The 14th Annual San Gabriel Valley Youth Summit was held on Saturday, March 18, 2023, hosted by Pacific Clinics’ Asian Pacific Family Center (APFC) in partnership with the Garvey Unified School District and fellow San Gabriel Valley Youth Summit Planning Committee collaborators.
The event was a success and attended by more than 100 youth ages 12-18 from across Los Angeles County, in-person, at Garvey Intermediate School in the city of Rosemead. This year’s theme, Strength Over Stress (created and chosen by the youth), played on the well known abbreviation S.O.S. This abbreviation traditionally stands for “Save Our Ship,” so this revamped version embodies the idea of finding ways to avoid drowning and find strength in navigating the waters, waves and storms of stress.
More than 10 different community partners collaborated with Pacific Clinics to facilitate 10 workshops on a variety of educational topics, such as disaster preparedness, healthy relationships, wellness and resilience, youth advocacy, teen sexual health, bullying, media literacy, and implicit bias and allyship. Multiple workshops were peer led by youth facilitators, including an “Intro to Programming” workshop facilitated exclusively by youth from the Wilson High School’s robotics team, AlphaGenesis, FTC Team 6436. Additionally, an arts activity was co-developed with youth and curated by the Asian Youth Center in honor of #MontereyParkStrong and created a space for community healing.
The event ended with a panel discussion co-hosted by Pacific Clinics and Center for the Pacific Asian Family (CPAF) where seven youth shared their ideas about strength and stress. Following the panel, a youth showcase featured five brave youth who sang, rapped and read poetry. There was also a screening of a youth-created video highlighting the importance of stress management, coping skills and asking for help.
As always, we are grateful for our event sponsors: the Kiwanis Club of Rosemead, Panda Cares (Panda Express), Cathay Bank and Ms. Bobbi Bruesch of Kiwanis. Community partners included LA Care & Blue Shield Promise Community Resource Center, Youth4ward, Garfield Health Center and the Los Angeles County Department of Mental Health.
