Macon and Savannah Teen Summit on issues concerning young people

MACON, Georgia (41NBC/WMGT) – Students from Macon and Savannah met Wednesday for the Georgia Civic Awareness Program for Students (GCAPS) Youth Leadership Summit.

The Savannah delegation made up of 10 students toured Macon with GCAPS. Afterwards they had lunch at the Fish N’ Pig on Lake Tobesofkee, where they arrived by boat.

The students discussed what it takes to become a leader, how government works and various issues teenagers are facing.

“The purpose is to prepare our youth leadership to open our young entities into all the opportunities that we have inside of our government to give them better perspective of how we put policy in place and how we administrator policy,” said the Asst. Bibb County Manager, Charles Coney.

The Savannah delegation, known as the Chatham County Youth Commission dined Macon-Bibb County Commissioners, including Elaine Lucas, Bert Bivins, and several others. State Senator David Lucas also attended the luncheon.

Savannah’s Mayor Pro-Tem, Van Johnson says he wanted to see for himself, how things were going with the new GCAPS group, which modeled themselves after the Chatham County Youth Commission.

“There are such great things happening here in Macon-Bibb County, that we had to come here and support our friends and our sister county, as they really step to the next level through in terms of promoting youth engagement and youth empowerment,” says Johnson.

Winter Forest High school senior, 17-year-old Keona Payne says their youth commission started in 1992.

“We’ve been sharing some of our ideas with GCAPS,” says Payne. “So we’ve just been helping them to try and develop. We’re here to learn from each other.”

Payne says one of topics of discussion among the groups was raising the age limit to allow 18-year-olds inside bars.

“We’ve been trying to come up with a solution to that question,” she added.

GCAPS member Ananeisha Walker, 17, says she was intrigued by the Savannah teenagers helping people to get tested for HIV and how they worked with a domestic violence awareness campaign.

“”We’re going over different qualities of leadership, so we can learn from them and they can learn from us.”

More than 100 Bibb County high school students applied to GCAPS, 33 were selected, according to Coney.