I don’t know about you, but there are days I just don’t want to read the paper or look at the local news. It seems like it’s just one story after another about bad things happening. So, when I see an article in the local paper about a group of kids that are helping themselves and their community it just makes me feel good.
A Promise for the Future
The City of Centralia, Illinois recently thanked nine members of YouthBuild who assisted the city in a number of projects this year, according to an article in the Centralia Sentinel.
YouthBuild is a non-profit organization which provides education, counseling and job skills to unemployed young American adults between ages 16 and 24. The program is based in five components: construction, education, counseling. leadership and graduate opportunity, the article stated.
Students spend every other week on a job site, learning the construction trade by building or rehabilitating homes in their own communities. This creates housing for low-income people, and also gives the students marketable job skills. The alternate weeks are spent on education in the YouthBuild classroom, with the goal of attaining a GED, the article explained.
Reaching Out
YouthBuild participants worked with the city in cleaning up the band shell at the Library Park, and also helped install new benches there. They also helped with the interior cleanup of the Illinois Theatre downtown and assisted in the work on the new dugouts at the baseball fields in Fairview Park.
Centralia officials thanked the YouthBuild participants for the “hard work, commitment to the community and the youth’s desire to make a positive impact, not only for themselves but their co-workers and the city as well.”
“You’re special to the city of Centralia,” Mayor Becky Ault told the nine. “We just want to thank you for all the work that you’ve done in Centralia.”
Each youth received a token of the city’s appreciation, a coin inscribed with “Change” on the front and on the back , “Change Attitude. Change Thinking. Change Behavior.”
I think that these nine young people are great role models not only for their peers, but for the adults in the community that don’t think that the actions of one person can make a difference. These kids are proof that it can.
