Slum Survivor - Youth Workin' It

Would your youth survive this? — Image courtesy of newbeatphoto, Flickr

As we mentioned in Tuesday’s post and in our book, youth retreats are often organized by faith-based organizations, but they don’t have to be. You can run weekend sessions about any topic under the sun – or even beyond with a space-themed retreat weekend.

Normally on Thursdays we like to give you a youth work session plan idea that you can do, or one that will at least springboard your own session plan ideas. Today, we’ll be linking to a ‘pre-packaged’ youth retreat which includes all the information you might need to do an entire weekend of sessions and activities about its topic.

Organizations you can partner with

On Tuesday, we mentioned weekend retreat themes like learning about famine through World Vision’s 30-hour famine weekend, or about slum conditions by undertaking a weekend of Slum Survivor. The best part of these weekend youth retreat ideas is that they’re applicable to almost any kind of youth work you do. You can focus on any angle you wish, whether it’s faith-based or not. They also include all the items you might need to run their weekend-long program.

Slum Survivor currently have three different types of programming that you can download: Trafficking, Street Children and the Original Slum Survivor.

The Slum Survivor program also includes additional challenges to make the entire experience even more realistic.

Paper Bag Making
Literacy & Health
Road Building
Toy Making

Each provides its own list of resources and instructions within each youth work session plan idea – you can download these directly from the Slum Survivor site. You even get support in completing sponsorship forms, permissions slips, feedback forms and in dealing with the press.

One of the benefits of a Slum Survivor weekend is that your youth can use it to raise money to help others. Slum Survivor also want to know about your own weekend projects, so register your event with them so they can highlight what your youth did during the weekend youth retreat.

Update: If you live in Australia you can also access TEAR’s Slum Survivor events.

If you’ve run one of these projects before (or are planning to), we’d love to hear from you as well. How did your youth find it? Were they impacted by what life must be like for those less fortunate than them? Did you run any additional activities alongside the resources provided by Slum Survivor? Let us know in the comments below.

You can also connect with us by:

Signing up to receive our posts via email
Following us on Twitter
Liking us on Facebook
Signing up to our RSS feed

Q: How do I know if a youth retreat is the right thing for my youth program?

A: Although often associated with faith-based youth programming, running any kind of overnight and/or weekend retreat can be great for your youth work. Here are just 3 reasons why:

1) Builds Relationships

Youth retreats or weekend residential youth programs provide a great time to build relationships with your youth, your volunteers and for them to build relationships with each other as well. You get more free time to spend together, plus you get to really learn what your youth think about certain issues, as they will have more time to relax and share.

2) Gives Youth New Experiences

Maybe your youth have never been to the beach. We live about 25 minutes from the oceanfront, and there are still youth that I work with that have never seen the ocean.

Maybe the teens in your group haven’t ever been rock climbing or zip-lining through the mountains. By spending 2-3 days together, you can try new activities and work through any anxiety or issues that may be difficult in shorter youth work sessions.

3) Opportunity For In-Depth Learning

On a youth retreat, young people have the opportunity to explore topics that need more than 1-3 hours once or twice a week.

Global issues are great topics to explore on a youth retreat. Some organizations have weekend-long sessions that you can run, so your youth can learn and give back to help others in need. One option is to help your youth learn about world hunger through a 30-hour famine. Another theme might be the global issue of slum conditions – this can be explored in a practical way through ‘Slum Survivor’ and Soul Action.

Some of these ideas lend themselves to faith-based youth work and as I said earlier, that’s often the type of youth program that runs youth retreats. However, there are many other possible themes to look at with your youth, no matter the reason for the program. This includes, but isn’t limited to, running a weekend retreat and planning session for a youth council, exploring LGBTQ history issues & pioneers and youth entrepreneurship.

There are so many choices but to help, you can find 85 youth retreat theme ideas in our new book How to Plan a Youth Retreat. Which, not so coincidentally, is released today so get your copy now! You can buy it from Amazon here or find out more about it on the How To Plan a Youth Retreat book page.