In November, YEA Camp launched the first-ever “Volunteer-a-thon” designed to encourage people to get more involved in community service and activism, and to do it publicly with greater accountability. The best part? The Volunteer-a-thon is a fundraiser, with all money raised going to the YEA Camp Scholarship Fund. For many campers who participated, it was an opportunity to pay forward their own experience to make it possible for someone else to attend in the future.

Each year, we receive dozens of financial aid requests from passionate activists who want to experience YEA Camp but do not have the monetary means to do so. In 2019, YEA Camp granted financial aid to 51 of our 100 participants and full scholarships to 17 of those participants. Overall, you helped us fund over $66,400 worth of financial aid. 

None of that would be possible without the generous support of our YEA Camp community. That is what made the Volunteer-a-Thon so special for us. By participating, our campers were paying forward their experiences to the next summer of activists. 

What was the Volunteer-a-Thon anyway?

Instead of trying to raise money by training for a marathon or selling cookies, members of our camp community created a donor page asking for they’d ask their loved ones to sponsor to their activism. 

Mia Jay-Pachirat is a two-time youth camper from New York City whose Issue of Importance (IOI) is climate change. For the Volunteer-a-Thon, she created an art zine focused on NYC-specific solutions to climate change. 

When asked about her experience with the Volunteer-a-Thon, Mia said, “It really pushed me to keep my action plan and other little activism acts to the front of my mind!” You can read more about Mia’s experience here. 

B.T. Salle Widelock attended YEA Camp in 2019 and pledged to volunteer 30 hours for local organizations in his community. “I had an amazing experience at camp. That great experience can only be made possible with others’ help.” We are so honored that 7 members of B.T.’s family donated a total of $850 to support YEA Camp and B.T. — and thanks to two generous donors who offered matching gifts, those funds mean $2550 for our scholarship fund!

For some, the Volunteer-a-thon was all in the family. Camper Marley Goldman and her mom Gail are working to end the use of rodenticide in Washington state. Marley says, “I want other young aspiring activists to get the same kind of training and support that I did so that they can pursue whatever cause is important to them.”

We already shared with you about our amazing former campers Dima Bischoff-Hashem, Audrey Watson, and Danielle Holtz also participated in the Volunteer-a-Thon. You can read their reflections on camp and their projects here. 

And YEA Camp director Nora Kramer participated in the Volunteer-a-thon, too! Nora’s project was to reach out to at least 100 former campers from over the years to see if she could support them in her activism. Nora reported back that this was a huge success! “It was so inspiring how many of our campers shared their positive experiences of YEA Camp and even sharing that their memories from YEA Camp were some of the happiest memories of their childhood! Several donated to our Volunteer-a-Thon, several offered to volunteer and are now working on cool projects for us, and one camper even wrote this blog post reflecting on her experience at YEA Camp, looking back 5 years later! It was an honor and pleasure to be back in touch with such phenomenal people!”

You can see — and you can still support! — even more amazing changemakers who created fundraising pages here. We are so grateful to everyone who participated!

The Final Results

We were so excited to pilot the Volunteer-a-thon this year and so grateful to the fourteen members of our community who created pages and helped us raise almost $6,000! 

Thank you to everyone who dedicated their time, energy, and dollars into this exciting new program. We could not have done it without you. 

It’s not too late to make a final donation to our Volunteer-a-Thon to help YEA Camp make a bigger difference for even more people!

Time to register for summer 2020!

Are you interested in taking your activism to the next level? We’ve announced the dates for this summer and would love to have you there. Do you know someone who would be great for camp? Nominate them here!

• Youth Camp: in Ventura, California (July 5 – 12) and Charlton, Massachusetts (August 1 – 8)
• Adult Camp: in Lanoka Habor, New Jersey (July 18 – 24)

The post YEA Camp Celebrates Success with First Ever Volunteer-a-Thon appeared first on YEA Camp.

By having friends and family sponsor them in this activism, participants are raising money for the YEA Camp Scholarship Fund. The scholarship fund is a core tenet of the mission of YEA Camp. It makes camp accessible for all who want to be there. In the past decade, we have trained over 1,000 activists. None of that would be possible without the support of our donors.

This summer alone, YEA Camp gave financial aid to 51 of the 100 participants to a total of $66,400 worth of aid!

Triple the Impact

This year’s Volunteer-a-Thon is an opportunity to pay that gift forward. By giving to YEA Camp, you give a young person the gift of camp. You allow us to activate them with the knowledge, skills, confidence, and community that they need to make a bigger difference in this world. By participating in or donating to the Volunteer-a-Thon, you become a champion for someone’s activism. 

