First Annual Leadership Summit of Dupax del Norte, 2011

As I said I would, here is the rundown of the leadership summit I helped organize and run, my first major project at site. The good, the bad, the ugly, and the obscure.

Where it All Began

Some time ago there was a law written where the youth took charge of the government for a week. Unfortunately it wasn’t implemented. The last time it was done according to my supervisor was 1993, roughly 18 years ago. The leadership summit was not my brainchild, but that of my supervisor and of the Mayor who wanted to get the youth more active again. When I met my supervisor for the first time during pre-service training where we found out our permanent sites, he brought it up to me as something I would be doing. So although it was the will of my site to have it done, I was put in charge of creating the module for it, and organizing it.

One of the hardest things to do for a project like this is to actually build enough interest to get it started, to talk to the community leaders and your supervisor and convince them it’s a good idea. I was really fortunate to not only have a site that was more than willing to be active, but who already had a project ready for me when I started.

First Step: I Don’t Know What to Do

One of the challenges of the Peace Corps is going to a foreign country and a foreign culture and figuring out how I can help. Heck, what do I know about the Philippines or Dupax del Norte? What do I even know about what’s working and what’s not? Well, that’s part of what the two year is for, to figure that out. However, with the leadership summit in December, I didn’t have much time. I tried to talk to one of the youth leaders to get a feel of the leadership capabilities of the local youth, and from that conversation decided the best course of action was to write a questionnaire and distribute it across the different schools. Rather than ask the youth “Are you a good leader?” or “What do you think leadership is?” I went for more round about questions. They were…

·         Think of one or two people you believe are good leaders. What makes that person or persons a good leader?

·         Considering your answer to question 1, what leadership skills do you share with your chosen person or persons?

·         Considering your answer to question 1, what leadership skills do you wish to learn?

·         Do you intend to participate in the Youth Leadership Summit this December? Why or why not?

·         Are there any topics you would like covered in the youth leadership summit? Why?

·         Why are you interested in leadership?

With those questions I was hoping to get some insights into the youth. I also wanted to give them at least some input as to what would go on during the summit. I was ready to send it out first thing October. Then came the typhoons…

Pedring, Quiel, and a Long, Long Wait

Pedring was the first of two major typhoons that hit the greater region. Schools closed down, there was flooding, and things just all came to a halt. When things finally started to get back to normal, Typhoon Quiel came and rocked the area even harder. Though the rain was as hard, the flooding was significantly worse. Flooding got up to six feet or more in some places, there was a landslide on the road that cut off most the mountainous, rural areas, and there was mud everywhere. This led to more school cancellations, and my time was busy helping the relief efforts of putting together bags of food for people, and for being present when we distributed them.

Then came a weeklong break.

Then came one more week of setting it up to give the questionnaires to the school.

Then we finally got them passed out.

By then we were into November, the time I wanted to have the module of the summit finished by. Under my original timeframe, I’d be done with the module by early November, and have the free time to plan ahead into 2012, and would have a lot of time to tweak the summit as need be. That plan fell through. I got about half the questionnaires back around November 20^th or so, and from those created the module.

The Module Itself

                From reading the questionnaires I came to the conclusion that most of the youth had zero experience with leadership, even those who had leadership positions within the schools. There seemed to be a lack of confidence, and an overemphasis on discipline being synonymous to leadership. I made the decision to keep the camp to the basics. The original summit went something like thus…

Day 1

·         Teamwork: There was an activity I ran in late October where I had two set teams and told them to build me the highest tower. When they finished, I asked them why they built me two towers, when I wanted the highest one, which could only be accomplished if the teams worked together. The purpose was to open the youth’s eyes and show them that just because they belonged to a team/school/province/etc didn’t mean they couldn’t work together. It was a success before, so I included it in the summit as well

·         What is leadership: Seeing how some youth didn’t have a solid grasp on the concept I let the first session be a basic coverage on leadership. Who are leaders? What are skills leaders have? Basically the same stuff in the questionnaires.

