Be a part of the David Suzuki Nature Challenge!

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Program

"Youth are the leaders of today, not by right, but by skill."
PSYL participant, 2002

The Pearson Seminar on Youth Leadership is designed to strengthen the role that young people play as future community and world leaders. PSYL provides a unique learning environment in which students from North America and from other nations around the world meet for a three-week seminar. PSYL’s framework includes discussions, presentations, guest speakers, workshops and interactive approaches to leadership training. Students are encouraged to broaden their perspectives on key world issues and are provided with the leadership skills they need to become leaders on themes of ecological sustainability, social justice and international understanding.

The Skills... The Seminar offers a skills-based learning model and explores key social issues and themes facing youth. Students learn, and apply, the leadership skills they need to become community and world leaders. The discussion and activities are monitored by professional teachers and popular educators. Students will learn:

• project planning and coordination
• ecological education in a temperate rainforest setting
• information on local and international social justice issues
• indigenous ideas and traditions
• public speaking and awareness-raising techniques
• people management skills (group management, conflict resolution, mediation)
• cross-cultural and diversity training

• personal reflection and self-awareness exploration
• critical thinking, problem-solving and decision-making
• goal-setting
• ethics-based action

The Format... PSYL believes that students require several elements to realize their leadership ability. The first is confidence. The second is information and skills. The final element is an opportunity to put these skills into practice. We focus on hard leadership skills training; we discuss themes of social, political, economic and ecological justice; and we take time to put our ideas - and skills - into action.

The foundation of the program is built upon:

• A belief in innovative notions of democracy

• A commitment to equity, social justice, and critical thinking

• Ways of knowing and learning that incorporate conventional, traditional, and alternative processes

• Exploring and developing creative aspects of ourselves

• Enjoying and savouring life, playing and having fun!

PSYL is based on the belief that youth have the skills to change their worlds and the capability to be leaders in their communities. The seminar attempts to provide them with the tools they need to enact change, and to engage new skills to address huge themes of environmental degradation, globalization, social justice and human rights.

PSYL is a program that produces involved, active, educated citizens, whose attitudes of understanding and service will be a force against social injustice in the new century

This summer - be the change!

Click here to see the summary program from 2009

What are past participants
doing now?

…If it wasn't for the way PSYL helped open up my eyes to the world I may never have done many of the things I have in the past year, including attending the Global Young Leaders Conference (GYLC) in New York...

…A bunch of us from PSYL are trying to set up a volunteering thing next summer in Africa to help fight AIDS

…In this moment I am so energetic and so inspired after PSYL, that I want to promote thousands of projects in my school... Among these, a project about the production of BIODIESEL for our own vans.

…I intend to participate in the Ontario Model Parliament and World Affairs Conference hosted by a local school.

…Using my sort of position of power in the community (student council president) I've been trying to affect change with my group of people as much as possible - leading chapel services on political awareness for gr.4-13's, on the zapatista's, effective resistance, and most recently a Middle-East initiative (with students from Israel, Saudi, Iran fronting for peaceful solutions) -- with the petition from PSYL being passed around, and more and more...

… This year I've been elected student council president, and am using the eco-footprint stuff we learned at PSYL with the group I'm a junior leader for.