![Hosting the SCLA Casptone Mentor Dinner outside allowed for more attendees on September 27, 2021 at Silver Creek. This event would’ve usually been held inside. According to Lauren Kohn, a SCLA 12 teacher, “If we have a higher number of people, as long as we can host the event outside, then that seems to be keeping every[one] safe”.](https://schsnews.org/wp-content/uploads/2021/11/sxMAIGbSYGodZkqmrvTi5YWcJ1ssWA08ApkeMLpp-900x675.jpeg)
Silver Creek Leadership Academy (SCLA) is an opportunity for students at Silver Creek High School to learn many leadership skills over the course of their high school career. SCLA teachers prepare students for a Capstone project that they complete during their senior year. A Capstone project is a year-long endeavor in which students complete a service-oriented task of their choosing.
One of the capstone projects is Sources of Strength (SoS), an international wellness program based on eight proven parts that are called Sources of Strength.
“Those [eight areas] are family support, positive friends, mentors, healthy activities, generosity, spirituality, physical health, and mental health,” SoS Adult Facilitator Whitney Mires said. “And then Sources of Strength uses those elements of the wheel to promote hope, help, and strength.”
Sources of Strength has been an active club since 2017 here at Silver Creek.
“We were the first school in the St. Vrain Valley School district to have a Sources of Strength club; it’s been going for quite a while,” Mires said. “We’ve had various SCLA students take it on as their capstone project over the years, so it’s always looked a little bit different.”
“At Silver Creek, SoS is a club that meets at least once a month, and throughout the year, [SCLA students] will do campaigns [centered around parts of the wheel],” SoS Adult Facilitator and Silver Creek interventionist Kristi Ehle-Parker said. “It’s really a student-led club. We help train youth facilitators, we stand in the background and just help the club get off the ground.”
SCLA seniors Alex Dobson and Leeli Gurrola took on Sources of Strength as their Capstone project.
“I decided to do this project for my Capstone because I was a part of it last year, and I thought that it was a really good community of people,” Dobson said. “I think that the club is centered around positivity.”
It creates a positive group of people who come to the meetings, because it’s everyone is all there for the same reason, and all there to support each other.
“Mental health is a really big struggle that we’re facing up in schools these days,” Dobson said. “I feel like I know a lot of people who struggle with mental health and the stats that keep rising and youth, suicide so doing a suicide prevention would be like something that’s really important for their high school community.”
Gurrola decided to stick with SoS because she wanted to help her school community in a more mental way.
“I’m definitely more into psychology,” Gurrola said. “I feel like Sources of Strength are already going towards that path. And the way I saw it was that by doing this, I can help others and myself by getting more on my education and kind of just learning along the way, how to be a stronger leader and how to help others and how to help others.”
Communication is important when it comes to sharing information and ideas, having classes with a partner helps a lot because students don’t have to wait, they can just tell their partner in the moment.
“We have classes together. Choosing a partner that you have classes with, it’s so helpful, I feel like it’s been a huge help for the project to be able to talk in person a lot of things like, sometimes, I forget to put stuff over text or like, stuff gets left out. It’s been really good for communication and like, to be able to say ideas the moment that we have them instead of saving them to write them out,” Gurrola said.
On April 4th, a SoS Training was offered for all students at Silver Creek.
The training helped students learn more about mental health, to raise awareness, and they also learned about community-building exercises.
Gurrola and Dobson’s favorite part of the training was an activity where students had to draw images that made them happy, because people got to see what they had in common, for example, having a cat or a dog.
“[I hope they took away] the importance of having a community within the school,” Dobson said. “The training was a really fun experience because it reminded people [that] there’s other people not just in the world, but in their school community, that have the same goals as them, in terms of mental health, I hope that they take away that they’re not judged, they shouldn’t be ashamed of needing help with their mental health.”
SoS meetings are during both lunches in the College and Career Center (CCC) For more information, please visit their instagram page.