We’ve finally wrapped up this year’s Gx and Bx Winter Cohort Programs! We ran our programs from January up until the end of March and we based all of our program nights down here in the Southend, specifically at UW Othello Commons for Gx Program and the Filipino Community Center for Bx program! Let’s delve into some of the highlights for each program, starting with Gx Program!
This year’s Gx Winter Program couldn’t have been possible without our leads, Ari and Taylor, with the support of our lovely high school interns, Lily and Keelin! With their support, we were able to collaborate with a handful of other organizations! Starting off, we had a guest speaker, Aya from Y-WE lead a creative facilitation workshop for our cohort! She led us in using our imaginations to create individual art pieces that we later combined into making one big collage of all of the art our youth made. As we continued program, we also had a workshop led on environmental justice by community member Nancy Huizar, who centers their work on environmental justice activism.
On top of collaborating with a bunch of community members and other organizations, we also went on a lot of field trips! Our first field trip was to Pratt Fine Arts where we had community members, Bailey and Chloe, lead us in a class on linographing. Linographing wasn’t the only form of art we touched base on on our field trips — we also got to paint pottery at Emerald City Fired Arts in Mount Baker. While both are very tedious art projects, our youth channeled patience and steadiness and got to take home their own linograph prints and pottery pieces!
In the spirit of running our programs in the winter, we also took both the Gx and Bx cohorts to go ice skating at Kraken Iceplex! Our cohort’s spent a lot of time doing endless laps around the rink, or even spent their time pushing one another on little ice skate trainers! In addition to ice skating, the Gx cohort went on our yearly cohort retreats during the snowiest weekend of the season.
For this year’s retreat, we spent a weekend in Kent where we spent a lot of time playing outside in the snow, cooking for each other, making friendship bracelets, and having workshops led by our high school interns, Keelin and Lily! We focus our time on our retreats to build and strengthen the relationships between youth by implementing the importance of spending time with each other through numerous group activities. Every retreat, we have a feelings circle, where we get to be vulnerable about our current feelings and emotions, which definitely ends up being a favorite part of everyone’s experience going on an AGE UP retreat. Retreats are always the highlights for everyone in our cohort programs, and we definitely understand why after seeing how much closer everyone gets after going on our cohort retreats!
“I hope to stick with Girls Ultimate and Southend Ultimate for as long as possible because I love the community. I hope to continue to learn more from them.” – AGE UP Gx Winter Program Participant
Moving on to some Bx program highlights! For this year’s Bx Program, it was ran by Program Coordinator, Zeppelin Raunig, and Program Manager, Anthony Ziegler, with the support of our awesome high school interns, Luke, Jayden, Maddox, and Isa!
Our interns led workshops on social topics they care about, including healthy relationships, immigration and protest rights, the impacts of social media, and toxic masculinity. Our Bx Program also spent a lot of time doing outdoor activities! On top of facilitations, they would also play lots and lots of frisbee, as well as kickball, and they even had a field day!
“My highlights working as an intern for the Bx Program would start off as building relationships with everyone. Whether it was the leaders, the program participants, or even fellow interns, being able to connect with everyone in some way is something that I value when I worked as an intern. Being an intern taught me things like patience, accountability, leadership, and inclusion. Another thing is the workshops were a way to craft ideas that were targeted to what is important to me, and being able to give input and receive input while leading my own workshop was inspiring and allowed me to expand my ideas for future projects.” – AGE UP Bx Program Intern