Bridge Conference 2018

The Youth Ambassador program aims to inspire students to take leadership within their respective communities through local activism and by compassionate means.The purpose of the Youth Ambassadors (YA) program is to help discover the untapped potential of students who can contribute meaningfully to their communities when given an opportunity. In this workshop, students will demonstrate how to incorporate activism into their WA State Social Studies curriculum by identifying the issues they are most passionate about and subsequently developing an activism strategy to be part of the solution.

1. Students will be asked the following questions: What can you learn about the specific problem? How can you compare what you have found in books, videos, websites, interviews, etc? For this problem, what is being done to resolve it? What still needs to be done? What organizations have tried to work on this problem?
2. The students will then lead the workshop to demonstrate the YA curriculum with examples of social change and civic-minded projects. This workshop will allow teachers and students to both make connections from the past to today's current events, and allow students to investigate and be curious about today's social, economic and political issues.
3. Youth Ambassador students will provide examples of their writing and reading materials.
4. An example of a final culminating presentation will be shared at the end of the workshop.

The students will demonstrate how fostering these skills during the school day will allow for a holistic approach to enhance non-cognitive skills for the 21st century. Community engagement opportunities will provide real world experiences and interactions with government officials and community leaders. The YA program helps to discover untapped potential of students who can contribute meaningfully to their communities when given an opportunity. Youth Ambassadors are empowered as engaged civic-minded leaders, building compassionate communities through activism to ensure our youth become caring and competent addressing the themes of relevance, opportunity, social justice, civics, and collaboration.
The powerful combination of building empathy, compassion, social awareness, public speaking, and collaboration for middle and high school students creates a strong pathway to achieve a life time commitment to civic engagement.