Winning Futures – Inspiring and preparing youth to succeed through mentoring.

When racing down the road to success, everyone needs a good pit crew to help them maintain their speed on the way to achieving goals. As the driver of your own destiny, it is up to each of us to find a well-balanced pit crew to help us succeed.

Positive support teams – or pit crews – are the people in our lives who encourage us, coach us and teach us. To build a strong pit crew, we all need to set positive relationship goals and work to maintain good relationships. One way to do this is through “random acts of kindness” such as writing a letter to those in our lives who make up our pit crew.

Use this activity from Winning Futures’ “Road to Success” workbook with your students or youth group members to help strengthen relationships with their family, friends, and others:

Have students write a surprise letter to their mothers or fathers, guardians, brothers, sisters, grandparents, teachers, etc. Let the students know that the letters should be forwarded to the person addressed in the letter (if you have access to the addresses, you can do this for the students).

Encourage students to include their feeling from the following statements in their letters:
1. How much that person means to them
2. What they admire about that person
3. Why they appreciate that person

After writing the letters, ask several students if they would share with the group who they wrote their letter to and why they chose that person.
This simple but powerful exercise takes just 20 – 30 minutes but can result in impacting and nurturing a positive relationship for a lifetime! Many lessons like these that you can implement in your own classrooms and youth programs are outlined in Winning Futures’ “Road to Success” workbook. Click on the “Purchase Books” button at left to learn more.