Parents

Our leadership curriculum is organic and action-oriented, focusing on themes developed from a collection of the best ideas of great thinkers, educators, partner universities, corporations, and our own youth. It is our curriculum that develops our leaders into self-aware, civic-minded, and motivated change makers. We believe the best education should be founded and challenged in experiences with others. This is why we ask our Young Leaders to “take action” at the end of each meeting.

The goal of our program is for youth to dig deeper and fully commit to reach higher goals. Metaphorically, youth achieve their ambitions by reaching four mountain summits before they graduate high school. 

The CYL summits are named after the Decalibron Loop peaks in Fairplay, Colorado and these particular visual drives our Leadership Skills Development. These summits help our Young Leaders focus on community involvement, living outside their comfort zones, developing the beauty that exists in their communities, and taking risks that benefit others. It’s a leadership style that brings out the best in all of us! This process allows your Young Leader to explore their passion, then commit to a cause; it moves them through this process through experiential learning, so it feels natural and fun.

CYL partners with over 45 nonprofit organizations focusing on key issues in our community and beyond, each of which is vetted by CYL Staff to ensure a quality service experience for all youth. These nonprofits are committed partners of the program, and also seek to involve youth beyond our partnership. Through this strong network of partners, we can help our students follow their hearts and find their passions. We support the missions that our students care about the most and we are constantly expanding our partner list. You can explore many of our partners and their missions by visiting our partner page on the CYL website.

By becoming a member of CYL, students can track their service and leadership hours through our student portal. Our registration process allows your Young Leader to track how many Service Adventures or Leadership Exploration Meetings they have signed up for and the hours they have dedicated to both. Participation is validated at each event through our adult leaders. Young leaders may print out a service resume to automatically print service and leadership reports that they can provide to school counselors, scholarship applications, or college admission boards.

The CYL program is built around five key values: Leadership + Service + Community + Adventure + Legacy. We infuse everything we do with these in mind. We seek to help students discover themselves, face challenges, become visionaries, and engage in their communities, plus we make sure we include lots of adventure along the way (because everything’s better with a dash of fun!). Additionally, college and university admissions departments are looking for students who have both depth and breadth in their community engagement. CYL offers students a robust program that they can engage with throughout their high school experience but also offers a gateway to explore a wide variety of causes and opportunities.  

Through our CYL-led Service Adventures and our partner-led individual service engagements the number of service opportunities is virtually unlimited. However, it is our goal to offer at a minimum of three CYL led Service Adventures a month and we anticipate offering over 50 in a given year. Students are encouraged to explore individual opportunities with our non-profit partners, and we list many of those opportunities on our calendar as well. Through the combination of our CYL and individual service opportunities our students can engage in an unlimited amount of service opportunities, and it is not uncommon for our members to easily exceed the hours required by their high schools and clubs.  

Our Changemaker Meetings are chapter based, and we currently have five active chapters based on regions. Each chapter is made up of students who either attend school or live in convenient proximity to the chapter meeting. We encourage our students to engage with the chapter that is the best fit for them. Our current chapters include Central Denver, Northeast Denver, Northwest Denver, Southwest Denver, and a virtual chapter. Chapter locations and meeting dates can be found on the contact page of our website. 

Community is one of our values and one of the things that makes CYL unique. The more your teen participates, the more they will become part of the bond of our community. However, we encourage teens to become members and participate in ways that are most meaningful to them. We understand that high schoolers are busy – there is school, homework, clubs, sports, etc. – so we’ve created our program to be nimble. If service is their passion and priority, they are welcome to join us on the adventures that excites them the most and students can join throughout the year or at any point during their high school career.

CYL is a great pathway for high school service and academic clubs to connect to meaningful service opportunities. We also offer a series of workshops to schools or organizations who want to jump start community engagement within their program. We would be excited to engage with your teen’s school to determine how CYL can help bring the unique value of our program to help them meet their objectives. Contact us and find out more about these unique opportunities.

We can’t give you an answer to that question until they come and check us out. However, our dynamic community of teens thrives by embracing a diversity of interests and viewpoints. Plus, our robust program strives to guide students in their passions no matter where they lead. While we try to build outdoor adventure into many of the things we do, we truly believe that any student will find amazing opportunities and create lasting friendships by being a member of Colorado Young Leaders. We encourage youth to step out of their comfort zones and try something new – that’s what adventure means to us.