2024 Rotary Youth Leadership Awards at Camp Erdman
As was noted during a recent in-person / Zoom-hybrid meeting at the Outrigger Canoe Club, the Oahu RYLA 2024 camp – held the weekend of February 16-18 – was a huge success! We had almost forty High School Youth and more than a dozen Rotary and Rotaract Volunteers who spent their Friday and Saturday evenings in the “Rotary Village” cabins at Camp Erdman – which many of you in the Rotary Club of Honolulu helped to paint and repair in April of 2021. Between Tyler Manuel and the rest of the YMCA Staff, Nicole Baltazar and the rest of the Rotaract crew, Rick Tabor, Brian Dunkel, Lee LaBrash, Natasha Clarin, Tracy Hargrave, Cyndie Smith, Kathleen Nicholson and the rest of the planning committee, as well as presentations by several members of our club and other Rotarians, the students learned many important leadership skills and developed additional skills for life.
Presenters from our club included Don Anderson (who gave a history of Camp Erdman and its connections to Rotary), Karen Glasser, Amanda Ellis, and Kent Reinker, and we were joined by RCOH RYLArian parents Michelle Dolan and Saima Makhdoom for part of the weekend. We also had presentations from PDG Sandy Matsui, PDAG Kathleen Merriam, current DG Mark Merriam, an ‘Oli by Lillette Subedi (PP of RC of Wahiawa-Waialua) and a beach cleanup project led by Sustainable Coastlines Hawaii. We are incredibly grateful to the volunteer Rotaractors (Nicole Baltazar, Bronson Padilla, Sabrina Hallabay, Keri Takata, Andrew Onofrietti, and Camille Danao) for planning and leading (together with Camp Erdman staff) a weekend-long series of activities to give the RYLA camp participants experiential lessons in team building, financial management, cooperation and other leadership and life skills.
We awarded three 4-Way Test Speech Competition Scholarships and used the recently installed Rotary Peace Pole to motivate an exercise in setting World Values Goals that were captured in a set of time capsules (one for each group or ‘Ohana), which we will revisit next year to determine how the goals, strategies and timelines can be further developed. It was noted during the graduation ceremony on Sunday that Hawaii (Big Island) and Maui held their RYLAs that same weekend, in a show of solidarity between the island RYLA committees developed during the statewide virtual RYLA camps held during 2021 and 2022. And looking forward, Oahu RYLA 2025 is “only” 325 days away, once again to be held at Camp Erdman from January 31-February 2.
The Oahu RYLA leadership team would like to thank you, fellow Rotarians, for all of your support in our successful camp. As they say, “Today’s Youth are Tomorrow’s Future. Teach Our Children Well.”