The Character Movement

Youth Frontiers entire staff photo

Now’s the time to lead

By Sarah Gavigan, Youth Frontiers Communications Specialist

It’s September, and we could not be more excited. We enter the 2017-18 school year with the momentum of last propelling us forward. We are honored to have worked with 126,934 students and educators on 861 retreats in 2016-17. This year, we aim to facilitate 873 retreats to reach 128,001 individuals – we hope that “1” is you.

Our retreats build positive school communities because they empower students to be leaders of character. At our Youth Frontiers Leadership Conferences, which bring together 11th-grade students from across a community, we help students identify their strengths and recognize how they can use those strengths through leadership to make their school a better place. At the end of the day, we ask them to commit to do one thing to improve their community. We ask them to no longer say “I should” and instead say “I will.”

The strong follow-through we see from students would be greatly diminished without the bold leadership of parents, mentors and educators and without the financial partnership of our generous donors. We sincerely thank you for modeling kindness, courage and respect every day for the kids in your lives.

We’ve already mentioned one of our goals for this year: to continue to lead in character education by facilitating more retreats than ever before. Youth Frontiers is also saying “I will” to abiding by our core values – quality, caring, growth – in all that we do to continue bettering ourselves as individuals and as an organization.

The next year will be filled with planned and unplanned challenges in our organization, in our community, in our world. When Youth Frontiers meets its obstacles, we will face them head-on and work to surmount them, step by step. We hope you’ll join us.

Now, at the marker of our new year, the beginning of school, we encourage and challenge you to think about what your resolution will be. When others won’t, to what will you say, “I will”? How will you lead this year?

Pictured above: Youth Frontiers staff in August 2017. 


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