Students share lessons at Youth Development Summit

By THERESA HOGUE

Gazette-Times reporter

Youth are our future, but many teens aren't waiting that long. They're creating a better world today, by getting involved in community projects that change both their hometowns and themselves.

Teen leaders were celebrated at Oregon State University on Thursday during the Oregon Community Youth Develop-ment Summit, including representatives from the Benton County Youth Commission. Many community-minded youth from around the state came together to share their successes, and to learn from others during a series of presentations, speeches and discussions.

For a group of Forest Grove High School students, participating in an environmentally minded group helped strengthen their science skills and their leadership skills, and raised their awareness about the importance of community involvement.

Equipo Verde (Green Team) is a 4-H group of Latino students that has been working during the past school year on a restoration project along the banks of the Tualatin River in nearby Cornelius. The project was student-driven, and included gathering donations and garnering community partners to implement a tree-planting project.

By getting help from METRO and SOLV as well as receiving support from Cornelius and Forest Grove residents, the students were able to get two dozen volunteers to help them plant 240 trees along the river, reducing erosion and replacing nonnative invasive species with native plants.

Three of the Equipo Verde members gave a presentation Thursday on their project to an audience of more than 150 in the CH2M Hill Alumni Center. The trio said when they first joined Equipo Verde, none of them would have envisioned speaking in front of such a large group.

"We practiced and practiced," laughed Daisy Ortiz.

Noe Barragan said his participation in the project helped him learn about making a difference.

"I learned we could help our local community," he said. "Helping feels a lot better than doing nothing at all."

Maria Bahena overcame the difficulties of being a nonnative speaker to give her part of the presentation.

"The most important thing is that it is necessary for people to be involved in things," she said, "because we as a community need a lot of help. There's a lot of things to do."

Ortiz even got the audience involved in an impromptu group exercise. She held up one fragile stick of wood, and said that it represented a stream. Then she asked the audience for three things that make a stream healthy and successful.

As people shouted out suggestions, such as native plants and a plenitude of tree roots, she added more sticks to the single stream stick, and then showed the audience how the cluster of sticks became unbreakable.

"All of this combined makes streams healthy and strong," she said.

The same could be said for each youth partner who came together to form a group at their high school. Together, they formed something strong and unbreakable.