Good evening.

I'd like to call to order our study session for Tuesday, April eighth, twenty twenty-five.

We're gonna have our assistant city attorney Gallagher lead us in the Pledge of Allegiance.

And the pledge.

As always, they did a wonderful job representing our community.

And in fact, we we had a lot of good feedback from other communities once again on the amount of participation that our Brighton Youth Commission commission showed at the conference.

And with that, I'm going to turn it over to Tanya and the Youth Commission.

So I'm Nia Lopo.

I'm a senior at Eagle Ridge Academy and chair of the Brighton Youth Commission.

Hi, I'm Eleanor Larson.

I am the Vice Chair of the Brighton Youth Commission and a junior at Brighton High School.

Hello there.

I am Charlie Haggerty.

I'm a freshman at Passby.

I'm a senior at Brighton High School.

At Prairie View High School.

Hello, my name is Ian Kim.

I'm a freshman at Brighton High School.

And Rachel Keeley, the services coordinator, also joined us at the National League of Cities Conference.

Unfortunately, she's out sick tonight.

And I don't want to steal too much of what they have to say, because again, I will get in trouble for stealing their thunder, but I just want to share that again, the youth commission continues to just make me so proud of these conferences.

I'll say that I think recovery and rebuilding after COVID has been so hard.

And this is the first conference that I felt like, okay, we're back.

We're back for real this time.

And so if you haven't heard about the process for the National League of Cities and how youth commissioners attend, they all first go through a pretty intense application process.

So the application process always includes essay questions and some sort of making of a video to post to social media.

And the vote the video that they create often includes incorporating other aspects of the community too.

So they have to highlight pieces of Brighton or interact with other people from the city of Brighton.

And then there's an interview process.

After they're selected, they go through kind of a training process to make sure that they're well prepared.

So you'll hear them talk a lot about networking, but I just want to make it clear they don't just show up and know how to do these conferences and networks.

So they go through a pretty structured rigid training before they attend the National League of Cities.

And then once we get there, I don't know if they'll all talk about it, but there's so many life experiences that they that happen during this time in addition to the professional experiences.

So it's always magical for me to watch whether it's they know that I'm terrible at directions, and so I give the disclaimer every trip that if you want to go somewhere, you have to find your way there.

If you get lost, it's on you, it's not on me.

But they're really out there figuring out if we're taking an Uber together how to look for the license plate number and how to check for an Uber or how to ride a metro and what that looks like.

Um in addition, I think a large piece of this is building confidence and learning how to advocate for themselves.

So whether they feel uncomfortable in a situation with a colleague at the conference that they just met, or they're mistreated by a cashier.

These are things that in the past, maybe their parents would stand up for them, but their parents aren't there.

And so learning how to advocate for themselves is also a huge part of the trip.

So I just wanted to share those little pieces with you.

I'm so incredibly proud and I'm excited for them to share their experiences with you.

Hello, I'm first.

Um so what I gathered from this experience from going to the conference was that um I learned about like the importance of teamwork and like building a team structure with the people you're working with.

Um and also learn like how to organize, brainstorm and like use my ideas to work towards a like a service project or a future project that I wanted to work on.

And like during the conference, we kind of like an example of this was um we worked, we were spread into a bunch of different groups.

I think like around like 40 different groups with all the rest of like the commissioners for our council members, um, part of like the different youth councils from across this country.

Um we were given three topics to work on.

It was either youth civic engagement, um housing, like affordable housing and um like topics surrounding that and uh diversity and equity.

And my group, we worked on youth civic engagement, and so we made like a a multiple-step plan of how we can help get more youth involved in like local government and local policymaking.

And I thought that was really valuable to learn and work with those other commissioners and council members.

And my favorite moment of um this trip, like my favorite moments of the trip was exploring the memorials and the monuments, um, talking and networking with other commissions, commissions at the conference, and going to the American History Museum.

Hi.

Um, I have gone to several out-of-state conferences during my time as youth commissioner, and I've just kind of noticed how I have like changed throughout these trips, and because of them, like my confidence and my role in the group has changed.

So on my first trip as a freshman in Kansas City, I was going through some pretty tough times, and I relied really heavily on my chaperones and my senior youth commission members.

Uh over time I learned how to be more confident in my abilities and how to advocate for myself.

Now, not only am I able to advocate for myself and feel confident, I'm able to feel confident in my role as a group leader and advocate for other people who need help.

Um and kind of just becoming the mentor that I needed when I first joined.

And I really appreciate the support that I've been given by city staff and council members.

And I'm really excited to see how I can learn and grow in my final year in the youth commission and attending another year of National League of City conferences.