Learn and Serve – Michigan’s Youth Voice

Posting written by the Learn and Serve – Michigan Team

Over the past couple of weeks perhaps you have heard us talking about the Service-Learning Youth Council or SLYC (pronounced “slick”). If you haven’t heard of these amazing kids yet, well it is about time you do!

The Service-Learning Youth Council is an opportunity for students to lend their voice to Learn and Serve – Michigan. We get to hear their input and encourage them to become youth advocates for service-learning in their schools. At the beginning of the school year we send around applications to our grantee districts. This year we were quite impressed with the group of applications we received.

Students from across the state joined our team in Hersey, Michigan for the 2009-2010 SLYC retreat earlier this December. During that weekend they learned how they can become voices for the youth of their community and how they can plan a service event. With each other’s help they climbed a huge wall and hoisted their friends into the sky as part of their leadership building at the Eagle Village Adventure Center.

During this time all of the SLYC students proved themselves capable leaders. They met and exceeded every challenge. Here at Learn and Serve – Michigan we don’t often get to see the wonderful students who work with our grantee districts so it was a great opportunity to meet an excellent group of youth. By the end of the weekend everyone was tired but proud of what we accomplished.

This is just the beginning of this year’s SLYC. Members are expected to do three things during their term:

1. Participate in one 2010 MLK Day of Service Project.
2. Plan one statewide 2010 Global Youth Service Day event with other SLYC members.
3. Do one thing to promote service-learning in their community (i.e. a guest blog post, a Facebook campaign, a presentation, a YouTube video, etc.)

We are excited to see how they meet these goals! At the retreat they were just beginning to plan their event for the 2010 Global Youth Service Day and they have some great ideas.

We’ll keep you updated as the year progresses and look out for our SLYC member’s guest blogs when we come back in 2010!