Thanks to two generous donors, we are making your dollars walk a little farther this year. From now until the end of the year, all Volunteer-a-Thon donations will be TRIPLED. Where else can you invest $20 and see $60 raised to support young changer makers?

Sometimes, though, it’s hard to quantify what that looks like. That’s why we’ve invited two time YEA Camper and Volunteer-a-Thon participant, Mia Jay-Pachirat to share her story. 

What YEA Camp Means to Mia Jay-Pachirat

Hello! My name is Mia. I’m 17 and have gone to YEA Camp for two years now.  I love it. Last year, my Issue of Importance (IOI) was climate change, and my action plan was to create an art zine, all based around solutions to climate change based in New York City, where I live. (Note: A zine is a small-circulation self-published work of original or appropriated texts and images).

Through the Volunteer-a-thon, I have been working on this zine, and I’ve started to plan out the skeleton of it. I am hoping that next month I can start making it! I am thankful for YEA Camp for giving me this opportunity to pursue my passion because otherwise, I wouldn’t have the knowledge and the community to effectively pursue what I wanted to do.

YEA Camp has allowed so many kids to learn how to fight for the world we live on. This is so important because currently not a lot of adults in the government are fighting for what the youth is going to have to live with for many years to come. I think YEA Camp allows youth to make sure that they have the tools themselves to change the world and to right the wrongs that adults have made and continue to make.

I know, personally, that through YEA Camp I have become a much stronger and passionate activist than I ever was before. I’ve learned how to talk to people I don’t know about issues that concern me and how to do that in a positive, helpful way. Additionally, the friends you make at YEA Camp are the best friends you will ever make. YEA Camp friends care about issues that you care about, and they understand what it’s like to struggle with explaining yourself to others that don’t think the same way.

Mia’s Project

So on to my zine! My basic idea for my action plan was to start creating a zine, mass-produce it, and then hand it out on the streets of New York. That didn’t work out because of school and schedule conflicts with my going through the college process. But after talking to my art teacher and making up a plan with her, she’s allowing me to do my zine in art class during the school day. I’m going to start producing a magazine next week. I have everything planned out and I am super excited.

By donating and creating a page for the Volunteer-a-Thon you’re helping so many kids have the opportunity to come to the wonderful, wonderful YEA Camp. Please, if you can donate, share a page. or even create one that would mean the world! To learn more about my project, click here.

Support YEA Camp

To support Mia and the other members of the YEA Camp community, click here. You can read more about her project and others or even create your own page. 

If you are able, please consider making a tax-deductible donation to YEA Camp this year. Your dollar will go three times as far thanks to our generous matching donors.

Interested in joining us at camp next year? We recently announced the dates for YEA Camp 2020 and are currently running an Early Bird special. Register by the end of the year to receive $250 off your registration. Do you know someone who would be great for camp? Nominate them here!

• Youth Camp: in Ventura, California (July 5 – 12) and Charlton, Massachusetts (August 1 – 8)
• Adult Camp: in Lanoka Harbor, New Jersey (July 18 – 24)

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I had never been to sleep-away camp. Even as a child, the thought of spending a week with strangers in an environment tailor-made for sharing and vulnerability made me nervous and fearful.

But I’ve spent this past year trying to reorient my life towards service and acts of good. I became involved in local Planned Parenthood activist groups, and learned about effective organizing and volunteership. I have always been committed to social change, but in our current timeline of such extreme terror coming from what feels like every direction, I struggled to stay tuned in to it all. I struggled to see where I may fit, how I could best contribute and though I am ashamed to admit it, these feelings overwhelmed me, sometimes leading me to do nothing but sit at home cloaked in anxiety.

I was desperate to find a productive channel for my fears, to not be paralyzed by our current situation, most importantly to make a real difference, no matter how small.

It was my partner who told me to give YEA Camp a try. She arrived home from work excited about an ad she saw on Facebook for an activist training camp for adults, sure that this would be a great opportunity for me.

I was more skeptical, immediately worried about how I would make connections in this environment and scared that I didn’t have the credentials to seem legit amongst other activists. I recognized the anxiety cloak settling in, and realized that was reason enough to apply.

I was pretty certain that this camp experience would be cost-prohibitive to me anyway, so with that safety blanket I began to poke around the YEA Camp website, content to say that I had given it thought, but wouldn’t be able to go anyhow.

Then I saw that YEA Camp offers a sliding scale on the honor code for anyone who wants to participate. It was in this moment that I realized camp was going to live up to its social justice ideals, and I had no excuse left but to push myself out of my comfort zone and give it a shot.

