I’ve got issues.
My friends have issues as well, some even bigger than my own. We’ve got issues with the achievement gap, hunger, homelessness, unsustainable practices of all shapes and sizes, debt, domestic violence, and many more. We really have a lot of issues.
Many of us are a part of an organization called Students Today Leaders Forever, which has had nearly 10,000 students volunteer more than 115,000 hours of service to these issues over the last seven years. The cool part is that Students Today Leaders Forever, or STLF, isn’t even a service organization – we do leadership. Our mission is to reveal leadership through service, relationships, and action. We carry this out by giving young people high responsibility roles and opportunities to lead their peers on community service road trips called Pay It Forward Tours.
The Pay It Forward Tours, which take place at the college, high school, and middle school levels, stop to serve in different cities across the nation and end up impacting the student participants, certainly the nonprofit they’re serving, and even whole communities. These trips are all planned, led and executed by students, giving them a chance to build valuable leadership skills and real-life experiences in which to demonstrate them. At STLF, we believe young people have issues they want to address so we help provide the spark or exposure they need and reveal the talent within young leaders, so they can be better equipped to take on those immense problems.
We’ve got innovative leadership and financial models, but the coolest part isn’t STLF’s approach, it’s the number of young people who have stepped up, during these tough economic times, to serve others and make positive life choices. There is a compassionate generation rising and we have some major issues. Whether it’s supporting a young person who has an idea or getting your hands dirty as well, I hope you’ll bring your issues and join us.
For more information about STLF go to www.stlf.net.
~ Josh Reimnitz is a guest contributor.
