Week 2 in the books!! Among the many concepts learned in the classroom, Emerging Leaders learned more about themselves by sharing their VIA Character Strengths to understand one’s assets and responsibilities in a personal leadership role. In addition, three groups of students were presented with a conflict resolution scenario where they acted out a role play to resolve differences in a civil manner.

Over the weekend, we went spelunking one mile deep into the native rock of the Lave River Cave system and were formed over 700,000 years ago. As you can see from our cold weather gear, it was frosty inside! Later that evening, we headed to Lowell Observatory where the planet Pluto was discovered, and we viewed the major planetary and astral bodies throughout the solar system. Just before dusk, we viewed the planet Saturn through the McAllister Telescope and once it became dark we were able to see the red planet of Mars and the M-13 star cluster from other portable telescopes.

Finally, on Saturday, we took the Sky Ride Chairlift up the San Francisco Peaks, at Arizona Snowbowl Ski Resort to journeyed to the highest point in Arizona (11,500 feet) where we could view as far as the North Rim of the Grand Canyon, nearly 100 miles away!

It is fabulous to see how a group of young adults from all over the US and other countries are able to begin to accept the challenges of being responsible to themselves through demonstrations of personal leadership, and start to learn/become skilled in working with others who have different ideas, experiences and opinions on how to life live. Like any other community, we are still learning how to set aside our obvious differences or opinion to find common ground where we can work together building the kind of future we want to be a part of and share with others.