The Toastmasters Youth Leadership Program (YLP) is a workshop consisting of eight one- to two-hour sessions that enable participants to develop communication and leadership skills through practical experience. The YLP is presented during or after school.
A local Toastmasters club serves as sponsor and provides a coordinator to present the program. The individual coordinator attends each meeting, where he or she will lead most of the presentations and counsel participants. The school provides a member of staff to support the sessions and to follow up with the young people between sessions. YLPs have also been run at Youth Centres.
Our most recent YLP in London
Florian Bay was the coordinator for the most recent YLP that has been sponsored by a club in London. We asked him to tell us about the experience and what he had learned.
Q: How did you get involved in Youth Leadership?
A: It began with a phone call from a fellow club President who suggested I’d be a good person for this challenge. I‘d previously been made aware of Youth Leadership by one of my mentors Andrew Bennett (our District 91 Youth Leadership Adviser) but did not take the lead in coordinating a project, until that phone call.
Q: What were the objectives for the school for the YLP?
A: The school’s objectives were linked to the IBCC/Career Ready programme aimed at providing middle-achieving young people with transferable skills that can be used in the workplace.
Q: Toastmasters is about teamwork: who was involved?
A: Canary Wharf Communicators sponsored the YLP and provided the equipment to get it running. Visiting Toastmasters running educational sessions were Catherine Casale, Elizabeth Toohig and David Marks.
The key contact at the school was IBCC/Career Ready coordinator Hilde Lewis. Her help was invaluable in making the programme a success. She helped by highlighting the value of the skills the students could learn from the YLP; supporting each session as well as following up with students in between sessions.
Huge credit must go to the student committee itself. The committee members quickly made use of the tools provided to them, primarily spreadsheets, and liaised with Hilde to ensure that roles were filled.