Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

After months and months of club, you, your team, and your club kids might be ready for a change. Here are a couple ideas you can use in the last couple weeks of the school year:

1. Leader panel

This is mostly a replacement for the club talk. For more details see this post, complete with cards you can print out.

2. Senior led club

For this club we simply hand the club over to the seniors and say “you got it!” We make sure there are some junior leaders working on most of it. We ask one or two seniors to give their testimony at the end of the club. They always love this, just be sure to give them enough time to work on it, especially with how busy they get near graduation.

3. Best-of club

For this club we make a poster and put it out a few weeks in advance. Kids then vote on their favorite games and skits from the year. Then you simply re-do the ones that are their most favorite. You can find more details here, including a poster you can use.

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In the beginning of each semester our club does a planning meeting to plan all of our clubs. One of the keys to quality brainstorming is to not rule out an ideas (initially). We vote and then I add some input to make a final call. So, when we had our planning meeting in January and “Kentucky Derby Club” was suggested by one of our awesome junior leaders I wrote it on the white board and moved on. Then they votes and, to my surprise it had a lot of votes. I tried to suggest I didn’t think it would produce a lot of excitement among students and was pretty random, at least for our community.

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A few weeks ago we had a lot of fun with mom club. Several people came dressed up like a mom, no offense to you moms out there. We also had some cookies when kids showed up. You could have some milk too to make it special. When kids were arriving we played the song “Stacy’s Mom” in the background. That might have been a little sketchy but YOLO, jk. I am trying to use YOLO for the next 48 hours before it is “sooo 48 hours ago”.

We started off club with the pregnant balloon pop mixer. For our game we pulled up a few boys and some young ladies and told them it was a kissing contest, the boys would be blindfolded and then they would need to describe, in detail, the kiss. After the guys were blindfolded we brought in their moms. They kissed their moms and described it. We picked kids (and moms) that we thought would have fun with it but wouldn’t get too silly with it. Obviously we had to arrange this a few days early with the moms, but the guys had no idea. It was a ton of fun, lots of laughs, and kids were talking about it for days at school. It also gave us a good opportunity to have a few moms come and check out club.

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Love it or hate it, the term “hipster” is everywhere. Who else could leverage the hype and still take a well-deserved shot at the silliness of it all than a Monday night YL club?

This is an easy one to ask kids to get into: scarves, beanies, flannel, thick-rimmed glasses, fixies, yes I know I am describing probably the majority of the people reading this blog right now so you won’t even have to dress up!

Here is a video for inspiration:

Here is the club plan:

Here is the video we pretty much copied for the skit:

Last, but not least:

http://hipsterorhomeless.com/

If you need ideas right away, go to the bottom of this post for a link to the best resource to date on theme clubs.

A few weeks ago (before the post) we had our semester planning meeting and came up with some outlines for our clubs. Here is what we are thinking right now:

Jan 16 – Volleyball hangout

Jan 23 – All Area Club

Jan 30 – Hipster Club

Feb 6 – Progressive Club

Feb 13 – Valentines Club

Feb 20 – No school, no club

Feb 27 – Leap year club

Mar 5 – College Club

Mar 12 – Superhero Club

Mar 19 – Spring Break, no club

Mar 26 – Mom club

Apr 2 – Kentucky Derby Club (seriously, my leaders wanted it)

Apr 9 – All AZ Club

Apr 16 – Canada/Malibu Club

Apr 23 – Mock Prom

Apr 30 – Messy Games Club

May 7 – PJ/Pillowfight Club

May 14 – Senior Run Club

May 21 – Year End Party

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Get your neon gear and leg warmers out… it is time for 80’s workout club! It worked out pretty good (get it?). The only challenge was calming the kids down due to all the energetic events. We could have used another song or two before the talk that were a little more chill to help transition the students so they were more ready to listen. Other than that it worked out just fine (get it?).

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This might sound confusing, but follow along… last week we did Young Life, Young Life club. So basically a club with a “theme” of “Young Life”. We did this near the beginning of the semester to somewhat introduce some of the newer kids to a little intro to YL. We asked kids to come in any YL gear they might have. I also save up random leftovers from previous camps and such and gave them away during club, especially to the newer kids. We also had some of our junior leaders do the “If I Weren’t In YL…” skit.

Here is our plan and also the video of the skit.

In the words of legendary rocker David St. Hubbins, “It’s such a fine line between stupid, and clever.” Well that is pretty much how you can define a flashmob. As you may know, a flashmob is a coordinated group of people who assemble or perform in a public setting to the surprise of everyone else.

Several of my YL friends have recently done their own YL flashmobs. Here is one from my great friend Chris…

I think the key is to minimize driving, emphasize being polite, and keep it moving.

Here is the plan we used:

Here is our birthday song:

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Your mom has it. So does your dad. So does grandma and grandpa. Guess who else has it? Every kid that you probably know. Yup. Facebook. 500 million users and over half of active users login every day. I’m no expert but even I saw it coming. Heck, I even published a theological paper with references to it.

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Dances can provide great opportunities for YL clubs to leverage. I’ve shared our Mock Prom Club in the past. Our leaders always do the bag check at the homecoming and hoopcoming dances. It provides a fun way to serve the school and to connect with kids. Also at the bag check we end up learning a ton of names.

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