Image taken form Edinburg Youth Leadership Institute homepage

The South Texas Youth Initiative is comprised of the rural communities of the Edinburg Consolidated School District, that include San Carlos, La Blanca, Lull, San Manuel, Faysville, Linn, and Hargill. The goal of the initiative is to teach leadership skills to children and young adults through educational workshops and commmunity service projects. The Initiative, based in Edinburg, created twelve workshops designed by, presented by, and offered to elementary, junior high, and high school students. Topics included:

• Gang Violence
• Community Leadership
• Etiquette
• Drugs
• 911 Awareness
• Hispanic Art
• Nutrition
• Community Development
• Learning Manners
• Home Fire Safety
• Gun Safety
• Healthy Living

Excerpt from the EYLI web site:

On March 18, 1999, six South Texas Youth Initiative members traveled to Washington, D.C. for a workshop on "Conflict Resolution" and "Facilitator Training". With this training, the students returned to train other members of the Youth Leadership Institute. All Team members have attended a series of community development workshops on topic such as Asset Mapping, Benchmarking, and Project Implementation.

On July 16 and 17, the South Texas Youth Initiative participated in a Llano Grande Seminar that dealt with defining community development. The STYI took part in the seminar by facilitating a workshop about the problems that our communities face and empowering the youth to work for solutions to these problems.

Our members have interviewed community leaders that have enriched us in the topics that we created into workshops for the city's youth. Some community leaders also did presentations for all of our members. The topics of the presentations dealt with the workshops we created.

Together we have developed topics for presentations, which we feel are important to kids today. We have used the years of experience of our youth, out teachers, our parents, and other people from the community to craft a program that reflects our assets and our needs.