Celebrate Our Youth Day, at the Mary Miller Hall was a chance for 40 different youth organisations to showcase what they have to offer.

There were performances by talented young musicians and dancers, a karate demonstration and a fashion show.

One of the highlights was a demonstration of the idea of “Asset Building,” a concept central to the Cayman Islands Youth Development Consortium. “Asset” in this context refers to anything that helps youth to develop in a positive way.

The group’s Director, Sylvia Wilks had helped to organise the event and had also invited 20 key government officials and community leaders along. They watched from their seats onstage as young people built up different coloured boxes, each representing a youth-development “asset” into a tower.

“Celebrate Our Youth Day is to acknowledge the young people and the different things that they’ve done to develop, and also to acknowledge the persons that have helped them to develop as well – the different organisations, schools, and asset-builders that help them develop to
be successful.

“We are hosting this event and we want to do it as an annual event, so this is a way of showing people how they can support our young people,” Ms Wilks said.

A number of government and youth leaders signed a special youth development proclamation. Ms Wilks said that signing the document indicated that the signatories supported the national celebration of partnerships and opportunities and that they believed that these opportunities were important to young people’s success.

Signatories included His Excellency, Governor Duncan Taylor, Mrs Julianna O’Connor-Connolly, Deputy Premier, Franz Manderson Deputy Governor, and Michael Adam Minister of Community Affairs Gender & Housing.

Chané Watt of the George Town New Testament Church of God gave a demonstration of dancing, and the Divine Drama Ministry, from the same church, presented a pantomime called “Everything.”

Booths included the Duke of Edinburgh’s Award programme, with some of the young people taking part on hand to answer questions about
the programme.
Save Our Youth (SOY) Foundation representatives were there too. The SOY group intended to recognise kids that value education and work hard to improve themselves.