International Service - RYLA - Top Gear

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         Where do students get to learn how to become leaders in their communities?  Top Gear is a RYLA (Rotary Youth Leadership Award) activity in which juniors and seniors from high schools from South San Francisco to Menlo Park spend a weekend together learning about trust, leadership, team-work and personal responsibilities.

         Rotary Club members and YMCA staff provide several activities for the students.  To begin the weekend, Leadership Ventures counselors take the students and adults through an all-day exciting ropes course.  Adults and teenagers alike learn to trust themselves, their partner, their group and finally the equipment.  Climbing up a tree 60 feet, looking at the vista view and down at their group and having the courage to take a step off into the void is extremely scary. Cheering and encouraging your teammates to take that step, or others like it, creates an everlasting camaraderie.  Previous years’ participants are peer counselors who also create activities to frustrate and confuse, build and generate teamwork, and finally, laugh and giggle.  Finally, Top Gear has an inspirational speaker, usually Michael Pritchard, a humorous and thought-provoking speaker who uses his hilarious voices and ideas to educate people, especially children.

         The Peninsula Rotary Clubs in District 5150, starting in South San Francisco and ending in Menlo Park, believe in the ripple effects people have on each other in their environments.  They want their local high schools to have positive role models who can positively change groups of students or even, an entire high school.  Each high school nominates two students, a boy and a girl who have POTENTIAL for leadership.  The Top Gear weekend takes that potential and makes it into a reality.  Each Rotary Club along the Peninsula sets aside $700 for its two students to attend this leadership camp, knowing that this investment is in their future community.