HC*HY Conference, October 2001, by Beth Sullins

From MemoryArchive

Who: Beth Sullins
What: Healthy Community*Healthy Youth National Conference
When:  October 2002
Where: Indianapolis, Indiana

Boise, Idaho is a city that cares about its kids. When damaging statistics came out in 2000, saying that kids in Idaho were unhappy, unmotivated and were feeling ignored by the community, the city of Boise stepped up to the plate. Using the Search Institute of America’s guidelines for what they believe can make kids happy, Boise got down to business.

Mayor Brent Coles, and the city council decided that the first and most important thing for the city to do was to hire a full time person who would deal with the just the youth. She would become one of the most integral people of City Hall in Boise. Angela, as we all came to knew her was fun, easy to talk to, and had a lot of ideas. She helped begin the Healthy Community*Healthy Youth team of Boise, Idaho. It consisted of mostly Jr. High and High school students from around the area who got to decide for themselves what projects they were going to undertake.

Many of the students, like myself were also involved on the advisory boards of the city council. I worked on the Public Works Commission Board for my senior year. It succeeded in making me feel like I was actually helping out my community. I say actual, because at the time, myself and the rest of the youth council felt that teenagers were often given “tasks” such as painting a park bench, and was told that we were doing the greatest service possible to the community. The adults could then applaud for themselves and the teens could be shuffled off and forgotten about. I appreciate Mayor Brent Coles, and the community of Boise for being one of the few communities I know about to take our problems seriously.

In the Fall of 2002, four students from the youth commission with Healthy Community*Healthy Youth were invited to the yearly conference. I had the honor of attending in the year 2001, and was pleased to get to go to Indianapolis for the second time. I attended with my conference mates: Elyse Reynolds, Luke Brown, and Jenny Adams.

Indianapolis was a great place. It was very cold for it only being October, and was filled with the warmest people I have met to date. We went to a restaurant where the waiters sat down with us to talk about what kinds of food were good, and even came in every once and awhile to taste little portions of our food. It was fun and new. When I mentioned to one of the people at the hotel in my nervous condition that I had to go up on stage to accept the award for the grant I had written, and was visibly shaking, she took a break to get me some hot chocolate and tell me that everything was going to be okay. She joked with me that I was going to be going on to the stage after Jane Fonda, and after the food, so a lot of the people who were going to be mean to me would be in the gym exercising in shame. I almost laughed as I was getting acknowledged for my grant when I looked at the chairs that had used to be full after Jane Fonda left the stage.

The other youths that I had met while I was in Indiana were very impressive people, whom I respect greatly. Many of the youth had taken on problems in the impoverished areas of their community without adult financial support at all. The non-Idaho and non-Indianan adults that I met didn’t care about me, or why I was there with my group mates. This was unfortunate, but the youth there were still so passionate and driven that they gave me quite a bit of hope for what the youth in America can do.