·         Understanding Yourself, Each Other, and Community: Next I included another simple session where youth wrote to themselves about leadership, learned about and recognized each other, and drew a mural to understand what their community meant to them

·         Self Confidence, Expressing Oneself: Knowing confidence was an issue, I tried to include a session with lots of compliments and getting the kids to shout out their name with pride

·         Roleplaying challenges facing youth: I wanted to get the youth thinking about what challenges they faced and to act it out

Day 2

·         Discipline, Having Fun, Observation, Communication: These four sessions were what came out of the questionnaires, mostly. They wanted Discipline. I added one Having Fun because the youth did not seem to appreciate that aspect of leadership. Observation and communication were also basics to touch upon. I tried to make each session active, but with some downtime in each so that the youth could have breaks during the day

·         Obstacle Course: It was a camp, so why not have an obstacle course to get the youth to do some critical thinking?

·         Videoke: Knowing the second day would have a lot, I wanted the youth to be able to sit down, relax, and socialize with each other

Day 3

·         Evaluation: Both handing out evaluations, and going over the importance of evaluating one’s actions

·         Tree Planting: Something my site wanted, so I included it

·         The How: How to plan step by step to achieve one’s goal. Goal setting is not a strength of the Filipinos.

·         Service Project Packets: My brainchild within the summit, I created a packet to lead the youth step by step to running their own service project. It’s my belief that leadership is gained through practical experience, and I want the youth active in the community, so I set some time to explain it. More on this later

·         Elections: Going back to the purpose of this summit, to get youth ready to get junior leadership positions within the government for a week, we needed elections to pick who the leaders would be.

Recruitment and Challenges

                For the number of youth, I settled on trying to get 100. I decided that I wanted eight groups to do the sessions at most, about 12 youth per group at most. Rounded up it came to 100. So, I asked for eight volunteers, one for each group. For this camp, I tried to keep it to the nearby region. One problem I came across was that I wanted to get some of the veteran volunteers who had been in the Philippines a year or more, but the ones I asked all had Christmas plans with family either in America or the Philippines which interfered with my December 16-18 camp. So, it was exclusively my Batch of volunteers who were recruited. I facebook messaged them to original copy, and all the edits. Speaking of edits…

                Nothing ever goes exactly how you want. The first thing to go was overnight staying. I wanted the youth to stay overnight to avoid Filipino’s infamous problems with punctuality, and so we could stuff at night. Sadly, it was not to be, so I had to drop the roleplaying. I also discovered they wanted to end the summit earlier on Day 3, so away went the session of the “How”.

                Another challenge came when we were starting to expect well over 100 youth. The schools were promising to send a lot more youth than we had allotted. I had designed the sessions with a certain amount of youth in mind.

                Probably the biggest challenge was stress. Boy howdy did I get stressed. I didn’t miss any meals for it, but my portions were about half.

The Summit Comes and Goes

                I won’t go into every detail, but here are highlights of the summit

·         One of the eight volunteers was late due to her obligations at her site, making so I was both trying to facilitate one of the groups, and keep track of the big picture. It went okay… but I don’t recommend it.

·         Belance, a school and barangay (local government unit) from the mountains had the most youth present despite being an hour’s ride away

·         Losing almost half our youth during lunch the first day

·         Combining the eight groups into four for Day 2

·         It turning out that my session I wrote for Discipline went a lot faster than the others, making the two volunteers running those have the improve a lot

·         Losing not a single youth the second day, even during the lunch break

·         Though wanting to start at 8:00 each morning, not getting started until 9:00

·         The youth actually enjoying themselves

·         Overall some good feedback from the youth

·         A girl telling us that we were the first people to sing her happy birthday. She turned fifteen that day.

·         Not having two of the five high schools because we had thought no one had school on the Friday, but it turns out only three of five had the day off

·         Also not having the SK (local government youth leaders) because of yet another schedule conflict I did not know about

·         About 60-70 youth who showed up for at least part of the summit, about 40-50 who were there throughout the whole summit

·         My stress level dropping step by step as the summit went on

Goals for the Summit

                I am a perfectionist, and I set the bar really, really high. I am always trying to think how I can get the most out of something, how I can accomplish the most with what I’m doing when it comes to work. I achieved quite a bit, but other objectives I had fell short.

