Coming of Age & Our Whole Lives (OWL)
Our Whole Lives
Unity Summer
Coming of Age
Our Whole Lives
This is a comprehensive and progressive sexuality program for eight or ninth graders. It is our commitment to raising sexually healthy youth. This program teaches caring, compassion, and respect as well as factual information and deals with attitudes, values and feelings that youth have about themselves and the world. It meets for an hour and a half each Sunday morning for the entire program year. It is offered once every two years. It is taught by trained facilitators and there is a mandatory parents' orientation. This course is a gift to our youth and they don’t want to miss a session!
Unity Summer
This summer program is a social justice internship for youth who have finished the ninth grade. Youth are placed in social justice organizations for a six-week, part-time internship and then meet weekly as a group with a teacher to talk about social justice problems and issues. Youth may apply for this program in the spring of their ninth-grade year. This program is done in partnership with the First Universalist Church in Minneapolis. It is a model program that is being developed in other UU churches all over the country. This program is run by the Unity Summer Committee which is a joint committee of adults from the First Unitarian Society and the First Universalist Church.
More about Unity Summer
Coming of Age
This program is run the year alternating with the OWL program and is geared toward eighth or ninth grade students. The program seeks to have the youth look introspectively at themselves and ask:
- What are the character traits that they are developing or hope to develop?
- What is their current stand on religious issues such as god, forgiveness and sex?
- Can they write a credo expressing who they are right now and their thoughts on the above issues?
They develop a whole church service in the spring of their year and it is the highlight of the year to listen to these intelligent and thoughtful people speak their minds. Also, as part of the program they attend the Urban Immersion Weekend in Minneapolis where they spend their time learning about the root causes of poverty, doing a social justice project and reflecting about all they have seen and learned.