Youth For Christ’s Campus Life program to expand to West Fork district

An afterschool program for students is expanding to a neighboring school district.

Youth For Christ Central Iowa recently announced that its Campus Life programs, which provide activities and ministry to middle school and high school students, will soon be available to the West Fork communities.

Jill Peterson, Campus Life Volunteer, said the conversa-tion to expand the service began with a conversation among the youth committee at First Grace Baptist on how to provide additional service to youth in the community. She reached out to Campus Life Coordinator Martina Smith, who made the sugges-tion to expand it to the school district.

“We decided this would be the way to do it, to actual-ly get it going in the West Fork system,” she said.

The service has not yet begun in the community, as preparations are being made to contact churches, locate vol-unteers, establish a location and find interested students. Smith said the rollout for the program is gradual and antici-pates early programming to begin in October. She added that the hope is to form small groups to stay within COVID-19-related safety sug-gestions.

“The next couple weeks and going into October is just connecting, connecting and hoping,” she said. “We want to connect with kids, seeing who’s interested and reaching out.

“We’re starting it, but the kids haven’t started yet,” she continued. “It’s foundation work, finding volunteers, churches and connecting the first base before we can en-gage kids.”

While the Hampton pro-gram offers Campus Life in both middle school and high school, Smith said the initial focus on the West Fork pro-gram will be in the middle school program, while high school students at West Fork will be coupled with small groups in the Hampton Cam-pus Life program.

Peterson said once run-ning, the program will pro-vide a valuable need for activ-ities and ministry for all in-terested children in the com-munity without being tied to a denomination.

“It’s not going to be a ministry of our church,” she said. “We know Campus Life and know what an impact it can have in kids and parents’ lives in the communities and that’s the goal is to reach them.”

“I think it’s good to unite the community and unite the kids together under a common thing,” added Smith. “What we always say is we want them to have another support-ive, caring adult in their life and our ultimate goal is that we build relationships with kids so they build relation-ships with Jesus.”

At first, the program will begin with small group ses-sions for social distancing purposes but hopefully ex-pand to activities and pro-gramming for all students who attend Campus Life. No matter the size of the groups, Smith said, the mission of Campus Life is to provide support and foster new rela-tionships.

“This is for any student who is looking for a safe place to be loved and belong,” she said. “There a lot of kids in our area who feel so dis-tanced, especially after COVID, so this is a place where they can come and feel connected, a place where they can have a place and be heard by adults and their peers and where they can come and know Jesus.”