Youth-Group Trips: Tips and Lessons Learned

The week before this past one, my wife and I were among the adult leaders of a spring-break ski trip for our parish's youth group (our two teen-agers went on the trip too).  I made some notes during the trip about things that worked and things that needed improvement.  I also dug out a set of notes from a children's-choir pilgrimage to Canterbury a couple of years ago, and consulted notes from some five years as a Boy Scout adult leader.   

Some tips and lessons learned are set out below.  Many of them will be obvious to experienced leaders.  But then, a youth group doesn't always have the luxury of a lot of experienced leaders. 

Committees and Duty Rosters

Things seem to work more smoothly if the adults and kids are divided into appropriate committees, each with a leader, to take responsibility for managing specific areas of the trip.  That helps spread the work around.  More importantly, it helps give committee members more of a sense of ownership.  My hunch is that this can pay off in terms of recruitment and retention.

In the list below, "DR" indicates that a duty roster is a good idea.  (One of the main benefits of a duty roster is that people know that, when they're "off duty," they can relax or goof off while remaining confident that the work is getting done.)

• Food Committee:  You'll need both meals and scheduled snacks, during transits as well as while on-site at particular places.  (When you're dealing with young people, hunger and rambunctiousness seem to be positively correlated.) [DR]

• Baggage Committee:  If you're traveling by bus and will need to load and unload bags, someone ought to be in overall charge; this person should manage the baggage-handling duty roster.  (The Baggage Committee can also arrange to make personalized baggage tags with a printer and some laminating sheets, which will be a big help in keeping track of luggage.) [DR]

• Equipment Committee:   If you're bringing equipment such as microphones, overhead projectors, etc., for meetings, singing, and worship, it's a good idea to assign specific people to be responsible for packing and unpacking them. [DR]

• Laundry Committee:  If you're on a trip that will last more than a few days, you'll need some way to do laundry.  On our children's-choir pilgrimage to Canterbury, we stayed in a dorm at King's College; we kept its laundry facilities running almost 18 hours a day.  One of the other dads on the trip remarked that our doing each other's laundry was a metaphor both for the communal bonding we experienced and for the servant mentality that pervaded the group.

• Communications Committee:  These folks can be in charge of the things mentioned below.

Communications

Good communications can make a youth-group trip a lot less stressful.  Consider the following suggestions:

• Before the trip, create an email mailing list to make trip prep easier.  For the children's-choir trip, we used the free (advertiser-supported) Yahoo Groups pretty effectively.

• Set up a blog for the trip, and post entries and photographs every so often, so that families and friends back home can keep up with the trip.

• Create and distribute a cell-phone list.  That proved to be very handy on the ski trip -- we had different groups scattered all over the mountain, and found ourselves using our cell phones quite a bit.

Photographs

Unless you're a real photography expert, you probably won't be entirely happy with the pictures you take.  Don't worry about it.  Here are some basic ideas:

• Encourage people to bring cameras and to shoot lots of pictures, without worrying about whether they're good or bad.  (I read once that a professional photographer will shoot one great picture by taking 100 shots and throwing away 99 of them.)
  

• I've found that I prefer still photos to video footage.  With still photos, it's easy to show them to people, to put them in a scrapbook, to turn them into a computer slide show, etc.   You lose the voice track, but often you don't care much about that anyway.  Some still-photo cameras will let you take multiple exposures in quick succession by just holding down the shutter button; for capturing motion, doing that is just about as good as a video camera.

• If you can bring a laptop computer on the trip, you can also bring an inexpensive multi-media card reader to use in copying everyone's photos.

• For the last night of the trip, put together a computer slide show of selected digital photos.  Kids love to see pictures of themselves and their friends, especially goofy pictures.   (TIP:  Set the slide show to display each photo for 2 seconds each, and limit the show to no more than about 200 photos.  That will give you about a six- to seven-minute show, which is just about ideal in terms of youthful attention span.)

• Plan ahead for other parish needs -- while on your youth-group trip, consider shooting some of your photos and videos with an eye toward future use in youth-group recruiting and parish-stewardship campaigns.   For that purpose, one of the best uses of a video camera is to do brief personal interviews with the young people -- but try to think of some interesting questions before you roll tape.

Worship

(I moved my comments in this category to a separate posting.)

Other Ideas

Consider doing some or all of the following:

• An all-hands meeting prior to departure is a very good idea.  Consider a short game of some kind as an ice-breaker, especially if some of the kids and/or adults don't know each other very well.

• If you're going to a foreign country, have someone change some money before departure, and put the foreign currency into envelopes in standard amounts. This works best if people pay an estimated amount to get a standard amount of foreign currency (say, £50 each for a UK trip).    It's too much hassle to let people specify individual amounts; the money-changer will have to sort out the correct change for each person, which is a pain in the neck.  The estimated amount that people pay in U.S. currency should be generous, to ensure that the money-changer won't come up short; the surplus, if any, can go into the food kitty as a "convenience charge."

• Think about having some kind of daily-wear uniform, e.g., golf shirts of the same color.  That makes it easier to spot your group's members when out and about, and also helps bond the group together.   On the childrens'-choir pilgrimage, we had red-shirt days and blue-shirt days, with khaki shorts / pants / skirts. 
  Also consider having a "dress" uniform.  On our children's-choir trip, when the kids sang at various services, they wore their usual vestments (cassock and cotta).  But the adults didn't have anything comparable to wear.    I remember thinking it would have been nice if the men had all been wearing (let's say) gray slacks, a navy blazer, a white shirt, and a uniform tie of some kind.

• For roll calls, assign each person a number in sequence.  That way, you can then do roll calls by having everyone sound off, in order -- "one!"  "two!"  "three!"  etc.  If you find that a particular number is missing, you can quickly determine who it is by checking your list.  (Personally, I like the Boy Scout patrol system better.  The troop is divided into patrols, much as Army platoons are divided into squads.  For roll call, each patrol leader takes roll, and then reports to the senior patrol leader.)

• When eating cafeteria style with mixed age groups, have the youngest age groups go through the chow line first.  You can explain to the older kids that this is part of helping to look after those less able than ourselves.

• If you're going to be bundled up in a jacket (e.g., on a ski trip), your cell phone will likely be zipped up in a pocket, and difficult to reach.  You'll want to bring, and use, an earphone / headset that has its own answer-the-phone switch on the wire.   That way, if your phone rings, you can quickly answer it without having to fumble for the zipper and dig through your pocket to find the phone.  (And the phone will ring -- kids will be asking you where they should meet; other leaders will be asking whether Zach or Michelle is with you; etc.)

• If you buy individual water bottles (e.g., Aquafina, Ozarka, etc.), many of the kids will throw away their bottles, and you'll have to buy new ones every so often.  Instead, consider buying some non-disposable plastic water bottles with coozie-style cases that have velcro straps; you can then fasten the straps to purse- or fanny-pack straps.

• Bring Sharpie marker pens, including some that write in white ink.

• Small umbrellas, with velcro fastenings, can be fastened to purse- or fanny-pack straps, and can really come in handy.

• For post-worship evening free time, you might want to bring some DVD movies -- but limit them to one per night, and start the show in time to finish by lights-out.

• Bring some tiny, flat, halogen flashlights that run on watch batteries.  They cost around $5 each; they're just a bit bigger than a quarter, and are practically unnoticeable in a pocket.

• Bring board games, cards, etc. -- kids always seem to enjoy them (it lets them hang out together while still having something to do).

• Disconnect the televisions if you can, e.g., by unplugging the cable connections. 

Feel free to add to the above in the comments section below.