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Youth Frontiers' 2017 Y Corps: Genevieve, Kevin, Maggie, Dahlia, and Traiveon

YCorps Spotlight: Kevin Lungay

We are so grateful for our wonderful staff at Youth Frontiers (YF), from our full-time and part-time employees to our YCorps. The Youth Frontiers YCorps (Youth Corps) is a seven-month internship program that gives emerging leaders the opportunity to facilitate, along with our full-time staff, life-changing retreats for schools all over the upper Midwest. The YCorps do a lot to further our mission, so we want to celebrate their skills and stories on our blog in a five-part spotlight Q&A series. Our second YCorps member in the spotlight is Kevin Lungay. READ MORE

Students using teamwork to overcome a the Giant Jump Rope Challenge

Teamwork is another name for community

By Sarah Gavigan, Youth Frontiers Communications Specialist

Icebreakers. Warm-up games. Whether you’re hot or cold about these, you can’t deny that they require one thing to succeed — teamwork. Every day on Youth Frontiers retreats, our staff members lead students and educators in games designed to break down their social barriers and build each other up. One such game is the star of our Courage Retreat — the Giant Jump Rope Challenge.READ MORE

Girl wearing backpack facing away walking down a street in autumn

HUGS – how one girl helps foster kids

By Sarah Gavigan, Youth Frontiers Communications Specialist

We facilitate retreats because we want all students to know that they matter, others matter and what they do matters. Sometimes the way students respond to this message astounds us.

The day after her Courage Retreat®, Guadalupe reached out to Youth Frontiers with a favor to ask. She requested that we send her not one, not a hand-full, but 4oo Courage buttons. That’s a lot of courage, we thought to ourselves. Why would a 12-year-old girl from Fort Atkinson, Wis., want so many small orange buttons? READ MORE

Youth Frontiers candle with microphone

Experience – it’s what makes us who we are

By Kasia Heurth, former Youth Frontiers retreat participant

The lights go out, the darkness giving room to the dim candlelight. Around the candle sits a circle of high school seniors. The silence is broken by shuffling followed by more silence and more shuffling. I can recall the warm candlelight casting highlights on the faces of my fellow classmates. I remember the silence that would welcome a classmate to the middle and share their four-year journey.READ MORE

Turning Tasks into Intention with a Bullet Journal

Turning Tasks Into Intention

By Alexa Peters Posner, Youth Frontiers’ HR Generalist

I know my first few years of “adulting” have been mild compared to many of my peers’.  Still, simply accomplishing the day-to-day essentials often seems like all I have time for. With work taking up about half of my waking time, it feels as though grocery shopping, cooking, laundry, etc. gobble up the rest. This year, I will keep on top of these tasks while not letting them take over my life.READ MORE

Minnesota Kind Button

What does it mean to be Minnesota Kind?

For nine years, Youth Frontiers has hosted its Ethical Leadership Luncheon, an event that attracts more than 550 of Minnesota’s brightest leaders to discuss fostering character in our communities today and building the next generation of ethical leaders. Last Thursday, Tim Welsh, Vice Chairman of Consumer Banking at U.S. Bank, led us in a discussion about how our community would experience positive growth if we went beyond Minnesota Nice to be Minnesota Kind. Here are some of our favorite moments of the event:READ MORE