Rodham Summit

Shoa Phillpotts and Mary Joan (MJ) Park, our Little Friends For Peace representatives, attended the Rodham Summit that was both motivational and enlightening. The Rodham Summit took place on October 20, 2016, and was a discussion on how to provide good health and wellness opportunities  to youth in different communities. MJ Park, Co-founder and Executive Director, spoke on behalf of LFFP on the panel. MJ contributed to the discussion of the role of youth in community health, and how emotional health is especially important in schools. Additionally, MJ mentioned how health and wellness play into eliminating our culture of violence. MJ also talked about the peace classes that are offered at LFFP and how some kids have a lot of built up anger. If you have built up anger, you can’t maintain good wellness. The Rodham Summit’s goals were to empower youth, goals that LFFP shares.
MJ felt honored to be able to speak at the Rodham Summit. She thought it was great that she could talk to people that shared the same goals as her own. MJ described the atmosphere as a “wonderful spirit of hope.” MJ discussed how her own program helps contribute to disrupting the violence and enforcing health and wellness in communities. It was great to collaborate with more like-minded people. Leaving this event, MJ concluded that it was helping to “create a culture of peace.”
Moving forward, at LFFP we need to eliminate toxic stress. Our mission is that we want to continue to encourage “children to be children” and we want to “provide them with positive role models, and love and help them to find their self worth,” says Shoa Phillpotts. As the Rodham Summit panels established, under privileged kids are given a lot of negative labels, and at LFFP we are going to continue our mission to help discard these labels.

The George Washington University School of Medicine and Health Sciences, Communications and Marketing has photo credit.