The City of Wilmington held its first Next Level Youth Leadership summit at the Community Education Building Thursday.
Young people in the city’s workforce development program, which includes students from 14 to 20 years old, were invited to attend the event with sessions on financial literacy, life after graduation, social activism and public speaking.
Adif Hossain is a rising freshman at the University of Delaware and worked for the city’s internship program this summer. He ran breakout sessions for the public speaking and financial literacy sessions at the summit and helped organize the event.
“As you can see in the past, most youth, most activists and people that want to change are the people that are the youth, usually because they are the next generation,” Hossain said. “They are living in it… So they need to be the one in charge and start getting into activism roles, into leadership roles.”
Hossain is 19 years old, and other interns were between 18 and 20 years old.
The Youth and Families Division manager for Wilmington Parks and Recreation Shakasha Clark said interns made hourly pay above minimum wage to help offset living costs while running the summit program.
“They knew they knew they had to execute it,” Clark said. “They knew they had to come up with ideas. The summit was going to be based around their vision, so that they could see that our youth that are younger than them, that they can lead them and that one day they could also run the summit and perform it.”
Clark added she wanted to give young people the opportunity to learn and make money over the summer when they might otherwise have trouble getting a short-term job.
Interns were invited to participate in the program in ways that aligned with their career goals or major in college.
“I feel like it was overall [a] good environment, a good program for them to allow the students [to] just to be able to network and meet with other youth that are in college or going to college,” Clark said.
Hossain concurred and said he thinks attendees will walk away with plenty of resources.
“As Malcolm X said, ‘education is the passport to our future,’” Hossain said. “So what I'm essentially saying, I hope they take something out of this, whether it be public speaking, whether it be financial literacy or right after high school, one of the topics. I want them to get educated so they can start leading in their own right, and carve a path to their future.”
The department leaders plan to host more youth summits in the future.
