For the rest of the world May is designated Love Month. Ok, in the northern hemisphere at least… Up there it is now Spring, when nature comes into full bloom. But Rotary International designated May to be Youth Service Month. Alternatively, May could also be named Rotary Acronym Month. These are just for Youth Service: YEP, RYLA, RYPEN, RYTS, MUNA, NYSF, HESS, RYDA (coming up for breath now…) Plus, for the uninitiated, some bewilderingly non-descript names such as Earlyact, Interact, Rotaract… Have I forgotten any? Ah yes, there is one in our region, the Conoco Phillips Science Experience which is held in numerous campuses across the nation. Yes, each one of these is a major Rotary Youth program! I won’t elaborate on details – our District Webmaster Gareth Hunt has done a sterling job of extensively outlining them: go to www.rotary9640.org and click on the Youth Programs tab at the top; they are all there.
One of these programs is running next month, in June: RYPEN. (Go on, look it up!). RYPEN is designed to help senior school students (14 – 16 years old) to get used to the real world. It starts on Friday 13th June and runs till Sunday. Talk to our Youth Service Director Thomas Robinson – he has all the details.
May. Youth Service Month. Visualize: some 45,000 Rotary and Rotaract Clubs throughout the world focussing on youth, focussing on providing youth with life training, the stuff they don’t seem to teach at High School, from “every day” kids to future leaders, all the way up to the top Science students who get accepted into the National Youth Science Forum in Canberra (we just had Chloe Chan reporting back to us last month). World wide, hundreds of thousands of future leaders, year on year. Will it make a difference? Yep, you proudly may answer this question in the affirmative.