United Future Leaders Ambassadors: How do we engage young leaders in community service?

The United Future Leaders Ambassadors is a program developed out of the expressed desire of students to remain active in a youth leadership development program originally focusing on 5th and 6th grades. Our paper discusses distinctions between youth development and youth leadership development, the evolutionary nature of our program and general/program specific lessons learned. In addition the authors provide suggestions for other leadership education programs which focus on adolescents including developing and maintaining youth interest in service leadership development, embracing technology for programming and research data, developing student and family “buy in”, and integrating new youth into service programming who are from a variety of backgrounds.