"The key outcome for Empire Leadership is building active leadership toward creating social impact and positive change"
EMPIRE LEADERSHIP
Empire Leadership is a platform for high school students, from diverse backgrounds, social groups, and grades, to equip them for effective leadership.
This involves participants identifying youth social issues either in the community or in their respective schools and then collaborating on events to affect the issue to bring about systemic or place based change.
Participants are actively engaged in designing and creating alternative ways for themselves, peers, teachers and the community to deal with issues, including disconnectedness, bullying and school suspensions.
Students at Lawrence Hargraves are currently designing a school “Feast,” and promoting the event to the school community including teachers and parents.
They are involved in designing the menu, cooking the food and serving plus designing the promotional posters for the event.
As the ideas are their own their enthusiasm is palpable and exciting.
Daystar Foundation partners with three schools, Lawrence Hargraves, Prairiewood and Fairfield High Schools.
Empire’s bold aim is to build an empire of young leaders while changing the lives of young people one classroom at a time.
Over the three schools we have a cohort of around 36 students. These are some of the most at risk and challenging students within the schools, and all have been suspended at some time for a range of behaviours.
Loyalty, Honour and Respect are the founding tenets of Empire to inspire and motivate students intrinsically to begin with and then extrinsically to build a strong and committed team.
Every student will:
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Identify and understand basics of leadership (getting things done through others)
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Identify social issues
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Create an awareness campaign or event to tackle the social issue
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Network with other community stakeholders, to strengthen student/community partnerships
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Coordinate and facilitate every event
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Develop teamwork skills
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Encourage public speaking and student advocacy (simply standing before their peers and articulating an idea/thought)
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Develop social graces (shaking hands, eye contact, calling someone by their name, common salutations, etc)
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Build/grow resilience (understanding curved balls are a fact of life, bad times don’t last, strong people do).
