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Story and photo by Master Sgt. Scott Wagers
AFNEWS
More than 100 teens from 11 bases throughout U.S. Air Forces in Europe traveled to Ramstein to take part in the first Air Force-hosted European Keystone Club Leadership Summit.
The Keystone program, aimed at developing leadership skills and encouraging civic responsibility in youth aged 14 to 18, has been part of the Boys & Girls Club movement since 1960. In 1995, it began partnering with military-based youth centers worldwide.
Garnering the attention and involvement of teens these days requires a different strategy than ones used in the past, said Chett Kline, Vogelweh-based youth program director who organized the summit.
“Kids today can sit in their rooms for 10 hours and travel the world (via the Internet) and play video games that will blow you away. Because of that, (youth centers) have to aggressively recruit teens by coming up with new and exciting things to engage them.”
For 14-year-old Karria Willoughby, a Keystone Leadership Summit participant and Keystone Club member for the last year, the community outreach projects have appealed to her the most.
During the week-long leadership summit, Karria and scores of kids her age emptied out an old child development center on Ramstein as part of a community service project. The toys and furniture from the building were organized and loaded into a truck for shipment to a Romanian orphanage. Sitting down to take a rest from the work, Karria reflected on a before-and-after-school mentoring project she did earlier in the year.
“I met a little girl who reminded me of myself when I was five – very shy. We played tag and drew with chalk. I was sad to go at the end (of the day) but it was fun to meet her,” she said.
Mr. Kline said only one-third of the 105 Keystone leadership summit attendees are prior Keystone Club members. The other 70 percent are the results of a new recruiting initiative.
Ken Schath, the training and curriculum specialist for Ramstein’s youth center – and one of 10 adult advisors at the Keystone summit – said there are two kinds of kids who patronize most youth centers.
“There are those kids who just want to hang out in a place that’s fun and safe – and those kids are not going to be interested in doing fundraisers for malaria. On the other hand, kids who discover Keystone Club find that their grades will be up, they’ll be in the Honor Society, they play sports, music, they’re civic-minded and they’re preparing for college,” he said.
Teens attending the week-long Keystone summit found themselves up at 6:30 a.m. each day preparing for community service projects, professional job shadowing, team-building exercises and fundraising initiatives that were budgeted and allocated to various charities.
To familiarize teens with the inter-workings of business and employment opportunities during the summit, teens were given a tour and operations brief of the Ramstein Base Exchange by the manager, Joe Fischer. The store averages $40 million a year in sales and boasts the largest bookstore in all of AAFES.
The youth were also joined and mentored the entire week by the current and former-reigning Boys & Girls Club of America’s national and regional Youth of the Year – as the result of a separate initiative facilitated by U.S. Air Forces Europe headquarters.
“We’re all here this week for one main reason,” said 19-year-old Demetrice Tuttle, the 2007-2008 Boys and Girls Club National Youth of the Year and Keystone Summit mentor, “…we’re here to make a positive impact on the world.”
