Solving issues one conflict at a time

Many people have trouble effectively resolving conflict within their lives, but one program is striving to teach area students tools they can use to solve problems and gain leadership throughout their own lives.

The YMCA Black and Latino Achievers mentoring program started 10 years ago at the Hayes-Taylor Memorial YMCA in Greensboro and has since moved to the Reidsville YMCA, the Spears Family YMCA in Greensboro and the Ragsdale Family YMCA in Jamestown, thanks to a federal grant from the office of Juvenile Justice and Delinquency Prevention (OJJDP).

Students in Rockingham County from the area’s four high schools and Early College have benefitted from this program for the past three years, which meets locally several times a month in Reidsville and at the Center for Creative Leadership in Greensboro once a month.

The monthly program focuses on the following seven areas: self-awareness, leadership, teams, communication, conflict, value and actions and vision and direction.

Director Myrna Wigley said the primary objective for this group is to encourage and increase high school graduation rates and expose students of color to post-secondary education and careers.

“There were a lot of things I felt students needed in order to steer them toward college and careers,” she said. “They need more than someone telling them, ‘You need to finish high school and go to college.’”

She said everything they do is geared toward high school graduation with incorporating college tours, SAT prep and having some personal development workshops like public speaking, resume writing and sexual responsibility.

“We throw a few of those personal development pieces in there because sexual responsibility is very important,” she said. “We want them to know about STDs, abstinence and peer pressure.”

Students are surveyed upon beginning the program and at the end. She said many students exhibiting risk behaviors like alcohol use and substance abuse that kept them from being successful in school improved after completing the program.

She said the OJJDP is interested in funding programs like these because it’s a preventative program that can steer this group of students in a positive direction so they don’t end up in the juvenile justice system.

This past Saturday’s session focused on conflict and how to effectively solve problems. Students engaged in games to create conflict and measure how they dealt with it.

“Most students think of conflict as a physical confrontation with another person, so the purpose of this was to teach them that conflict is in different forms,” she said. “Whether it’s that nothing is going right at a meeting, or whether the conflict is within you over doing the right thing – that’s an internal conflict. We want them to recognize conflict and develop strategies on how to deal with it, whether it be taking a walk, listening to music or counting to 10.”

She said many of her students argued that during conflict and confrontation, many people don’t have time to think before they act. Wigley and other volunteer mentors taught the feel, think and act program, which forces a person to feel it first, think before you act and think about the response.

There are more than 160 black achievers programs across the United States. Wigley said the program is open mainly for high school grades, but some eighth-graders with the right maturity level are invited to attend. For additional information, visit www.ccl.org/LBB or contact Wigley at (336) 272-2131.