The Teen Empowerment Dinner
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” Simone Weil
One of my favorite quotes set the opening tone for a Meshin Meal that supported Teen Empowerment, a Rochester-based non-profit that serves as a beacon of hope in challenged neighborhoods.
TE employees Rochester youth as leaders, amplifying their voices, developing their skills, and positioning them as agents of change to uplift their community. Their work in our community is invaluable and their impact is widely felt.
The teen age is so critical for setting down the path of adulthood. You’ve got the context of your family of origin—for better or worse—and you’re stepping into an age of agency, when your thoughts, feelings, actions and behaviors set the course for who you’ll be as an adult. Like a table set, waiting for the guests to arrive—it’s the activity you bring to the table that determines how the big event will go.
I’m in awe of what the Teens supported by TE have created in our community. From storytelling to unite community members around shared purpose (an intention that aligns so deeply with my own purpose) to lobbying for change at the state capital.
I have so much heart for Rochester and the potential we have in our city. By supporting this group of activists and change leaders, I am proud to fuel their potential and also serve my community for the better.
This dinner was a special one. The narrative woven into the meal unfolded in new and special ways, with a highlight being each one of us reading aloud Archbishop Desmond Tutu’s quote that defines Ubuntu.
“This expression is very difficult to render in English, but we could translate it by saying, ‘A person is a person through other persons.’
We need other human beings for us to learn how to be human, for none of us comes fully formed into the world.
We would not know how to talk, to walk, to think, to eat as human beings unless we learned how to do these things from other human beings.
For us, the solitary human being is a contradiction in terms.
Ubuntu is the essence of being human.
It speaks of how my humanity is caught up and bound up inextricably with yours.
It says, not as Descartes did, ‘I think, therefore I am’ but rather, ‘I am because I belong.’
I need other human beings in order to be human.
The completely self-sufficient human being is subhuman.
I can be me only if you are fully you. I am because we are, for we are made for togetherness, for family. We are made for complementarity.
We are created for a delicate network of relationships, of interdependence with our fellow human beings, with the rest of creation.
I have gifts that you don’t have, and you have gifts that I don’t have.
We are different in order to know our need of each other.
To be human is to be dependent.”
Teen Empowerment has just opened doors on a bigger and beautiful space to serve more teens and impact our community in ever greater ways—helping to shape world-changing humans and creating connections to help fulfill the potential we have as a community.
If you are interested in their work and or supporting youth-led social change, please consider donating to their efforts here.
