Peaceful Leaders Summer Experience 2023  

Please complete this quick interest form and we will contact you with more information.

Brief Description: The Calvert Peace Project’s Peaceful Leaders Summer Experience is designed to energize high-school aged youth to build a better community and country. Youth aged 14-18 years old will learn to effectively lead others in their homes, schools, workplaces, and neighborhoods. Held in partnership with the Calvert County Department of Parks and Recreation, participants in this program will engage in a diverse range of interactive and creative activities and thoughtful conversations to develop skills and strategies for promoting peace in their communities. This program will equip youth with the skills to establish meaningful relationships and inspire others to make a difference. For more information regarding financial aid scholarship options, please send an email to: calvert@peacethroughaction.org.

Location: Harriet E. Brown Community Center, 901 Dares Beach Rd., Prince Frederick, MD 20678

Age: 14 – 18 years old

Day: Monday – Friday

Time: 10:00 am – 3:00 pm

Date: July 10 – 14, 2023

Fee: $150 (scholarships available upon request)

Scholarship Information: Interested participants in this program may be able to receive a need-based scholarship that would cover the total cost of attendance. If you would like your youth to be considered for scholarship funding, please complete this Scholarship Request Form and submit via email to calvert@peacethroughaction.org.

Please complete this quick interest form and we will contact you with more information.

Peaceful Leaders Youth Program Activity Profile

Brief Description

The Peaceful Leaders Youth Program develops high school-aged youth into community peacebuilders and leaders by providing them a sequence of learning and action activities on social and emotional development, peaceful practices, and civic engagement.

Purpose

Through the Peaceful Leaders Youth Program, the Calvert Peace Project seeks to prepare youth to be 21^st century servant leaders through learning and application of social and emotional development, peacebuilding, and civic engagement skills.

Intended Participants

• High school-aged youth (in-school or out-of-school youth ages 14 through 18)
• Youth interested in social justice and peacebuilding
• Youth interested in learning how to take action in their communities
• Youth ready to commit to being part of a peer learning group for a medium-length time period.

Detailed Description

The Peaceful Leaders Youth Program prepares high school-aged youth for 21^st century community peacebuilding and servant leadership by providing them a sequence of research-informed learning and action activities on social and emotional development, peaceful practices, and civic engagement. Peaceful Leaders participants will mature in their prosocial skills, become equipped to teach and model various peaceful practices to their peers and the wider community, and blossom as engaged citizens in their schools, neighborhoods, places of play and prayer, and future campuses and workplaces.

Peaceful Leaders is comprised of a year-round cycle of in-school and out-of-school components, in which youth may engage in any or all components. These components include Peaceful Leaders Step In/Up Trainings, Peaceful Leaders Clubs, Peaceful Leaders Summer Experiences, and Peaceful Leaders Service Projects. All youth who participate in any one component of the cycle will experience distinct gain in peace knowledge and skill. We will measure these programmatic outcomes using participant surveys, skills audits, and qualitative interviews.

Youth who choose to participate in most or all program components will become the core group of peaceful leaders who then train their peers and community members in a variety of prosocial behaviors. In so doing, Peaceful Leaders develops a dedicated constituency who will facilitate the recruitment and replication of the program in subsequent school years.

Peaceful Leaders Step In/Up Trainings

Peaceful Leaders Step In/Up Trainings teach high school-aged youth the upstander intervention peaceful practice to capacitate them to proactively identify harmful situations such as bullying and harassment and redirect them in a positive manner. This interactive training develops youths’ prosocial skills by providing them a framework to assess possible risk factors when responding to negative social interactions, rehearse effective interventive strategies, and bolster confidence in their implementation. Additionally, these trainings serve as recruitment opportunities into the second Peaceful Leaders component, Peaceful Leaders Clubs. In 2023, we will offer Peaceful Leaders Step In/Up Trainings to approximately 40 youth with one Calvert County high school and one youth development organization.

Peaceful Leaders Clubs

Peaceful Leaders Clubs are a high school and youth service provider-based, extracurricular activity to drive social, emotional, and leadership development of club members interested in increasing peace among their campus and community populations. Schools and service organizations sponsor and offer Peaceful Leaders Clubs year-round either within the school day schedule or during afterschool hours. Convened regularly over the course of the academic year, Peaceful Leaders Clubs provide a sequence of brief session, student-centered, research-informed skills reinforcement in upstander intervention, skills training and reinforcement in restorative justice and other peaceful practices, and forums for peaceful dialogue on subjects of importance to their school communities or the wider geographic communities the schools serve. Peaceful Leaders Clubs equip and embolden a group of students to function as peer leaders for peace. Peaceful Leaders Clubs serve as a feeder into the third Peaceful Leaders component, Peaceful Leaders Summer Experience.

Peaceful Leaders Summer Experiences

Over the course of a week-long intensive in summer months, when youth have more discretionary time to engage in long-form and active learning, Peaceful Leaders Summer Experience participants will explore in greater depth an equivalent set of content to that of Peaceful Leaders Clubs. The summer experience will allow for youth to form connections with peers from high schools other than their own, including home-schooled youth and youth who are not participating in school. Anchoring these relationships around a common cause, the summer experience will provide participants opportunities to organize themselves to apply the knowledge they have gained from this and prior components of the Peaceful Leaders cycle to improve their school communities in the form of student-designed and led Peaceful Leaders Projects.

Peaceful Leaders Projects

A subset of participants from the summer experience and/or clubs will plan and execute Peaceful Leaders Projects in their high schools within the fall term of each school year. Planning will begin at the summer experience and will continue through summer so that youth are ready to present their plan to school administration early in the school year. Projects could include guest motivational speaker supplemented by other learning, schoolwide teach-ins, experiential activities, a peaceful practices workshops series, resources fair, on-site or off-site service projects, and more. We are prepared to offer suggested projects to youth short on ideas, but truly expect that they will identify the subject(s) and delivery methods that spark their enthusiasm and motivate them to carry them out.

Performance Measures

We expect that participants will experience increases in their commitment to future peaceful behavior and confidence in their ability to practice such behaviors. We will measure for these performance goals using surveys, skills audits, and qualitative interviews.

We will strive to recruit at least 20 youth into the program cohorts and retain at least 15 of them through the full sequence of learning and action activities. We will measure for these performance targets through attendance documentation.

Also, as this is a new program for the Calvert Peace Project, we will continuously invite participants to provide assessment of the program’s content, structure, and logistics.

Peaceful Leaders Youth Program Resources

Peaceful Leaders Youth Program Activity Profile