30 hours of classroom training that culminated in a community service project at the end.

“I think the Prudential Youth Leadership Institute is important because it gives youths the skills they need to implement service projects and better their community,” Hulbert said.

The curriculum used by the Institute was designed by the Center for Creative Leadership. It included modules such as the creative leadership process, team communications, diversity issues, raising awareness of problems through community mapping, forming problem statements, goal-setting, decision making and planning the community service project. Often before a module was introduced the participants would do an exercise that would prepare them for the issues of the next module.

For example, students paired up and one partner was blindfolded.

The rules:

• Each pair had three minutes to discuss a system of nonverbal communication that they would use to lead each other around. Neither partner could talk.
• During the silent period, the people who were blindfolded had to walk up and down stairs, on ledges and all around the United Way building.

This exercise demonstrated the need for trust and team communications. The Institute featured a panel of community leaders. The panel included Matt May from American Red Cross; Hank Booth from Wildscape; Hilda Enoch, a general community advocate; Jehan Faisal from Rape Victim Survivor Services; and Jennifer Adhima from the Douglas County AIDS Project

Powers said he was impressed by the panel.

“My most memorable experience was to see such active members of our community take the time to come and let eight kids know what they could do to help the world,” Powers said.

After doing a community assessment, the group decided it would like to do its service project on education with Success By Six. Success By Six is a nonprofit organization that helps all children receive a healthy, educational start by the age of 6. After consulting with Success By Six, the group decided to help organize literacy kits. The kits were once loaned out to children, but were now missing so many items and so out of order that it was impossible to circulate them any longer. The literacy kits were designed to help young children learn to read by giving them books, toys and other activities that would encourage them to read.

— Beth Ruhl is a junior at Bishop Seabury Academy.