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YOUTH LEADERSHIP
Developing youth leaders evolves out of Friends' work with our members. The youths involved in the justice system are often overlooked as a source of peer and community leadership. Yet no one can be more persuasive role models for at-risk adolescents than their peers demonstrating firsthand the value of learning to make positive choices. They can provide compelling leadership in a manner that no one else can.
The power of youth teaching youth encourages at-risk peers to begin the journey on the road to achievement. As youth members begin achieving the goals they have set out for themselves, they are provided the opportunity for an 8-week training in youth leadership.
Certified youth leaders, trained by Friends' staff, form the core of the "GIIFT Pack" (Guys and Girls Insight on Imprisonment for Teens). The GIIFT Pack was developed and named by youth members as a vehicle to share their experiences and insights with their younger brothers and sisters on how to remove themselves from a cycle of negative behavior, crime and violence. Members of the GIIFT Pack travel in groups of 2 to 6 to public schools, group homes, juvenile justice facilities and community centers to share their experiences and deliver their very powerful message. They have also travelled to Albany to be heard on legislation affecting youth in the justice system.
The Youth Leadership program at Friends gives our youth members an opportunity to work together through peer counseling and recreational and educational activities that provide adolescents with a new sense of purpose and a chance to feel safe to give up their former behaviors.
As part of Friends' 20th anniversary celebration, the GIIFT Pack will be targeting neighborhoods in upper Manhattan and Central Brooklyn for concentrated Youth Leadership services aimed at prevention and capacity building among younger adolescents.
Many of Friends' long-term youth leaders are changing cycles of poverty/disconnection/crime by working with at-risk youth in New York's most impoverished neighborhoods.
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