WYLS

What is WYLS?
I have mentioned WYLS a couple times in my last couple of posts. It stands for Wartburg Youth Leadership School. I worked on the staff for the school this summer as a counselor. There were two sessions the first with 16 youth and the second with 9. Both were great, but with different dynamics and personality.
During the school there were many different activities, but the ones where we worked the most closely with them was planning service ministry projects that the students complete when they get back from the school. We work with them to put together a plan of action and also to help brainstorm different obstacles that may arise and how they can identify the gifts they have to solve these obstacles.

I worked with two guys in the first session, both wanting to work with organizations helping people overseas. The first we came up with the idea to have a car wash and a walk-a-thon to raise money to give to an organization called Freedom Water they build wells in Africa. The second was working to either get a group of people together to make food packages or to get enough people to have the organization come to him in his home town. The organization is called Feed my Starving Children and works by creating food bundles that volunteers put together and then sending them to places in Africa that need food.

The second session I worked with one girl. She is planning a music festival that will be held in the parking lot of her church, the money raised by the festival she hopes to be able to send to orphanages in Siberia. This could be a problem as the news program that she first saw about these organizations said that the government was not allowing money to get to the orphanages. We are hopeful that some method can be found however. The festival itself will be a fun project, I encouraged her to contact other local churches, she is also from the Twin Cities area and attends a church close to my home church, and also Luther Seminary to find musicians and to get more people to come to the fest. We are hopeful that it could turn into an annual event.


All in all, it was a great experience, I met a bunch of great youth and got to know the other staff a lot better.