After packing my bags and squeezing my dogs goodbye, my partner and I drove the 30 minutes to Woodstock Farm Sanctuary, laughing the whole way about how genuinely nervous I was to spend time with people who would, in all likelihood, actually understand me!

The New York session of YEA Camp takes place in a truly idyllic setting, replete with baby pigs, friendly cows, free land to roam, and a night sky full of stars.

I was expecting camp to be made up mostly of locals, people like me, who could drive up and get dropped off, but quickly came to see that I was the only Hudson Valley camper. Almost everyone else had traveled from far away to take part. Arizona, California, Illinois and Texas were represented amongst campers.

The atmosphere was immediately friendly, relaxed, caring and compassionate. We were implicitly invited to be children again, to introduce ourselves and connect with strangers in a way that is almost impossible to find as an adult.

There are plenty of adult summer camps, but YEA Camp is special.

Most of the other adult summer camps I’ve found center almost exclusively on socializing and drinking, giving adults the freedom to play and party and meet people like we dreamed of as teens. But YEA Camp contained a mission. We came to learn and to grow, to develop the toolkit necessary to be the activists we want to be, to be the activists that the world needs right now. I found that this mission lessened my social anxiety because I knew that if nothing else, we were all passionate enough to show up to a week long (pretty intense) learning retreat.

The YEA Camp experience was filled with joy, and its fair share of sorrow and confusion. The experience was not without its challenges for staff or campers. As most activist spaces are imperfect, so was ours, but what many activist spaces lack — transparency in leadership and a commitment to non-violent communication — YEA Camp had in troves. We dealt with tensions regarding how to best navigate our personal identities and privileges, and while these tensions exist everywhere in the real world, out there we are taught to ignore them, to put our heads down and shoulder on. Yet, at camp, we were able to collectively decide to talk about these things. To confront what made us uncomfortable, what may have pushed us away from being brave in the past.

When we realized our collective stake in this experience, we also realized our shared ability to be honest, to try communicating in an ideal way, without the fears and anxieties that make us too timid to share our truths in the real world.

A space like an adult summer camp is almost necessarily experimental. YEA Camp accepted the fact that we don’t always know the best way to approach challenges and integrated the campers into this experience.

During the day I was learning about grassroots techniques and lobbying, and in the evening, I was getting a first-hand lesson in how to run an organization with integrity and heart. I was shown how to find strength in vulnerability, by bearing witness to a dedicated team of staff who were the first to admit that they didn’t have all the answers either.

Our world is scary right now. For many of us, this world has been scary for a long time, and the escalation of our fears can quickly drive us into isolation, into small safe spaces, secured from the outside world.

I wanted to find a community, a reason to extend myself into the places I was scared of, an opportunity to connect with other people who felt the same. I found this, and more at YEA Camp.

I was sustained daily through the work of talented vegan chefs who were integrated into our community. I was sustained through an environment that encouraged all people to ask questions. I was sustained because I was shown that long after camp ended, we would still have each other to rely on. And it is true. When I am scared, sad, when I worry that I am being ineffective, now I have the wherewithal to pick myself up. To remind myself that small steps are still steps, and the world needs more changemakers.

If you are scared, you are not alone. If you are scared and want to work anyway, YEA Camp is the place for you.

You will harness your ability and meet and connect with people that remind you of all the goodness we still have left.

Deciding to go to YEA Camp 2019 was one of the most important decisions I made this year.

I left not only with a revitalized sense of commitment to the causes I care about, but the tools to make my commitment more impactful. And perhaps most importantly, I left full with a current of hope where there had only been doubt, with a sense of possibility, and the want to reconnect to myself.

Maggie Berke is a postpartum doula invested in the fight for comprehensive reproductive justice. She has a background in LGBT+ advocacy and education, and currently spends her days surrounded by dogs and babies in the Hudson Valley. In her free time, she is writing poetry or participating in theatre projects. You can find her @goldenhourpostpartum and @maybemaggiewill on Instagram. 

Interested in joining us for a future session of YEA Camp for youth or adults? Join our email list or follow us on Facebook or Instagram so we can let you know when we announce our locations and dates for next summer!

The post Saying Yes To YEA Summer Camp for Adults appeared first on YEA Camp.

Even if you’re lucky enough not to be targeted directly, just watching the news or even our social media feeds these days bring a daily assault on so many issues progressives care about: human rights and equality, environmental protection, animal welfare, and the state of our democracy and our discourse, for starters.

How do we cope without burying our heads in the sand?

