Olivia Medina, Nederland. On Wednesday, March 6, 2019, Nederland Communities That Care Coalition (NCTCC) held our 2019 Kickoff meeting in the beautiful community room at HubNed. It was another well-attended meeting with representatives and partners from throughout the state. We all shared a family-style dinner and our purpose in being there: why we care.

The NCTCC envisions empowering youth to reach their full potential through positive relationships with the goal for promoting healthy behaviors and well-being.

My name is Olivia, and I am the email director for the Youth Leadership Academy and a student at Chinook West. I am going to describe my experience during the NCTCC meeting.

It all started when I entered the HubNed building before the meeting actually started. I began to feel a little queasy, but I attributed it to just being hungry and got together with my peers to plan our presentation.

Several minutes later, people were filling the room, including the principals from both NMSHS and Chinook West, a town official, parents and other leaders in the community. That’s when I started to feel even more uneasy and decided to finally eat. I came to realize that I was super nervous for a reason, and that was the fact that my group and I were presenting in front of all of these people. I just could not gather enough courage to stay in the room with everyone else. I excused myself. After some comfort from my fellow coalition members, I managed to recollect myself outside of the room so I could join my group, just in time.

We stood up and discussed how we came to be as The Youth Leadership Academy, how we came up with the research and resources for our presentation, how we came together to create the vaping presentation, and how we made our presentation known to others in our Boulder community and our personal reasons for being there.

During the rest of the meeting, we revisited the structure of Communities That Care, what has been accomplished thus far, where we are presently and what’s next for the Nederland Coalition. At the end, we broke out into smaller work groups: Family Involvement, Funding/Sustainability, Board Maintenance (coalition structure; policies; operating procedures; celebrations), Communications/Outreach and Factors and Assessments.

That day was the most nerve-wrecking, and yet most interesting, meeting that I have ever attended, even if I haven’t been to many meetings in my life. I really appreciate the support given to me as well as being able to present to our audience about who we are as Youth Leaders.

Being a part of the Youth Leadership Academy has pushed me outside of my comfort zone with public speaking and has already greatly improved my communication skills. Nederland Communities That Care Coalition allows my voice to be heard and to be a changemaker in the community. We all have the ability to change our community as well as our entire country and that can only be done by taking it to heart and having the determination to keep going.

If you are interested and want to learn more, please get in touch with Jen Lavely, our CTC facilitator, Jen@teensinc.org.

(Originally published in the March 21, 2019, print edition of The Mountain-Ear.)