FC Leaders Take on New York

Friendship Circle International, the central office of Friendship Circles worldwide, hosted its fifth annual Teen Volunteer Leadership Convention this past March 4-6, 2011 in the Crown Heights section of Brooklyn. Close to 60 of the top volunteers attended.

Leadership Convention attendees, representing dozens of the organization’s branches across the U.S., converged on the Jewish Children’s Museum on Friday to kick off the three-day Shabbaton event.

The exciting convention began with a VIP tour of the Museum, on which the teens took in the state-of-the-art features of the world’s only museum of its kind, many for the first time.

The teens then embarked on the first of several activities that underscored the event’s theme, “Rewrite the Script”, hitting the streets of cosmopolitan Manhattan on a city-sized, Friday-morning scavenger hunt of sorts that entailed speaking to passersby about people with disabilities and encouraging them to integrate sensitive, positive outlooks towards them.

Participants then returned to the Museum, where they would enjoying a great Shabbos weekend filled with laughter, friendship, great food, and visits to Lubavitch World Headquarters at 770 Eastern Parkway and Congregation Beis Shmuel.

The weekend-long program included an array of motivational presentations by such powerful personalities as Jewish community hero and JCorps founder Ari Teman, DoSomething.org Special Projects Manager, James Elbaor, special-needs financial planner Bruce Maier of AXA Financial, globetrotting Chabad rabbi Avremi Berkowitz, and Chabad campus outreach rabbi Shaul Wertheimer.

With the arrival of Saturday night, teen participants were treated to a Panini bar from a local eatery and fabulously entertaining performance by mentalist Ted S. James, who amazed the participants with his baffling feats. The night continued with the inspiring movie Temple Grandin, shown in the Museum’s in-house theater.

The motivational convention concluded with a Sunday banquet/party on a three-hour cruise around Manhattan. While on their short voyage, participants viewed an edited video of their Friday efforts to “rewrite the script” on Manhattan’s streets, and held an election for regional representatives to the Volunteer Club’s international board.

Says Rabbi Bentzion Groner, director of Friendship Circle International, “the teens walked away realizing that their small actions of kindness are replicated many times over.”

Sspecial thanks to Chaya Ceitlin for organizing the event.

VIDEO: Courtesy of Jewish.TV