Leadership, community service and sport camps…these are not new concepts when you look at them individually, but when you put them together it creates an interesting opportunity. My family has recently started a non-for-profit organization that gives Junior High to High School student athletes a chance to learn leadership skills through community service and high level skill sport camps. The organization is called Blue Chips For Life, Inc. The website is www.bluechipsforlife.org.

The quick overview on what this organization does is give student athletes a chance to go to a high level skill sports camps, but what makes this camp unique is the student athlete can earn a scholarship to pay for the camp registration fee by doing community service volunteer hours. Also, while at this camp, there will be a session on community involvement and leadership by an outside speaker. Each camper will go through this session during the two-day camp. This summer we will doing our first camp which will be football in the beginning of July. It will be held in Naperville, Illinois at North Central College.

Why am I writing about this here, well I am doing this for many reasons. First and foremost I always learned that volunteering in the community was a good thing, but I really did most of my volunteer hours after I became a Lambda Chi. It was there that I truly understood why it is important to give back to the community in which you live in. Second, my leadership skills were sharpened while at Lambda Chi Alpha through what was then called LEAP, which has now evolved to Impact Leadership. I figured I learned most of this while I was in college, wouldn’t it be better for me if I had learned these concepts while in High School or even Junior High? That is what this organization will hopefully accomplish.

We are expecting between 100-150 campers this summer. Next year we will be adding other sports to the mix which will include female student athletes. I think teaching our youth today to be a leader and to give back to the community is only going to help our local communities grow…just think when these Blue Chippers start going to college over the next couple of years, wouldn’t it be great to recruit them to be Lambda Chi’s? They will already be seasoned veterans on being leaders and volunteering in the community. Just food for thought. Please go our website and I would love to hear and feedback. You can email me at k7piket@hotmail.com. Also, everyone involved in this organization is volunteering there time, we are leading by example and precept (LEAP).

This entry was posted on Tuesday, February 28th, 2006 at 9:59 pm and is filed under Community Service, Leadership, Recruitment . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.