Young Leaders Team and Resiliency
Though I do not believe in binaries, in times of change I believe we have two options: resist, reject, and retreat, or accept and adapt. When I thought about the prospect of shifting the Youth Leadership Team (YLT), a group for middle school youth who want to transform their communities through environmental leadership, into a virtual after school program, I felt a bit hopeless. CitySprouts, for me, represents a much-needed shift in education away from worksheets and lecture into active, hands-on learning. To me, through experience and some (read: a lot of) anti-technology bias, virtual learning seemed to be a regression to the mean. The image that came to mind for me was a series of muted, floating faces listening to a lecturer drone on and on about a topic that provided no meaningful blueprint on how to grow professionally, personally, or otherwise.
Migrating YLT into the world wide web felt like a slow death march towards the untimely end of my precious after school program. When I thought about what seemed possible in the midst of social distancing, I decided to offer YLT Office Hours during our usual meeting time. Any youth who wanted to join me for an hour and a half of casual conversation about what was happening in their lives was more than welcome. In addition to that, I would send out an at-home design challenge that could be completed whenever they wanted to.
We scheduled our first meeting for the first week of school closures. I felt anxious: how many youth would show up? What if everything went wrong and no one wanted to be there?
The nice thing about deep-seated fears is that generally speaking, they’re not a reflection of reality. Our first day every single student was able to and wanted to join us for a virtual session. We just talked that day about our feelings, our fears, and the things in life that we were grateful for.
After that, I was determined to create a space for my middle schoolers to still be creative, vibrant, community-oriented problem solvers, regardless of whether we could meet in person or not. Since then, we’ve been working on creating together, designing together, laughing together, and expressing gratitude together. Our virtual space has become a welcome refuge for me in a week that is otherwise dominated by flurries of emails and Slack messages. Google Hangouts, rather than becoming a hindrance to learning, has allowed all of us to connect and feel a small piece of normalcy in a wildly abnormal time.
The spirit of CitySprouts still exists for us in the online world. I find that we can still inspire wonder through hands-on learning even through the blue light of a computer screen. More than that, I realized that the true part that makes CitySprouts special hasn’t gone away in the time of coronavirus: the people. Our Youth Leadership Team will be finding ways to cultivate a relationship with the environment, leadership, and care for our natural world because the energy that drives us forward is our connection to each other. As long as that is still there, everything will be just fine.
-Kata Rolf, YLT Leader and Garden Educator