For the Sake of Our Youth

FROM OUR FOUNDER & CEO

Each year, this report provides an opportunity to pause and reflect on all the triumphs and challenges that Youth Frontiers and those we serve — students, educators, community members — faced. Youth Frontiers is committed to bringing out the best in our community’s young people. We are here. We are standing up and speaking out more boldly than ever for character and community — for connection in our disconnected world. All for the sake of our kids.

Our mission is strong. Thirty-two years of inspiring character and building community strong. Last year, we surpassed working with 2 million students and educators. This year, we are looking to expand that work even further to reach more adults so our kids have more role models of character.

A few highlights from last year:

We expanded our leadership work with students from seven student leadership conferences to eight and held our first-ever Young Women’s Leadership Conference. This conference alone reached 12 schools and nearly 200 young women. It was a powerful experience. One participant said, “I accept responsibility for unity. Together we are more powerful. I hope that together all of our leadership commitments can unite our schools, unite us as women, and unite us as a society.”

In our emerging work with educator cohorts, we doubled our goal, supporting twice as many educators as we anticipated. Being an educator in today’s classrooms is a seemingly impossible job, but after participating in our program educators tell us they are returning to their schools reconnected to their purpose and more inspired to continue in their critical work teaching students. One principal said, “When I have forgotten my way, Youth Frontiers brings me home.”

We expanded our YCorps internship program. It’s a landing place for recent college grads and an opportunity for our future leaders to grow in confidence, engage in professional development, gain life skills and be a part of our mission with kids. The young adults leaving our YCorps program carry the YF way into the world with them — a world that so desperately needs to see a better way.

Our work with students, schools and the community is thriving because we have steadfast support from exemplary pillars of leadership in our community. One such leader, and a mentor to me, passed away recently — but his legacy will long outlive him. Chuck Denny was a founding board member and generous supporter of our work at Youth Frontiers for many years, and part of the legacy he leaves is passing the values of presence, humility, and courage on to the next generation.

Every year, we have the opportunity to highlight some of the incredible young people we get to meet with our Youth Frontiers Character Award. This year, in honor of the legacy Chuck has left — and in great anticipation of a future filled with more leaders like him — we have renamed our Character Award the Chuck Denny Legacy Character Award. We hope our work, the work he helped shape, will inspire many more kids to grow into adults and into leaders like Chuck. This school year, we’ll be working with 130,000 students, educators and community members to this end.

We know we’re not the solution to so much that ails our society. But our message of character is the solution. I invite you in this upcoming year of challenges in our community and nation to help us carry this message forward and to live with great presence, humility and courage in 2020.