The 2019 annual Catholic School Youth Summit was held at Notre Dame University this week.  Five Year 11 students from Santa Maria College joined schools across Western Australia to attend the fourth annual Youth Summit. Participants enjoyed a day of faith-filled learning, guest speakers and workshops.

Year 11 student Lucy Cocks reflected on the Summit:

The one key message that I took away from the Catholic Youth Summit is that you don’t have to be a saint to be a good person. By listening to the guest speakers and students’ stories I learnt that by showing simple acts of kindness, and ‘practising what we preach’ is what makes a good person.

At the start of the day, all the students attended a presentation by Nathan Leber who is a Justice Educator for Caritas Australia. I found Nathan’s presentation to be very engaging and interesting because he talked about his life journey of being a professional musician, to studying at university, then graduating and becoming a teacher in NSW to then a deputy principal. By linking his own personal stories to his presentation, Nathan taught me that even though sometimes life may not always go to plan, in the end, everything will work out just fine. We just need to have faith in God and a good sense of humour because it makes the tough times a lot easier to handle.

Later in the day, we got to choose different workshops and sessions that discussed how to be effective leaders. My favourite session was Dr Shane Glasson’s, as he taught us about resilience and how important it is, as it will help us thrive in the future. Before Dr Shane’s session, I didn’t know much about resilience, but I learnt that it refers to the ability of an individual to ‘bounce back’ quickly after failure. In this session we didn’t just learn about what resilience is, we also went through a small quiz to see how resilient we are and simple changes we can make in our lives that can help us develop strong resilience.

The Catholic Youth Summit gave me the opportunity to learn more about myself and how to be an effective leader. By attending sessions and listening to presentations like Dr Shane Glasson’s, I learnt ways to better improve myself and my attitude. All the lessons and teachings I gained from attending the Summit are things that will help me in my future and current endeavours.