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January 25, 2002/12 Shevat 5762, Vol. 54, No. 19
Workshops help teens develop leadership skills
BETH OLSON
Staff Writer
Leadership workshop staff members connect at a weekend retreat at Hawley Lake.
Photo courtesy of Leadership Workshop Foundation
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Parents send their children to school to prepare them academically, but where can teens go to learn life skills such as how to make successful interpersonal connections, think independently and develop leadership skills?
If you ask Frances Mills-Yerger, co-founder of Leadership Workshops Foundation for Youth & Family, she'd be sure to point you in the direction of her workshops, from one-day seminars to weeklong summer intensives.
"We're preparing youth for a lifetime of leadership," Mills-Yerger explains.
The cornerstone of Mills-Yerger's programming is the summer workshops. Broken down into four age groups, each level meets the needs of young people at an age-appropriate level.
The first level is "The Great Transition" for ages 10-12. In this preteen group, topics frequently focus on social skills.
"Those programs really help preteens develop the skills they need for leadership, such as forming good, close, durable relationships and friendships and having a strong basis for making informed choices," says Mills-Yerger.
Teens ages 13-15 can participate in "The Essentials." This group aims to focus on issues that face young teens, explains Mills-Yerger.
"We work a lot on developing their positive strengths and abilities, which of course promote self-esteem, and then help them confront everyday teen issues that they face," she explains. Those issues include alcohol, disrespectful friends, drugs, gossip, greed, materialism, peer pressure, having too much information and knowing what to do with it, and dealing with changes in their growing bodies.
The progressive levels continue to meet the needs of young people as they get older. There is a workshop for ages 13-17 called "The Building Blocks" and a workshop for ages 15-19 called "Finishing Touch."
There are also single-session workshops held on Sunday afternoons during the school year, as well as workshops for parents.
Peer leaders, who have already been through the workshops and received additional training, help to facilitate the activities at the workshop sessions - activities that include games, lectures, music, art, peer theater and group activities.
Mills-Yerger explains that the peer leadership program is a mentoring program and she calls the peer leaders "mini-social workers."
"They are part of the team that presents this program - an integral part of the program because they're mentoring and they're one on one," she says. "They really spend time to get to know the kids and inspire them to stay on their path - on a good path."
Seventeen-year-old Michael Wiss has been a peer leader for two years. He started participating in the summer workshops when he was 12, progressed through all of the levels and then decided to continue on as a leader at the workshops.
When Wiss' mother sent him to his first workshop, he says he didn't want to participate.
"My mom forced me to go. She actually got me to go because my best friend went," he explains. "But immediately when I went there, I said, 'I've never seen anything like this. I love this.' I didn't want to go home. It's unbelievable the power this workshop has."
Wiss and his mother have encouraged more than a dozen of their friends to get involved in the programs - mostly friends from their synagogue, Temple Chai in Phoenix.
One of Wiss' friends who participates as a peer leader is 17-year-old Rachel Alter. Alter also has been a peer leader for two years, and she is quick to point out the influence the workshop involvement has had on her life.
"If I had to pinpoint one thing that has had the biggest impact on who I am today, it would probably be the workshop just because it teaches you so much about being a better person - about being a more active citizen," she explains.
Both Alter and Wiss point to peer theater as having the greatest effect on them when they were participants in the program. Its skits focus on issues that are important to the teens.
"In the workshops for older kids, we present skits. As a participant, those were really powerful," Alter explains. "They act out, either creatively or realistically, exactly what teenagers and adolescents feel."
The ideas for the activities in the workshops, Mills-Yerger says, come from her years of experience in the mental health field working with both young people and adults. Many ideas came from the co-founder of Leadership Workshop Foundation, Dr. Mike Salzano of San Diego, who is now retired. Other ideas come from leadership volunteers.
Because she works with the groups for only five days, Mills-Yerger says it's essential to start with community building activities to get the kids talking as quickly as possible. The participants also do a great deal of journalizing over the course of the week.
"Every day they're writing and learning about themselves and the role of taking leadership positions with their friends, with their family, with themselves - learning their bill of rights, their boundary system, learning how to say no and what no really means, challenging them and inspiring them to be involved, to care, to take on those characteristics of a good leader."
Though Wiss feels his leadership skills have become well developed through the workshops, the close bonds he's formed with others have equally touched him.
"I'm allowed to speak my opinion without being shut down," he emphasizes. "We go in and we form some amazing community - in a matter of five days - that takes other groups years to form."
Alter concurs, "You just feel so accepted and everyone just opens up. It's kind of like naturally speeding along the get-to-know-you process."
Mills-Yerger is careful to point out that the workshops are not designed for troubled teens.
"We want to keep the good kids good - bringing out the best in good kids," she says. She works with 2,000-3,000 of these "good" kids each year
"I think I've given these kids the courage to continue to develop the strength and the power that is just waiting to be unfolded inside of them."
For more information about Leadership Workshop Foundations for Youth & Family, call 480-675-6011, e-mail info@leadershipfdn.org, or visit www.leadershipfdn.org.
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