Generation of Heroes – Making it Matter at GTI
By Skylar P., LIT Class of 2014
On June 9th, my fellow LITs and I had the privilege of attending Georgia Teen Institute (GTI). GTI is a youth leadership program for Youth Action Teams throughout Georgia. Held at Oxford College for four days, we had the opportunity to stay in the dorms, participate in team-building exercises, design a project that will improve our communities, and attend workshops designed to raise awareness on different issues and build leaderships skills.
While participants had many workshops to choose from, I attended a workshop that helped everyone become aware of the stereotypes placed on teenagers in today’s society. “The Fighting Low Expectations with Emotional Intelligence” workshop was one of the many eye-opening experiences I had while at GTI.
After our workshops, HoG’s Youth Action Team, Generation of Heroes (GoH), reconvened to begin work on our project. Since HoG has been attending GTI for quite a few years now, there have been many projects completed, each impacting the bleeding disorder community in its own way. This year the LITs decided that we need to raise awareness of the general public about bleeding disorders. We are all working together to write Public Service Announcements about the most common inherited bleeding disorders and will be sending them out to radio and TV stations. While putting a group of very strong headed teenagers with very different opinions in a room together to come up with a unified idea may pose a few challenges, we were all in agreement that we need to give something back to the community that has given us so much, and that this was the best way to do so.
But we are teenagers, and there was no way we would be able to stay in one room working on one project for days. Lucky for us, the GTI staff was prepared for that. Each Youth Action Team was given plenty of opportunities to get out and interact with different teams. GoH got particularly close to the members of the Dual County Defenders from Ringgold, Georgia. The last night of GTI was an especially proud moment for GoH; we won an award as Team of the Year!
The end of the week was bittersweet. We were all ready to go home to our families and to sleep in our beds again. However, it was very difficult leaving the new friends and memories we had made while at GTI, especially for the older LITs such as me. A few of us only had the opportunity to visit GTI once, but it was an experience that we will all hold in our hearts forever.