Saturday, January 13, 2024
TCS youth McKenzie Lancaster and Jayleyana Peake cohosted the "Emspire More Youth Experience" Conference at Groveport Madison High School over this past weekend. Emspire More is a youth led movement to help empower and inspire each other through the More Inc. organization.
Dr. Diandra Gordon founded the Emspire movement and has incorporated it into The Charles School, Groveport, and will soon be in Africentric. The conference embodied strength, vulnerability, arts, poetry, progressive workshops, and collaboration.
There were two phenomenal poets: Marium Seck and Tykeice Cox who started off the conference with heartfelt poems about life as a young black American and the struggles of being misinterpreted.
Next, there was an influential speaker by the name of Jordan Peaks who is an NBC4 news anchor and opened up about her struggles with mental health and how her religious foundation changed her perspective on everything. She gave a compelling speech on self-accountability, finding purpose, and persevering.
After the speeches, the students split off into groups to partake in the seven workshops being hosted by the youth leaders. The workshops were:
Get To Know You
Money On My Mind
Zootopia
Family Matters
Money Management
Growth vs. Fixed
At Ease
All the workshops covered different lessons on money management, how to manage stress, self-identifying, disconnecting from stereotypes, and much more. The conference ended with a dance party called After Glow and all in all, the leadership Mckenzie and Jayleyana displayed by hosting and navigating this whole event was admirable and we are very proud of them!
