High school students from all over North Carolina will be at N.C. State today for the 4th annual Triangle Youth Leadership Conference. The conference is a product of Triangle Youth Leadership Services, a completely student-led organization advised by the Park Scholars.
Participants will have the opportunity to stay overnight in the Avent Ferry Complex, because the conference will run until Saturday. This is the first time the conference will last for two days.
“We really wanted to grow the conference, and lengthening it was the first step to doing so,” said junior Devan Riley, the general director of TYLC and accounting major.
“We’re really excited about this year,” said Joseph Bond, TYLS’s communications director and sophomore in communications and political science.
“Even though we’ve had to hustle because this is our first time doing a two-day conference, we’re all really excited. We’ve worked really hard and we hope the high-schoolers enjoy it,”
The conference was established by Adam Dunn, a senior in physics, and Steven Mazur, a senior in chemical engineering, when they were freshmen. Dunn and Mazur created the conference to empower and motivate high school students to initiate change in their communities, which remains the goal of the conference.
Alanna Propst, small groups organizer and panelist and sophomore in political science, explained that at the conference, students will be assigned to a group where they will participate in icebreakers and team building exercises. At the end of the conference, students will use the knowledge they gained from the conference and work together to engage in ideas and do real-life problem solving. At last year’s conference, students were asked to present plausible solutions to issues like homelessness, voter apathy and environmental degradation.
This year’s guest speaker will be Kevin Miller, a senior majoring in international studies. “Miller is a dynamic speaker and he’s young,” said Bond. “He’s done a lot of interesting things and I think he has a lot of interesting perspectives to share. We’re hoping that the high school students can relate to him and really be inspired.”
Miller, who is a Caldwell Fellow and StartingBloc fellow, has helped found a non-profit organization called Que Lo Que, a global citizenship initiative, worked at the Unreasonable Institute, co-taught an English class for women leaving the sex trade in Costa Rica and has spoken at TEDx. He is currently working with Pennies 4 Progress, a non-profit venture, HUB Raleigh, and the Superhero Experiments, a personal blogging project.
When asked about his accomplishments, Miller responded, “It’s not about me or the conference. What I care about is getting the kids to think or be moved to go do something.”
Panelists for the conference will be Propst and Barton Strawn, an MBA candidate who graduated with his undergraduate degree from N.C. State in 2010 and founded the Lumina Clothing Company. The conference will also feature Jessica Ekstrom, founder and CEO of Headbands for Hope and senior in communications, as a workshop presenter.
Riley explained that the “long-term vision for the conference is not only to teach the attendees leadership skills, but also to be a point of pride of the university. We’d really like to be something that the university is proud of.”
