Upper Midwest Youth Conference – A DLRE’s perspective
This past weekend, I had the pleasure of taking a handful of our UUS high school youth to First Universalist in Minneapolis for CONnected: a UU high school youth conference (or CON).
Some adults, especially those who haven’t had the opportunity to experience a youth CON as either a youth or an adult volunteer, wonder why I would choose to spend 48 hours with 40 high school students, barely sleeping and cramming a whole lot of activities into an incredibly short amount of time. Let me tell you.
Friday night, just before midnight, a fourteen year old opened our gathering with words from Shel Silverstein:
If you are a dreamer, come in
If you are a dreamer, a wisher, a liar,
A hope-er, a pray-er, a magic bean buyer…
If you’re a pretender, come sit by the fire
For we have some flax-golden tales to spin.
Come in!
Come in!
The theme that the youth leadership from First Universalist chose for this gathering was CONnected and all of our activities, whether in the whole group or small groups, fit that theme. Repeatedly throughout the CON, the youth leaders and participants tied our activities back to our shared values – especially noting our interdependence and pluralism. In the afternoon, we broke into small groups to go on a walk through the community to find representations of each of our shared values. When each group returned, they created maps of the neighborhood that highlighted each of the values. Then all eight groups discussed their findings and connected their maps to each other.
Youth and adults alike also spent time creating identity boards. Everyone was invited to use any of the art supplies they wanted to create a visual representation of themself. After putting all the identity boards on the wall, each person took a turn using yarn to connect items on their own board to like-items/symbols/words on other boards – not knowing who the people were. The visual diagram of our connections was stunning. Sunday morning, as the youth were removing the yarn to take their boards home, I overheard a youth pointing out that despite having removed the yarn, there were still threads of the connections remaining on their personal board, an awesome representation of how the weekend had affected them.
Late Saturday night, we all had the pleasure of participating in an entirely youth created and led worship service. As part of the service, one youth shared a tradition from their own congregation. During dinner, we had all written a joy, sorrow, or concern on index cards. The youth read the notes aloud during the worship service and, each time, had us respond:
You are not alone.
We are holding this together.
From covenanting to ice breakers to meal times to special handshakes and singing and Soo Bahk Do to Zombie apocalypse plans to exploding atoms to spiritual practices to sardines – the CONnected theme and premise of not being alone was beautifully seen throughout the weekend.
Our five youth could have easily clustered together during the CON. They could have definitely been quieter and sick of each other at the end of such a long and tiring weekend. Neither happened. They made new friends and deepened their personal understanding of Unitarian Universalism and are already talking about “next time.”
That’s why we drove 564 miles and 10 hours and spent our whole weekend out of town sleeping on hard floors. 40 high school youth having the opportunity to connect to something larger, to know they’re not alone, to feel that no matter where they are, there are others who care deeply about our shared values of justice, equity, transformation, pluralism, interdependence, and generosity with LOVE at the center.
