The Way Opened - Quaker Youth Leadership Conference 2021

By Miriam Rock 

Every February for over 29 years, the Quaker Youth Leadership Conference (QYLC) has brought together students and staff from some 20 Quaker schools all over North America. Friends schools take turns hosting with chaperones determining the following year’s host during the conference itself. 

In February of 2020, QYLC was hosted at George School and drew over 160 attendees. That three-day conference on George School’s beautiful campus included a keynote address, a day of exploration and learning in Philadelphia, three Meetings for Worship, a talent show, and a variety of student workshops. 

Friends Select School volunteered to host the 2021 QYLC, fully expecting it to take place in person in Center City, Philadelphia. By March of 2020, the world had changed and we recalculated….

As the Upper School Quakerism Coordinator, I was honored to attend the 2019 and 2020 conference with Friends Select students and to work with Quake, our student Quakerism club, to plan the 2021 Quaker Youth Leadership Conference. Faced with the pandemic, we set about reimagining the conference as one that took place entirely over Zoom.

Our task involved meeting a variety of challenges: 

• So much of QYLC is dedicated to time for unstructured socializing - a concept which is particularly badly adapted to Zoom, a medium in which only one person can speak at a time and one where technological delays can often ruin the spontaneity of precious moments. 

• Building intimacy and vulnerability on Zoom often takes longer than it does in person. QYLC is a three- day conference, which meant that time was at a premium.

• Zoom fatigue meant that we needed to structure breaks into our programming. Unlike in person interactions which can be at once exhausting and recharging, sitting in front of a computer all day disproportionately drains energy.

Despite these challenges, Friends Select students were resolute to create the positive, enthusiastic community that is a hallmark of Quaker Youth Leadership Conferences. We met weekly and biweekly (on Zoom!) throughout  the spring and fall of 2020, developing the guiding themes and queries for the conference, reaching out to speakers to serve on a panel, determining authentic service options that could be completed by individuals in their homes, creating a schedule which would blend traditional QYLC programming with lessons gleaned from remote and hybrid learning, and brainstorming ways to build connections between participants.

Quickly, the narrative around the conference shifted as Friends Select students’ initial sadness at not being able to introduce new friends to their beloved city transformed into excitement at being able to provide a much needed service for the larger Quaker school community. There were possibilities open to the remote conference that did not exist in previous iterations. For example, students from Brummana High School, a Quaker school in Lebanon, and Ramallah Friends School in Palestine were able to attend QYLC 2021. In all, over 140 students and chaperones from 24 different schools and four different countries were able to attend our virtual conference.

In order to build community, Friends Select students sprinkled ice breaker questions throughout the conference. At one point, a debate emerged over what the best kind of milk was. Instead of fizzling, this conversation continued to gain steam over the course of 20 minutes and was discussed both in the main room and in a series of smaller break-out rooms. Differences of opinion ranged from predictable ones like 1% vs. whole milk or cow's milk vs. almond, soy, and oat milk to less predictable ones, like “milk is just thick water” and “why use milk when you can use cream”; all views were defended passionately. Eventually, a proposition emerged for all the Philadelphia-area Quaker schools to go in on a cow together!

Another highlight - and a hallmark of QYLC - was the student workshops. Any student who attended the conference was invited to host a workshop. This year, students led a total of 18 workshops. Each student could attend two workshops from a list including:

• Medical Biases: How Identity Impacts Treatment in the US Medical System

• Quaking in Our Boots: A Quaker Education

• Democracy and Oppression: Gerrymandering and Elections in the United States

• An Introduction to Racism

• "Ask a Palestinian" - Palestinian culture, heritage, and what is it like to be a Palestinian from an anecdotal experience

• Quakerism and the LGBTQ+ Community

• Positive Vibes: Finding Joy During Quarantine

Bonds between and among schools formed in the course of several of the workshops. A student who attended one of several sessions offered by students from Ramallah Friends School reflected, “I learned about the Friends school from Palestine. I attended their workshop on Palestinian life and got to meet friends from across the world.” Similarly, one of the leaders of the “Quakerism and the LGBTQ+ Community” shared that, following QYLC, “We are planning on making a way to work with different Quaker Schools and their GSAs to have a greater network of people and other queer leaders to talk to about issues going on at different schools and ways to combat that.” A student who attended the “An Introduction to Racism” workshop remarked that it “was so wonderful. Everyone stayed long after to keep the conversation going.”

Chaperones from the 24 schools had a series of conversations about their experiences. The conversations ranged in focus from discussions of the health of the student community at our respective schools to strategies for hybrid teaching to conversations about anti-racism work at different institutions to time set aside for affinity groups. There was also time for unstructured cross-talk as new and veteran QYLC chaperones caught up about their lives, their experiences, and their favorite recipes for chai.

Chaperones were united in feeling both exhausted from the previous year’s teaching and energized by the positivity of students during QYLC. As one chaperone noted in her reflection following the conference, “My personal highlights included the talent show (including the support and positivity shown to the performers), the Meetings for Worship (great queries!), the affinity group time, and hearing our students reflect on how they experience Quakerism at our school. So much of all of our work is seed planting, and it was great to see some of those seeds blossoming.” I completely agree with this sentiment. The Friends Select students banded together to successfully reimagine a beloved conference and to make it accessible not only for all of us as we live through the coronavirus pandemic, but also to students who have never been able to attend QYLC due to distance and structural constraints. Similarly, all of the students who attended QYLC made the choice to engage with their peers and with the programming, a testament to the remarkable young people who attend Quaker institutions. 

The shape of QYLC 2022 is not yet clear; multiple schools are in the process of considering hosting it and are waiting to determine whether it will be in person, hybrid, or remote. What is clear, however, is that this community has once again found a way to adapt and to build cross-school connections even at our most isolated. The way opened.