This past week, four of the CV Youth Alliance’s teen members attended a conference in Orlando, Florida. The conference was hosted by the Community Anti-Drug Coalitions of America and built on the framework of the National Coalition Institute’s National Coalition Academy.

At this conference, youth learned how to help community coalitions be more effective in producing community change. The experience helped coalitions build their capacity to foster youth leadership in the design, implementation and evaluation of action strategies addressing community problems.

This training greatly helped the steering committee of the CV Youth Alliance further the knowledge of how to assess the needs of youth in our community. Not only did we grow closer as a group, but we also learned from other coalitions from all over the country. The conference started on Sunday with a warm welcome from the leaders and a brief introduction as to what they do in their coalitions. Then on Monday we had a chance to network with other teens from other states. The rest of the week we learned how to identify our community’s local conditions and how to create action plans to combat the conditions.

Now that we are back from the conference, we will complete our action plan and set deadlines and deal with the logistics. We learned so much from being able to attend this training, but if I had to pick one thing that really motivated me to thrive as a Youth Alliance member, it’s that the work that we put in is what we get out of it. This next school year we are going to give it our all and see that every plan we create gets completed and thrives with the youth. Our plans are going to address the needs of our teens and ’tweens in ways that they will connect with.

I am very excited to take the next steps towards a drug-free and happy community.

Makayla Rabago
CV Alliance board member

Suzy Jacobs is on vacation this week.

CV Alliance
3131 Foothill Blvd. Suite D
La Crescenta, CA 91214
(818) 646-7867  http://cv-alliance.org/

  Makayla RABAGO