ELCA Youth & Young Adult Gathering Recap

By Autumn Byars

Last week, the LAMA team joined synod staff, youth, leaders, and young adults from around Arizona in New Orleans, LA for the ELCA Youth and Young Adult Gatherings! Solveig and I travelled with staff members from the Witness in Society team and State Public Policy Offices from around the country, including all of the other Hunger Advocacy Fellows!

You may have seen hundreds by now, but here’s ours, with our Advocacy hat on. Images of the week in NOLA below.

Accompaniment Days

The Witness in Society team was busy this week, leading workshops, guiding accompaniment days, and introducing participants of all ages from across the country to the church’s advocacy work!

Each youth group is assigned to one Accompaniment Day during the gathering, and this year, groups were assigned to a wide range of projects all over the city of New Orleans. Traditionally, accompaniment days have been spent doing service projects out in the host city, and while many groups helped local churches with repairs, worked to restore coastlines, and cleaned up litter, ELCA Advocacy gave other groups an immersive experiencing, introducing them to the advocacy process.

Each morning, Solveig worked with several other staff members to lead Accompaniment Day workshops for youth groups. Solveig and colleague Regina Banks (Lutheran Office of Public Policy in California) facilitated 9 workshops over three days titled “Advocacy Every Day.” Using one major issue — Housing and Homelessness — they walked groups through the process of discovering the need at a local level (what can your congregation do immediately?); discerning the root causes at the state level (what leads someone to be unhoused?); and learning what the government can do about it, and the importance of Lutherans advocating for justice, at the federal level. Advocacy every day, from the church parking lot to the halls of Congress in 45 minutes.

Autumn’s Young Adult Workshop

For my part, I spent the morning working with my friend Frances, the Hunger Advocacy Fellow from Wisconsin, leading a workshop for the Young Adult Gathering participants. Together, we explored the history of voting rights in America, as well as frustrations, concerns, and hopes for the upcoming election. We focused on the ways that our votes can serve our neighbors: voting for policy that affect people in need, voting for candidates who prioritize our values, and voting against policies that marginalize people. Even if we don’t win our elections, voting allows us an avenue to bear witness to Christ’s love and advocate for our neighbors; even if things don’t go our way, we still get to speak to our values in an official capacity. We also made space for the reality that voting won’t solve all of our problems; young people are often targeted by flashy get-out-the-vote campaigns that all but promise that voting in THIS election will be what fixes the world, but that’s just not accurate. This messaging is leading to a lot of fatigue among young voters; our candidates are not superheroes and our vote is not a silver bullet. Instead, voting is one of many small ways we can work for the betterment of our society and enact justice for our neighbors. Even if every single election went the way we want it to, there would still be work to do every day. This perspective has been liberating for young voters, as it allows us to participate in the election without pinning all our hopes and disappointments on these choices, and empowers us to continue doing the good work out in the world.

Frances and I also introduce young folks from our respective states to our offices, as most of them didn’t know that we had tools for them! I want to specifically mention the Young Adults from Streams in the Desert Lutheran Church in Tucson. We told our groups about the various resources ELCA Advocacy offers for churches and members to engage with elections. Our workshop time was a wonderful and much needed opportunity to address and work through some of the anxiety and angst that my generation feels around voting. Together, we expanded our perspective on voting from just a personal responsibility to a call to accompaniment and an act of faith.

The Main Event: The Mural!

The main event for all three days of the Gathering was in the exhibit hall, or Interactive Learning Center. Here, ministries from across the ELCA, from the Lutheran seminaries to Women of the ELCA, ELCA World Hunger, Lutheran Disaster Response, sumud and many, many more, set up booths to tell participants about their work and engage with young people. At the Witness in Society booth, we offered several ways for youth, chaperones, and young adults to engage with Lutheran Advocacy. We invited participants to take a custom personality quiz, which would tell them what policy areas align with their passions. We decorated our booth with images of advocacy events from across the years, and also had a selfie station where people could take pictures together! Our most exciting activity was the puzzle piece mural. We invited every participant to decorate a wooden puzzle piece with an issue or policy area they care about and, since all our issues and lives are connected, we used these pieces to build a giant puzzle.

It was amazing to see young people find their voices and identify the things they care about. The youth identified so many important issues, including all of our policy priorities! Our presence at the gathering allowed us to connect with so many passionate people, both youth and adults, who are already doing important work to serve their neighbors.