All photos by Haset Tesfaw.
The Malden Youth Civics Council (MYCC) is making their way to their goals step by step. On April 25th at 7:00 P.M. they held a meeting at City Hall and thoroughly explained why they had called for the council’s attention.
The MYCC has been working on a project for months and are now finally taking it to the people in charge. Their main goal is to have someone from city hall in their council in order to put their ideas and projects into action.
The program started with establishing the youth board, describing their agenda, the benefits, and the other existing groups. They explained how these groups did not fully align with their representation of the youth board. They feel as though the youth of Malden are currently underrepresented and want to change that in order to make a difference and get as many backgrounds heard by the mayor as possible.
Jay Wong, one of the members states, “what we aim to do is try to engage the youth and get them more involved with the government along with trying to bring some issues to light. Saying things like ‘Hey, this is what is going on in City Hall,’ and bringing it to the highschool because not a lot of people really pay attention to the news as they are most likely either going out, playing video games, and whatnot. They do not really pay attention to the news so we wanted to make it more easy to access.”
As the MYCC presented to the City Hall members, they kept strong and straight forward attitudes. They explained the benefits of assisting the city by getting youth involved as well as how they would create solutions to better the community of Malden. They included statistics such as a petition they put out for this project where they got 132 signatures in only 48 hours to show how the community wants this council to succeed.
Wong explained, “the Malden Youth board that we were working towards was supposed to be a youth board that works directly under the city council. It was supposed to be to engage the youth all over Malden instead of just at our school, since we have gotten requests from different schools seeing if they can join our club but they cannot since it is a Malden High School thing.”
After their presentations the City Hall board gave their thanks and acknowledged how hard it was to do something like this. Not everyone can get up in front of these important figures who control almost every aspect of the city they live in. The MYCC did not let these scary thoughts get to them though they found it more empowering than anything.
The board gave them many compliments calling them admirable, courageous, and enthusiastic. They loved everything about it and ended by saying they will keep in contact to further their projects and help the youth of Malden.
Many Malden High students came to show their support for the Youth Council. They sat in the crowd and helped the MYCC to confidently get their points across to the board.
The MYCC had a successful meeting with the City Hall board and plan on making further improvements and representation for the youth of Malden.
