SAYA Youth Attend the DYCD Youth Summit

On May 11th, youth from SAYA’s programming at J.H.S. 202 Robert H. Goddard attended the Youth Summit, hosted by the New York City Department of Youth and Community Development. Two of our young people shared their experience below:

“During our trip to the Youth Leadership Summit, hosted by the Department of Youth and Community Development (DYCD) at CUNY John Jay College of Criminal Justice, we visited many different workshops to help us gather ideas for our own service projects at SAYA. We also participated in some fun activities, including Civics Jeopardy, where our team won with a score of 3,200 points! After that, we ate lunch and took some pictures before going to watch the Junior Shark Tank competition. We gathered ideas on how to give back to our community. One group attending the Summit focused their project on helping orphans, which was really inspiring.

Afterwards, we had a meeting with the Youth Development Institute, who awarded us $1,000 dollars for our SAYA program group to complete a community service project! In this workshop, we met new people from other groups with the same goal as us: giving back to their communities. We thought of ideas about what we can do to help ours, and used the time as a learning experience as well as a way to get to know each other better.

At the end of the event, we heard a great speech from Francis Lucerna, the wife of a great community activist named Luis Acosta. The grant we received was in his honor, and is called the Luis Acosta Bridging Communities Grant. We were then invited up on stage to accept our award from the commissioner of the DYCD, Bill Chong. It was an amazing experience, and we had a lot of a lot of fun and learned a lot from attending the Summit.”

- Taheerah Jenkins & Ayisha Chan