Skye Jenkins, a student at Monmouth School for Girls, was sponsored by Ross Rotary Club to attend the Rotary Youth Leadership Award (RYLA) and she attended a recent meeting of Ross Rotary Club, with her mum, to share her experiences of that event.

Prior to attending the course Skye said that speaking in public to a group of people, whether they be friends or strangers, was a major challenge for her and whenever possible she would avoid it. What she hoped to get from the course was the confidence to be able to express herself through public speaking or presentations.

She talked through some of the diverse challenges faced by the groups, under the guidance of established Team Leaders and elected Day Leaders and how these challenges contributed to team building. She said her favourite part of each day was sitting in a circle, as a group, to discuss what happened during the day and how they might have done the task better. Skye was pleased that as a result of those discussions, their success rate on other tasks greatly improved, and she successfully took on the role of Day Leader during the canoeing and kayaking challenge.

One of the final challenges was to go to Monmouth town centre to raise money for the Marie Curie charity, and to find someone whose birthday it was. They succeeded in both and raised £350.

Skye said that RYLA was an incredible experience and thanked Ross Rotary for giving her the opportunity to attend. She added that you go thinking you won’t learn anything, but come back a changed person. Since returning from the course Skye has talked about Rotary and RYLA to a peer group at her school and it was a massive achievement to talk about these things in front of her friends. Her informative, amusing and confident talk to Ross Rotary demonstrated how she’d overcome her fear of public speaking.