YOUTH VOICES CENTER

The overarching goal of YVC is to promote positive youth development and to lower the incidence of interpersonal violence among teens. YVC aims to achieve this goal by disseminating its Power of Peace program to a critical mass of students that represent a cross-section of their respective school, community center, or youth group. By helping these young people to dispel negative stereotypes of themselves and others and increase their capacity for empathy, YVC hopes to create safer school communities and more confident adolescents. The specific participant outcomes that YVC has identified include:

1. Increased self-esteem
2. Increased cultural awareness
3. Increased empathy
4. Increased knowledge of conflict management skills

The Power of Peace program utilizes a variety of experiential workshop activities to promote the following skills and attributes: conflict management, leadership, teamwork and collaboration, decision making, respect for others and self, and diversity, as follows:
Conflict Management: Youth learn ways to avoid and to resolve conflicts before they escalate into physical confrontations and dangerous situations. Facilitators engage the youth in various activities and role-play scenarios examining potential conflicts with peers and family members. Participants are invited to share personal experiences with conflicts that they resolved nonviolently. Through a round-table discussion of these real-life events, students begin to understand the power and responsibility of managing conflicts effectively.
Leadership: Opportunities to develop leadership skills are built into nearly all program activities. For instance, youth are encouraged to serve as the leader during small group activities, to listen to and report on the opinions of others, to help groups make decisions, and to help others within the group to express themselves. YVC's facilitators encourage and acknowledge examples of these leadership behaviors throughout the program. For many participants who may not excel in sports or other extracurricular activities, these activities present opportunities to demonstrate and practice their leadership traits that they may not otherwise have.
Teamwork and Collaboration: All of the activities during the program provide opportunities for youth to practice teamwork and develop valuable collaboration skills. Many of the activities require youth to break into small groups and complete tasks as a unit.
Decision-Making: Throughout the program, YVC's facilitators are looking to identify and discuss the real-life challenges that participants are facing. By discussing the dynamics of these situations and critically evaluating the choices for how to deal with them, participants develop responsible and rational decision-making skills to counteract the impulsivity, often characteristic of adolescence, that leads to many unnecessary conflicts in youth's lives.
Respect for Others and Self: Building self-respect and respect for the other participants is both implicitly and explicitly stressed throughout the program. Implicitly, youth are building respect by following the ground rules to listen to each other and always provide positive and constructive feedback. Facilitators also engage youth in activities that explicitly build a sense of self-worth.
Diversity Awareness: Youth are engaged in various activities designed to bring attention to the different belief systems and common values among various racial, cultural, social, and gender groups. By identifying points of commonality, youth are encouraged to explore ways in which they can build relationships with people who are different from them by focusing on these shared qualities.

The Power of Peace program is delivered by its creator and other trained facilitators. YVC staff work very closely with the school guidance counselors to schedule as many workshop cycles as needed to reach the targeted number of students. Teachers and staff are encouraged to participate in the workshops as well so that they can share the experience with the students. School administration are also very involved with the process to ensure participation, group cohesion and support services if required.

Since its founding, YVC has served more than 8,000 youth through its unique Power of Peace workshop. The program has documented impressive results and received overwhelmingly positive feedback from participating teens and schools. Recently, surveys have shown that students demonstrate the greatest improvement in respecting others and the willingness to speak to someone different than themselves. This displays empathy, compassion, understanding and community building learned through the workshops and transfers into the community.
An area where YVC has not been as successful is expanding the program into additional schools above and beyond the 11 currently participating in the program.