Pine-Richland Young Life Provides Safe Hangout, Positive Adult Influence

Have you heard about Young Life or WyldLife in Pine-Richland?

If not, don't worry, we tend to be only a word-of-mouth group, and we are relatively new to the district. Though not affiliated with the school, we have been around for the past three years hanging out with Pine-Richland kids. As the director of Young Life in the area, I thought I'd introduce the Pine-Richland Patchers to what we do.

Briefly, Young Life is a non-profit, Christian faith-based outreach to adolescents. On the surface, Young Life is a safe, hangout for kids. Young Life Night is controlled chaos that is impossible to describe, and is the best night of the week for many high school kids.

A message of God's love for us all caps each night. We also take kids on some spectacular camp trips (it's more like resorting than camping!) as the national organization owns camp properties built specifically for kids in some beautiful locales.

These programmatic elements, however, are not really what we are about. We begin with adults who care enough for these young people to be a part of their lives. Our staff and volunteers are a group of adults who think the world of kids and are actively building relationships with them on our local school campuses. We go to them, on their turf and in their culture, because we recognize this need for relationships with mature adults. 

Chap Clark, a professor of Youth and Family Culture, says that the root of the issues related to contemporary adolescense is leaving this age group to flounder on its own, and that the answer to this problem is relationships with adults who care. Teenagers are facing myriad issues that they don't know how to deal with. The very adults who can help them through these tough times, have a hard enough time understanding this seemingly hostile and foreign adolescent culture. It's a scary place!

Young Life leaders want to help kids through these rough times, and that's why we continue to build these relationships with the kids. Kids don't care what you have to say otherwise! And while we are presenting a Christian message, we continue to love all kids and accept and love them as they are, and never make anyone feel uncomfortable for having different religious views. We continue to care for and help kids regardless.

Young Life refers to both the overall organization and to our traditional outreach to high school ages, while WyldLife refers to our outreach to middle-school-aged kids.

Both are active at Pine-Richland and other schools in the area. For more information, go to www.younglifenorthhills.org, follow @PineRichlandYL on Twitter, or email me at mark@younglifenorthhills.org.