Hi, my name is Johnesse. I am a junior at Gadsden High School, and this past summer I had the amazing opportunity to attend the Evolvement Leadership Team Summit. It was a week’s worth of training filled with fun, games, and friends. I was lucky to meet so many amazing, kind people who have the same goals as I do, to stop the young community from developing an early addiction to nicotine. 

During this training, we went more in-depth about what 24/7 and No Minor Sale stand for, as well as all the events we can do to promote these campaigns. I learned how working on these two campaigns can help enact actual policy change at the state level. We talked about all of the opportunities you can participate in like; events, school board meetings, partner presentations, city council meetings, and elementary and middle school presentations. An important thing about learning about these opportunities was that we actually learned WHY they’re important and how they can help us achieve our goal. Like how collecting No Minor Sale support cards gives us a bunch of data that we can use to show our Key Decision Makers why they should support the campaign.

 At Summit, we played fun games with the Evolvement staff and other youth leaders and  shared many laughs together. I even made really good friends with people from a different school than mine, and it turned out that we were really close in distance so we’re still able to  hang out! It was really cool to be able to meet students from around the state that also care about protecting our community from the dangers of nicotine and tobacco products. My favorite part about the Summit training was when we had our Networking Event. I was able to sit down with members of the community who also care about preventing youth addiction to nicotine and the importance of getting nicotine products away from youth. On the Networking Event day, we got to dress up in professional clothes which felt very official, and then we got to network with all of the people that attended the event. I thought this event was super fun because we got to share all of our knowledge about the program and why we care so much about this program. After the Networking Event, we had professional photos taken with our Evolvement T-shirts, which was another really cool opportunity because I’d never had professional photos taken.

There was honestly so much about the Leadership Team Summit that I loved and I’ll definitely be going again next year so I hope you all will join so we can meet!