It's a new year, a new day, and we want to say thank you for changing the lives of today's youth! We are full of zest and excitement here at the BOOST office and are preparing for our biggest BOOST Conference yet! We are constantly striving towards continuous improvement so that we can serve you and your team while meeting your emerging needs.

We had a very exciting 2011 serving over 3,000 out-of-school time educators across the nation through quality professional development and learning opportunities. Additionally, we also moved our office to a bigger space to accommodate our growing organization. We even took time to celebrate our success at the end of the year with local partners and friends.

What will 2012 hold for us? We hope to continue to learn from you, to share your promising practices and to celebrate your successes! Let's do this! Together we make a (huge) difference!

Leadership is not something you do to people. It's something you do with people.

Thank you for all the work you do to support children, youth, families, and communities.

Tia Quinn

The 2011 TedxYouth day event took place over 3 days, November 19-21, 2011, coinciding with Universal Children's Day. TedxYouth Day featured over 100 events worldwide, with live streaming on 37 dedicated websites. There were total of 60,000 live stream viewers. The events featured over 17,000 attendees, mostly youth participants.

TedxYouth Day San Diego took place on November 20, 2011 at Canyon Crest Academy. The theme of the event was "The World in Our Grasp". The conference focused on inspiring attendees to see a problem and take responsibility to do something about it now. The event featured 23 different speakers and performances with 400students from various high schools. The day featured inspiring speakers, live performances, in a day of learning and connecting with others to motivate the young adults to be agents of change.

Event speakers included Mark Hixon, marine biologist at Oregon State University, Jason O'Neill, a 15 year old entrepreneur who founded pencil bugs at age nine, Patrick Ivison, a 17 year-old motivational speaker and adaptive surfer, Jake Shimabukuro, Richard Dreyfuss, and Adora Svitak, who published a book at the age of 7, and has written over 300 short stories. Speakers shared stories of hardship, success, and inspiration. Students also had an opportunity to view several performances, including Maia, and robotic dance. High school students were responsible for a vast majority of the efforts including the MC's, sound, and lighting, artists who decorated the lobby, ushers, and empowering presentations.

The youth that were a part of the planning team went above and beyond to create an intentional networking experience for the youth at lunch. Each student received a different colored lanyard at the time of check in. When students entered the gym for lunch, they picked up a reusable lunch bag, hand crafted out of recyclable materials, created by a student club at Canyon Crest Academy. The colored lanyard designated a pre-selected group for the youth to sit with for lunch. In the bottom of each bag was a prompt for the youth to engage and talk about with a group of peers that they had never met before and created a very successful peer networking lunch.

TedxYouth day San Diego was more than just a conference. It was a day for youth to take a step towards making a difference, one action at a time.

To learn more about TedxYouth day, click here

Six of The YMCA of Greater Long Beach Community Development YMCA Cambodian American Staff have been working on a service learning cultural exchange experience in Cambodia partnering with the Cambodia YMCA. The team of six young Cambodian Americans along with the Vice President of Community Development, the Senior Art Director of Change Agent Productions and the Community Development YMCA Board Chair all traveled to Cambodia to help the Cambodia YMCA strengthen its programming, strategize its PR and learn from its participants and members.

This international project's goals were to help the six Cambodian American YMCA Staff who have never visited their country of origin to learn from their home country's cultural heritage and also give back to the young people involved with the YMCA there. The YMCA of Greater Long Beach staff hope to make many more journeys to the Cambodia YMCA for other young Cambodian Americans to recapture their heritage and give back to their country through service with the YMCA.

The YMCA of Greater Long Beach provided a day camp for 100 street kids from the Cambodia YMCA Street Children's School. These children are living on the streets and in the poorest slums of Phnom Penh, the capital. They come to the YMCA program because they are not attending state school and because they are guaranteed one meal a day there.

Another much more in depth project involved teaching five days of digital media and leadership skills to 30 young people who are members and staff of the Cambodia YMCA. This project is ongoing and will culminate in the Cambodia YMCA teaching digital media arts continuously and starting a micro-enterprise in Phnom Penh as a revenue generating social enterprise for the YMCA there.

A film maker captured their experiences and insights, reflections of their emotional, physical and cultural awakenings and growth and they hope to have a documentary finished in late January for submittal to film festivals and Cambodian community showings throughout the US.

This project is unique in that it was developed by Cambodian Americans and has many similarities to a Jewish Travel Project where children and Grand Children of the Jewish Holocaust go back to Israel and learn about their cultural heritage and the genocide. Cambodian Americans feel a need to reconnect to Cambodia, learn about their history, especially the genocide of the Khmer Rouge years where nearly 2,000,000 people were tortured and starved to death. They also need opportunities to give back to Cambodia's youth and help the country heal thus healing their own generational wounds from that dark time.

YMCA Cambodian Cultural Exchange

1. Frame - as a group and list of as many jobs possible in 2 minutes. Discuss their list and how well it reflects the real world. What is missing? How would the world be different without these jobs?

Milton Chen  on 21st Century Teachers

The BOOST Collaborative is pleased to announce Milton Chen as a Keynote Speaker for the 2012 BOOST Conference.

 Join us April 25-28, 2012, in Palm Springs, California for amazing keynote speeches from Milton Chen and Sir Ken Robinson.

For more information on Milton, click here. 

Black History Month, or National African American History Month, is an annual celebration of achievements by black Americans and a time for recognizing the central role of African Americans in U.S. history. The event grew out of "Negro History Week," the brainchild of noted historian Carter G. Woodson and other prominent African Americans. Since 1976, every U.S. president has officially designated the month of February as Black History Month. Other countries around the world, including Canada and the United Kingdom, also devote a month to celebrating black history.

 

Smithsonian Education offers a plethora of resources to help support teaching your students about Black History Month including African American History and Culture, reading lists, a guide to African-American Artists, and many more free resources.

Click here to learn more.