Help for Young Life Leaders NOW

Want to know how to be a super fantastic YL staff person? Make your leaders heroes! That is exactly what my friend Amber has done in Malibu, CA.

Here is an example of some of her work. Great job Amber! Enjoy!

As the semester gets rolling, so many club teams are sitting down to plan clubs. On YLHelp.com there are plenty of clubs you can check out. To make it easier I have put together a whole semester plan of clubs using existing plans on YLHelp.com. In case you need more, I did this last year too. This year I make it a zip file for easier use. Enjoy!

PS If you want to send your club plans my way, I’d love to hear about them! smcgever (at) yahoo.com

The “This Year…” series looks back at lessons learned in the past year of YL. It will feature several posts and guest posts.

Here is one from my friend Jason in Flagstaff…

Don’t set a club start date.  Instead set a goal for leaders knowing 100 or 200 kids (or whatever goal you think is appropriate for your school/club) and once they know kids by name and are committed to praying for them then you will start club.  This starts the year focused on contact work, prayer, and recognition of what’s truly important.  Relationships.

OK, so basically our economy seems like it was hijacked by Black Bart. I went into a local yesterday Einstein’s Bagels and it was empty. They said is has been very slow and people’s hours were being cut big time. My guess is you are trying to make the most of your money, especially now.

Being a YL leader can cost you a fair amount of money. Here are a couple ideas about how to save money as a YL leader:

• No Starbucks. Some of my friends affectionately call it "Five-Bucks". Not only for yourself, but it is kinda the standard phrase to say, "hey lets do coffee" or "lets do Starbucks". How about meeting at McDonalds? My wife says their iced coffee thing is pretty good. I’ve been meeting people at Wendy’s and we get $0.99 Frosty’s. (Ummm I love Frostys). Basically avoid Starbucks. You can even feel like one of those "down with the establishment" people.
• Paying for school events. Many schools will give you free passes to games if you explain what are you are doing. (Use the word "mentor", they like that). Ask the front desk or teachers or coaches. Your staff person can help with this.
• Carpool to club. Basically carpool everywhere. Maybe ask a kid to pick you up if they can… Why not?
• Fun is free. Dust off the board games and all the stuff you already have. You don’t have to go see movies or anything like that. Also don’t do Pizza Olympics club, that always costs me like $50-75.
• If you expect paying for camp to be a problem, tell you team leader or staff person ASAP! They might be able to help you figure it out if you give them enough time. If you tell them two days for camp then you might be out of luck. Don’t be prideful and don’t wait.

What are some of your ideas how to save money these days?

In my area we had no formal plan for recruiting and developing college freshman as leaders. I asked around in my state if anyone else was doing anything, I didn’t get a ton of feedback. I asked around nationally and I got a little more. Eventually a key person told me about the "premier" freshman program in the United States. They were kind enough to send me all their material.

I like planning and training and all that stuff a lot. (So much that now there is ylhelp.com haha) So I worked through all their material and my own and came up with "FYL" First Year Leading. We had a free kickoff retreat to the beach, free leadership camp in September and we met every Thursday night from 9:20PM until about Midnight at my house. The first semester it was pretty much a small group then the second semester we started including leadership training elements. The format was so simple: food, short game, worship, life story, then discuss the past week’s reading in the One Year New Testament (this is a GREAT tool).

This is separate from our traditional leader training we do each semester.

We have high school seniors, juniors and even sophomores who are saying they can’t wait to be a part of it. Most of their leaders are involved in FYL so it is contagious.

If you don’t have a plan for freshman in college, you should! Contact me if you need some ideas. 

One of my favorite baseball players growing up was Darryl Strawberry. I even traded a Ken Griffey Jr. Upper Deck rookie card for a Strawberry 1984 Topps one time (now the Griffey is 10x its value). Anyway… One thing I loved about Darryl was that he hit for power and could steal bases. He was consistently in the 20/20 club and was on the verge of a 40/40 season one year (that is home runs and steals). For some reason this combination has fallen from the spotlight in baseball.

What do you think about this about a stat… Names and contact work trips in a semester (season). So you could be a member of the 10/5 club after you learned 10 new names and went to do contact work five times. Here are a couple details:

Names – They cannot be names that you already know. This would be only new names.

Contact Work Trips – This would be times when you do contact work and encounter kids outside of club or campaigners. There is a value to texting, Myspace and Facebook connection, but for this plan it would not include those. This could include shopping at the mall where kids hang out and intentionally going through the food court where they all hang out (Level 1 Contact Work = Be Seen).

I have a couple questions:

1. How could you keep track of all this? When? Where? How? Before club? Email?

2. It would be fun once a month (Area Leadership) to have awards for certain plateaus. What would be good levels? What would be good awards?

Is this a good idea or too focused on numbers?