RYLA YOUTH LEADERSHIP PARTICIPANTS SPEAK ABOUT THEIR THREE DAY CONFERENCE
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Emily Tvelia (right), Robby Moxley (center), and Jon Haverlin (left) shared their very positive experience with RYLA and thanked our Rotary Club for supporting them. Aylene Popka gave me some additional background information about RYLA which I am sharing below. Thank you Aylene.
RYLA stands for Rotary Youth Leadership Awards. Every Rotary District in the world is encouraged to create their own RYLA conference. Our District RYLA serves more participants than any other in the world - about 625 high school juniors each year from throughout our District 5330. We have two conferences each Spring at the Thousand Pines Conference Center.
Conference speakers talk about leadership skills and the teens do a large service project (for example, packaging thousands of meals for people in need). The participants are assigned to small discussion groups. In these groups, they meet about 12 times throughout the conference to process what they are doing/hearing and sharing how it relates to their personal lives (these discussions can get pretty "heavy" emotionally).
All in all a tremendous opportunity for these participants and hearing them speak of how the experience influenced their lives makes us all proud Rotarians to be able to support them.