By: Oluwanifemi Onifade, Sullivan Sophomore
The Junior Youth Empowerment Program (JYEP) is a program for youth to join and learn how to be effective mentors and teachers for middle schoolers and teach little children. It is a new club choice that has been added to Sullivan recently. The JYEP focuses on spiritual education related to acquiring qualities such as truthfulness, honesty, kindness, and generosity.
The program includes many components such as academics, arts, recreation and service. Members mentor middle schoolers in groups and foster friendships through communication, providing advice to help guide them through the challenges of growing up. The program is designed to help children navigate the forces of life, helping to impart them with good values that help them know the value of life.
The JYEP as in its name is a program directed to youths who would live to mentor/Animate to younger kids. Their goal includes to empower youths and kids, to teach them good spiritual and moral values to help them get through life the right way.
“The program helps channel the energy of middle schoolers for service in their community, helps provide them a supportive and encouraging group of friends to help them navigate this important and sometimes challenging period in their lives,” Katie Oswald, JYEP Animator and Coordinator says.
In the JYEP, the youth are both teaching, as the program calls animating, and learning. As they teach they see the way words, behaviors, even the littlest things can affect the way one behaves, reacts or views things of the world and they learn to be an example and a role model for their peers and younger ones.
“We hope to get a significant number of youth involved with the program so that they can start junior youth groups in the area that will do service for the community and build greater bonds of friendship, bringing together the school as whole,” William Taylor, JYEP animator and facilitator, says.
The JYEP is open to students on Mondays. You can sign up with the coordinators and they will receive you with open arms.
Be sure to check it out and spread the word!
