The Addiction Experiment

This weekend I attended a 24 hour lock in event for work.  In Arizona we are trying to build a statewide youth coalition to do advocacy work and influence policy, so this was the 2nd annual summer event to get the kids excited about that effort.  Last year we had a [somewhat] boring conference at NAU in Flagstaff, so they went a completely different direction this time and hired an event planning company to do the work and the result was "The Experiment".  Our teen tobacco prevention campaign here in AZ is called venomocity, which means tobacco addiction, so the "essence" of addiction played quite a big role in this event.  Basically the 24 hour progression of the event took the kids on a journey from being controlled by addiction to becoming tobacco advocates.  We met addiction's "minions" who were mysterious hip hop dancers who did his bidding to interrupt the festivities, split teens up from their friends, and give them things like the "burden bag" (a month's worth of cigarette butts they had to carry around for 10 min at a time) and the "smoking jacket" (which trust me. . . smelled awful!).  Not to mention the voice of addiction was heard frequently calling teens away from their current activity and forcing them to visit disruption rooms.  This continued throughout the night leaving only a few hours for sleep and a bright and early (5:30 am) wake up call (4:30 am) for us "old fogey" leaders. Today however, brought some more activities and labs designed to provide knowledge about what tobacco and addiction can really do and culminated in teens filming their own "choose/refuse" videos (see venomocity website) and challenged to do advocacy in their own communities.

So now that you have a sense of what happened, my thoughts:

First I was amazed at how well all the kids did on little to no sleep.  Especially considering that some of them arrived yesterday afternoon after 8 hrs on bus.  A good compliment to the event planners who kept things moving enough to keep interest and activity levels high enough for the teens to be engaged up until 3pm after a night of virtually no sleep. With that being said, I as an adult leader was a little bored, and bored and tired is not a fun combination.  They had teachers there as professional chaperones who were in charge of the groups of kids, so us leaders were just kind of extra floaters that they asked to help in certain areas from time to time, only there wasn't really much for us to do, (compliments here to the fabulous chaperones for doing so good of a job we didn't have to step in) but I felt like I spent the majority of my time wandering around looking for something to do.  Which lead to lots of looking at the old historical photographs on the walls (the event was held in Old Main which is the oldest building on ASU's campus).   Oh well, all in all not a bad way to earn a living I suppose.

Last but not least, it was ironic to me that the whole premise of this night was to see the power of "addiction" and the one thing I heard the adult leaders talk about most was where to find their next cup of coffee.  (talk about addiction! The kids did fine, but there wasn't nearly enough coffee available for all the caffeine addicts in the building).   However it was nice to get to talk to some of my counterparts at other counties more.  Communication between county partners across the state isn't generally that great for a whole slew of reasons, so it was nice to have a few candid conversations and talk about our programs in ways we would never be able to in our formal meetings and conference calls.  The diversity of Arizona is amazing to me and it's fun to see where everyone is coming from. . . literally and figuratively.

All in all, one good event, a 5 hour nap and one blog post later, I think I'm ready for bed.