Young Leaders Corner - Programs

Young Leaders' Corner - Youth Exchange

Young Leaders' Corner - RYLA update

Story submitted by Luke Froncheck

The 2026 District 6360 RYLA Camp — Rotary Youth Leadership Awards — is in the books.

This summer, nearly 40 students from all corners of District 6360 joined together at Clear Lake Camp in Dowling, MI for a weekend centered on forming new friendships and engaging in meaningful leadership building activities.

Our district’s young people had the opportunity to identify their own leadership style, explore those styles and others through group activities, and hash out what really makes a good or bad leader through group discussion.

Later in the weekend, students grew their leadership abilities through group activities focused on topics like ethics and integrity, community service, and mental wellbeing. Students also had the opportunity to grow their leadership ability through outdoor activities like the Team Course — leadership-based group activities that encourage students to find new ways to lead, and the High Ropes Course, which encourages students to test themselves and encourage others to embrace challenges and push themselves.

RYLA Camp also heavily emphasizes community building, encouraging students to make friends from other schools and embrace the summer camp experience. The highlight of which is arguably the camp talent show, where students show off their unique talents from playing a musical instrument, to singing, to magic acts. This year’s show ended with nearly half of all campers singing their own rendition of Let It Go from Frozen.

At the end of camp, students welcomed their families to join them for a picnic celebration — which was made possible this year through an incredibly generous donation by the Delton Area Rotary Club. The picnic gives rotarians, families, and the RYLA volunteers an opportunity to come together to celebrate the kids and show all their hard work from the weekend.

The highlight of the picnic is the students' presentation of their team projects. At the beginning of camp, students in each team are asked to come up with a solution to a problem that fits within Rotary’s seven areas of focus. Campers have the complete freedom to identify a problem and work together to identify an actionable solution to the problem.

This year, students identified problems like deforestation, an assortment of invasive and endangered species, wildfires, and the spread of sea lamprey in the Great Lakes.

These projects all came to life during the business of a camp weekend. Our young people identified problems within our communities — whether locally, nationally, or even internationally — and researched ways to solve them. One group even went so far as to create a model for gala-style events to raise money to support efforts to limit the spread of sea lamprey, calling the events “The Final Dance of the Lamprey.”

RYLA offers our Rotary community the opportunity to uplift young people and help them embrace the best qualities of leadership. This short weekend serves as our opportunity to identify and encourage the next generation of leaders, many of whom may become rotarians themselves.

RYLA (Rotary Youth Leadership Awards) | July 17–19, 2026

Registration is OPEN | RYLA 2026 Brochure

Registration is open for RYLA