IYI offers professional training for Indiana youth workers

The Indiana Youth Institute will present a youth worker training program at Monroe County Convention Center today. This year, the theme of this workshop is “Engaging Families Across Cultures”.

The IYI will hold eight training programs across the state of Indiana this fall to provide youth workers with professional training. This series will focus on engaging families and children from different cultural backgrounds and addressing the importance of understanding cultural difference.

“By hosting these trainings, we are trying to get families and youth workers to be better aware of the importance of youth education and ways of getting to it,” IYI CEO Bill Stanczykiewicz said.

The training program will invite nationally recognized youth experts to educate local youth workers and parents with practical information. Stanczykiewicz said that understanding how cultural diversity makes a difference in youth education is the theme of the program.

“The program will get the experts to talk about the ways to improve communications between parents and their children,” Stanczykiewcz said. “Multi-cultural communication will also be touched, because the diverse cultural backgrounds among children will definitely affect the ways they learn.”

How to access local educational resources and organizations will also be discussed in the program. Stancykiewcz said that there are rich educational resources in the community, but not many people have realized that. Thus, they make little use of it.

The participants of this program will be grouped in mid- and advanced-levels, based on their years of experience in the youth education field. The ideal candidates expected to participate include local or state youth program directors, family service coordinators and youth worker volunteers.

“We want to make a difference by bringing all available resources together to educate youth workers with professional strategies in education, and definitely the children will be the ultimate benefit group,” Stanczykiewicz said.

Stanczykiewicz said his former experience as a public advisor in Washington gave him the sense of responsibility to make sure that every child should receive good education. He joined the IYI in 1998 and became an executive board member.

“My working experience in the government makes me realize what education means to children and the future of the United States,” Stanczykiewicz said.