Students from several area high schools gathered at Lincoln Hall on the Ozarks Tech campus Wednesday for the annual Youth Empowerment Project or YEP conference, hosted by the Community Foundation of the Ozarks.
YEP works to get people involved in community-based philanthropy.
The guest speaker at the conference, Dr. Marcos Silva, is the executive director of RGV Lead in south Texas, which connects education to industry to prepare students for successful careers. He's a part-time lecturer at University of Texas-Rio Grande Valley and curator for TEDxMcAllen, TEDxMcAllen Youth and South Texas Ideas Festival. And he’s a former teacher who helped his students see how they could make a difference in their community.
Silva said the main message he wanted to leave with the students was that they have value in the community now.
"I think it's an area that sometimes we forget to have conversations with youth about and saying, like, you have a lot of talents, you have a lot of information that could be useful to a lot of the work that is happening around you," he said."
Communities will benefit by seeing the value in their young people and including them, he said.
"It's this idea also that they're not just tokens, right?" he said. "That they're not just going to sit in the table to say we have young people at the table and that there's this active listening component that needs to come from the community and this recognition of, like, this is, by all means, a pipeline of what the community's going to look like in the future."
According to Silva, the more communities invest in developing their young people, the better those communities will be in the future. They need to ask themselves: What development opportunities do they want those who will stay there to have when they’re young? What connections do they want them to have in the community? And how do they build that network at a younger age?
