5 Skills Youth Leadership Initiative Alumni Bring Into Work and Life
By Padah Vang, YLI Alumnus 2012-2015
I joined the Youth Leadership Initiative (YLI) in my sophomore year of high school because I wanted something different, challenging, fun yet meaningful. I found all of that in YLI. While I learned a lot as a participant, I grew the most when I was peer-selected to become a YLI peer leader, known as a Youth Mentor, during my junior and senior years of high school. While YLI is only an after-school program, it manifested into my everyday life. My co-mentors and I often joked about eating, breathing, and dreaming of YLI. We found that no matter where we were, we carried YLI with us. We were always thinking about the concepts and applying the skills that we learned.
Even after leaving Minnesota for college in Colorado, I continue to use what I have learned. I am more confident in presentations because of the public speaking opportunities I had in YLI. I am strategic about hosting events at my college because of the planning process I practiced in YLI. More importantly, I learned how to be comfortable in my own body, my thoughts, and voice.
Many YLI alumni still use the concepts and skills that they learned in YLI. I sent out a survey to our alumni to capture their stories. I asked them: What is one YLI skill, philosophy, lesson learned or concept you still use since graduating from YLI? How have you used it?
“When meeting new people with different experiences, I use what I think I know in combination of what is present to adapt to communities that are around me.”
Here are the top five skills YLI alumni say they still use to this day:
1. Public Speaking – YLI advocates for youth voices and leadership, and the survey shows that YLI is doing that well. Most of the alumni who took the survey mentioned that public speaking is a skill that they still use to this day. Kia Lor uses their public speaking at board, committee, staff meetings, teaching and orientation. Paul Vang uses his public speaking skills to facilitate activities for his advisory cohort and even took the challenge to be an emcee at his school. Xai Thao found public speaking to be very useful and relevant because he often presented to groups of 30-200 students. Public speaking is a transferable skill that can be implemented to any place and audience.
2. Self Confidence – YLI holds and facilitates the space for us to find confidence in our own voice and self. “Before I joined YLI, I used to be a very quiet person, but during my time at YLI, it taught me how to not be shy and to be confident about myself,” Oo Meh wrote.
Kenneth Yang wrote, “YLI has definitely taught me how to be confident in my thoughts and spoken word. I use this wherever I go, and it has definitely made my life richer and more fulfilling.”
3. Implicit Biases – YLI creates a safe space for us to explore our implicit biases through fun and interactive activities. Implicit biases are subconscious attitudes towards people based on associated stereotypes of them. These implicit biases may affect how people treat and interact with certain people, negatively or positively. We ask ourselves, where are our attitudes stemming from? What did our parents or guardians teach us about other people? While we investigate ourselves by asking these questions, we also know that our implicit biases do not automatically disappear by simply naming them and that we must continue to do the work to unlearn them.
Cooper Vang talks about how he examines his implicit biases when he meets new students at Augsburg College. Are his biases stopping him from creating intentional and meaningful relationships? On the contrary, he says, “When meeting new people with different experiences, I use what I think I know in combination of what is present to adapt to communities that are around me.”
Sam Xiong wrote, by “recognizing the implicit bias I have towards things in my daily life and making sure I take a minute to ask myself if I am being fair about my judgments. YLI has helped me realize the implicit biases in our lives that affect the way we carry ourselves or unconsciously make judgments.”
4. Intersectionality – The concept that people’s different identities, such as race, class, gender, sexuality and ability are interwoven to affect their experience. One of the activities that YLI participants do is identifying their different identities on each petal of the flower. This flower or visual helps to facilitate the discussion on intersectionality.
“Diversity is our strength.”
Cooper Vang shared, “YLI has also taught me well about the many identities that people hold… college is a place where many people who hold different identities come to learn. Through YLI, I learned why it’s important to ask people for their preferred pronouns and how important it is to address them correctly.”
5. Cross-cultural communication – YLI encourages us to be curious about our own culture and other people’s culture. Cross-cultural communication is an interaction that happens in the process of communicating with people who identify differently in terms of race, class, age, gender, sexuality, generational, worldviews, religion or spirituality.
Chit Su Htway wrote, “I learn to appreciate my culture. I share my culture with other people without hesitation. For example, whenever I meet someone new, they would ask me where I am from, and without thinking, I just share my culture with that person.” An appreciation for our own culture is a celebration of yourself and your people or community.
“Diversity is our strength,” Pa Xiong wrote.
“I have used the skills of learning and working with people across differences. It has helped me in tough situations and discussions about race, equity and bias and in the work that I do now,” Gao Thor shared.
One alumnus approached the question differently. Xe Chang wrote, “Rather than specific skills or concepts, I feel like I continue to embody a way of being that I specifically learned and practiced in YLI. They are, listening with the intent to understand… having meaningful interactions with my peers, being mindful of certain powers and privileges, and being willing to take risks and to trust in the process of the ‘newness.’”
YLI helps to build lifelong skills that are relevant and important in this 21st century. While YLI does teach us how to speak in front of an audience, how to talk with someone from another background, how to call out our implicit biases, YLI shows us a way of being. It flows in us through the way we think, the words that we use, and the actions that we take.
YLI is a transformative experience.
Wherever we are, we know that we are YLI.