2023 Colorado Mentoring Summit

The vision of Sources of Strength, a nationwide peer leadership and wellness model, is to empower a well world. By empowering youth voice, engaging trusted adults in schools and community organizations, and focusing on protective factors that mitigate risk and promote wellness for students and adults, Sources of Strength is an award-winning evidence-based approach. In this session, attendees will learn about Sources of Strength, tap into what gives them strengths, discuss the importance of adult wellness in schools and communities, and leave with practical resources and tools to support their own sources of strength. 

Creating inclusive environments for youth of all abilities to thrive ensures participants will feel valued, respected and appreciated. This workshop will explore the benefits of fostering an inclusive culture through the use of storytelling. Participants will experience how the story of me, the story of us and the story of now come together to create a powerful narrative for building equity across programs and participants. Workshop participants will be given tools to explore ways to promote diversability inclusion in their daily practices to ensure everyone has a seat at the table and feels welcome to be their true self. 

Participants will get an overview of the legislative process and pointers on how the power of the people can and must show up to co-create policy solutions that are consistent with the destinies that we have in mind for our children and our communities. 

This session is the first in a two-session series on trauma, resilience, and relationships. In times of stress and tragedy, social support is one of the most powerful resilience factors, enabling communities to come together and support, provide resources, and increase self-efficacy in one-another. As community-level stress continues to grow, learning skills of reaching out to make meaningful connections and conversations is more important than ever. In this workshop, audiences will learn about GRIT, a free online training to provide skills and education in fostering community social support. Audience members will walk away from this workshop with key education on stress and trauma, enhanced communication skills, and helpful resources in becoming Population Resilience!

Let’s build the teams we need to have greater impact for our youth and our communities! In this workshop, learn and discuss how using talent optimization techniques can impact outcomes for organizations! In this workshop, we will focus specifically on recruiting, hiring, and retaining staff and volunteers in mentoring organizations. If you are an organization struggling to hire and retain staff during this climate of “the great resignation,” come and join the conversation! If you are an organization struggling to fill the mentoring gap, come and join the conversation!

In this workshop we will discuss best strategies for collecting meaningful and actionable data, along with common “pitfalls” in data collection and evaluation. The presenter will introduce a method for designing a logic model or theory of change that revolves around outcomes, and helps bridge gaps between the work we do and the impact we want to see.

Workshop attendees will have time to interact with templates and tools for:

1. Beginning to create/improve your program’s logic model
2. Identifying or clarifying the most important outcomes/impacts your program aims to achieve.
3. Identifying the best data metrics and instruments to bring strategies into alignment with outcomes.

Join us on an interactive path of organizational self-discovery that led to podcasting for mentors. This session will guide participants through SOS Outreach’s journey to answer pivotal questions about the essential elements of their program, the effectiveness of their mentor training, and the power of podcasting for mentors.  Participants will also gain tips, tools, and templates to advance their own journey in defining program fidelity, conducting a training needs analysis, creating a wheel of support for mentors, and designing their own innovative learning initiative for mentors.

This workshop will give participants the opportunity to learn about what homelessness looks like in education under the McKinney-Vento Act, and how homelessness and involvement in the child welfare system impact a student's access to their learning. Participants will also learn strategies for identifying and supporting “highly mobile youth” and actions steps they can take to create an environment that elevates learning for students who are experiencing homelessness and/or are involved with child welfare.

This session is the second in a two-session series on trauma, resilience, and relationships. Let’s collaborate and come up with a community definition of Resilience and compare that to the definition participants in Dr. Callico S Vargas’ research with bachelor level social work students, faculty, and alumni came up with. Callico will share with you results of the research and give an opportunity for some individual, small, and large group work (remember how important fostering community social support is from Nicole Weis’ presentation, “Population Resilience: Harnessing the Power of Community in Times of Stress”?) We will dive into and practice Connection with Others, Self-Care, Communicating about Resilience, Personal Experience, create a plan to move forward with a deeper understanding of developing resilience, implementing practice skills, and weaving them into daily living. Finally, we will discuss language that can be associated with dominant culture and how having terms and a language can help us identify and dismantle parts of that culture that contribute stress and chronic stress and how we can move together in a different direction that is more favorable for Justice in Diversity, Equity, Inclusion (Belonging), and Access work.

This workshop will give evidence-based insight into the unique traits and characteristics of Gen Z youth, provide tips, tools, and strategies on how to best engage with Gen Z, and provide an opportunity for participants to hear directly from Gen Z presenters through a Q & A panel portion of the workshop.

To work in the field of serving youth is very fulfilling, but can also be extremely frustrating, discouraging,... making you feel over-worked, tired, burned-out.  Let's look at the root causes. Learn essential emotional intelligence strategies providing you the insight and management tools to continue serving youth from a place of balance. 

The Pueblo Communities That Care (CTC) grant program has had a strong youth advisory council for the past four years, consisting of a group of young people that represent Pueblo County high schools and diverse backgrounds. With the guidance of these youth advisors, CTC has implemented several policy changes and collective impact initiatives to ensure local young people have a healthy and safe community to develop in. One of those initiatives would be the Southern Colorado Youth Go (SoCoYoGo) online platform, which acts as an incentivization connection website to encourage teens to participate in prosocial opportunities in order to earn points and rewards from local businesses. This session will focus on how the CTC advisory board was initially formed, how the facilitators and adult coalition members interact and empower the youth advisors, necessary board maintenance and structures, and how the advisors’ leadership has resulted in amazing efforts in the community. Session participants will also learn some best practices and lessons learned from CTC coalition members and youth advisors for the implementation of a youth advisory council or board.

“Bystander Intervention” is widely known as one of the most effective practices for interrupting sexual misconduct and, in turn, preventing assault. These same strategies and tactics can also be used to redirect racist, xenophobic, and homo/trans-phobic abuses as well. By providing a baseline understanding of social conditions, core concepts, and strategies for safely disrupting problem behavior, communities everywhere can set a higher standard of conduct and improve safety for everyone.