                One thing that fell short was the numbers. Throughout the summit it was about half of what I wanted, however, it was fine. I told people even getting half of what I wanted would be a success, and I stand by that. Giving a summit for about 40-50 youth is still not bad.

                One major success was the sustainability of the leadership summit. Sustainability is big in the Peace Corps, to make sure our assistance lasts even after we’ve left. The youth, as Junior Elected Officials, passed a resolution to institutionalize the leadership summit as an annual event. The next challenge will be to work with people to get them to be able to create, organize and coordinate the summit, but I have time for it.

                Which bring me up to another goal that fell short, that to have my coworkers work as counterparts to the Peace Corps Volunteers to get more experience facilitating. In the end my coworkers helped with logistics such as cooking, cleaning, doing sign in, helping fix the microphone, and some even had work they had to do during the summit. It was in part my fault because I did not keep my office mates in the loop throughout the process of making the summit, and in part because I underestimated how much manpower the work behind the scenes would take. I’ll work towards getting my coworkers at my office to take the lead for later projects.

                I did get at least some of the youth to learn something. After the elections, the young lady who was elected as Junior Mayor gave a thanks to us Peace Corps Volunteers for helping, and had said that although the different groups of youth didn’t know each other well, maybe after a week as Junior Leaders with the government they would get to know each other better. It was a call back to the Teamwork exercise. From what I heard, the youth lived up to that, and the teenagers who never knew each other (cause they live an hour away) are keeping in touch via texting now, bringing the community closer together. Also, the youth opened up so much from the start of the summit to the end.

                Things did not fall apart. That was also a goal that was met.

                Probably the biggest goal I hit was this being a gateway into more projects for the community. The biggest cause of my stress (other than me getting overly worked up over stuff) was that the success of lack thereof would be a big determination as to how my site saw me. I really wanted this summit to go well to prove I could help, and get more people involved. The Monday after (the 19^th) saw a few more projects land on my desk. They want another similar summit in April or May for the SK who could not make it and for the out of school youth. The teacher from Belance who went with the youth to the summit each day wants me to help them get grants and to get started up on their own school volunteer projects. This is exactly what I wanted, for the summit to drag out opportunities.

Service Project Packets!

                As I said earlier, I handed the youth service project packets near the end. I explained to them that although the summit was “free” they still needed to pay us back. For being given three days of lessons learned, for food, for having the opportunity to be elected as Junior Officials, they needed to utilize the experience we gave them, and give it back to their community. Speaking maybe 70% in Ilokano, the rest in English, I walked through the service project step by step. Whether they absorbed it all, and whether they do it remains to be seen, but I think it’ll work out. Here’s a list of lofty goals I have for these service projects

·         40-50 community projects: Why should I do one service project for my community when I can empower the youth to do scores of them?

·         Leadership experience: As I said, the best way to get leadership is through practical experience

·         Making the youth believe in themselves: I want the youth to know what they are capable of doing

·         Making the adults believe in the youth: Showing the adults of the community what the youth can do given the opportunity

·         Have tangible evidence of youth accomplishments in the form of the filled out packets to show my supervisor, the Mayor, Peace Corps, the Governor, etc

·         Discovering further projects I can help with by seeing what the youth accomplish

·         Make it about the youth, not me: I keep getting congratulated on for MY youth summit. Hopefully the service projects shift the focus to the youth, and away from me

Thanks, and What’s on the Horizon

                Want to give a shout out to the eight volunteers who came: Alex, Amber, Austin, Becky, Chelsea, Ebonee, Kelsey, and Munya! You guys were rock stars!

                So what’s next? I’m nearing the half year mark of my time in the Philippines. Among what I mentioned above, I may do some more on leadership with a nearby university. I’ll be talking to and working with the out-of-school youth. I may also start working with the local government unit I’m with and run a few programs for them to help deal with stress management, marketing, goal setting, and a couple others.

                Next post I plan to get a bunch of the best pictures from my first six months and post them, including many from the summit.

‘Til next time!