“Self-care” has become a popular topic in recent years, but it wasn’t a term I had even heard of when I started out as an activist 20 years ago. I recently recognized that, without consciously planning it, I’ve been using some key strategies that have helped me keep going all these years, though they’re a bit different than what folks normally think of when we think of self-care. In addition to the basics that most of us know (though may not necessarily do), like eating healthy, exercising, meditation, and getting enough sleep, choosing our approach to activism and how we engage with the problems in our world can help us use our time strategically and avoid burning out.

At Youth Empowered Action (YEA) Camp, a summer camp for social change, we have expanded our focus on self-care since the 2016 election. This year we will host our second year of YEA Camp for Adults as well, and we will make even more time for this. We will do yoga and journaling and meditation, yes, and we will also focus on how we can do activism in ways that not only make a big difference in the world but also sustain ourselves. We’ll also have time in nature and the opportunity to visit with rescued animals at the sanctuary we will be staying at. But I digress….

Here are 10 approaches to self-care that might support you in your journey as an activist and human.

1. Resist

So many YEA Campers have been speaking out against this administration.

It might seem like doing activism is not a form of self-care or is even the opposite of self-care, but resisting harm is self-preservation and helps us know we are taking action on what matters to us.

When your house is on fire, it’s hard to go take a bubble bath. We need to sound an alarm and put out the fires.

“Activism is the antidote to despair,” said Joan Baez, and taking action can not only bring about change but also keeps us action-oriented so we can protect ourselves and our community and don’t feel helpless.

While social justice issues are very interconnected, to avoid overwhelm, at YEA Camp we recommend focusing on one main issue, what we call your IOI, or issue of importance. Nobody can solve any of the major problems of the world alone, but all of our actions add up to make a cumulative difference. Taking breaks and pacing yourself as needed for you and your life are key.

To get more involved in activism opposing this administration, connect with Indivisible, sign up with 5 Calls to call your legislators, or get involved with any of the many organizations working to bring about social justice.

2. Focus on other types of activism you enjoy or can easily accomplish to see an in-person, real-time impact.

There is so much we can all do in our communities to make a difference.

Resistance activism is playing defense, stopping something bad from happening. As important as that currently is, it’s also difficult and exhausting, and a “victory” just means stopping something terrible.

We also need to proactively find ways to make good things happen. This can include volunteering at a local shelter or community organization, doing a neighborhood cleanup, teaching people what you know, or greening your school or office.

Is there a way to combine something you love to do with a cause you believe in? Or a way you could get involved that doesn’t involve convincing sold-out politicians to change their policies?

It’s also empowering to recommit to daily actions that you have direct control over. Think driving less, eating fewer animal products, boycotting harmful companies, buying less stuff, and speaking up in oppressive situations. Knowing that we are doing these daily things can help us feel OK about taking the time off we need. Try to bring humor, lightness, and joy to counter the stress associated with the issues we’re working to address.

3. Think of yourself in a larger activism context.

You don’t need to get your PhD in Social Change, but just learning about how change has happened in the past can reframe our thinking in a more long-term context. It can be humbling to realize just how many actions it takes to cumulatively bring about systemic change, and to recognize that none of us can ever do “enough.” That also frees us up to pace ourselves. Even though we may not see big results right away, each small step adds up. Two short videos about the gay rights movement and civil rights movement serve as a reminder that all of the actions so many people took led to big change.

4. Donate money.

If you’re feeling depleted or demoralized about the state of the world, a donation is essentially paying someone else to do the work that you’re not able to do. And giving not only does good, it makes us feel good — and activism that combines doing good with feeling good is a win-win that we should do as much as we can. Even better that it only takes a minute and then you can go do whatever you need to do.

Even if you are not in a good financial situation at the moment, since you’re reading this, you can probably donate $1. Maybe $10 or $100? Or more, if you can. Choose an organization doing good work (here are many we recommend), and then commission them (or us) to do more of it while you take time to do what you need to do.

5. Follow just the right amount of the right news.

As activists, we want to be generally aware of what is going on — sometimes it can be more stressful not to know — but you don’t need to know intimate details of every horrible thing happening in the world each day. Learn just enough of what you need to know for the activism you will be doing. Some specific tips:

• Remove any news apps from your phone and disable news notifications.
• Give yourself a time limit of the amount of time you can spend on the news or social media each day. Monitor it so it doesn’t get out of hand.
• Ask yourself: Do I really need to know the details of this? What will I do with this information? Will this help me to make a bigger difference, or make me feel more demoralized?
• Sometimes we need to laugh instead of cry. Watching Alec Baldwin’s dead-on Saturday Night Live performances, and critiques from Seth Myers, Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee, or Stephen Colbert can be as gratifying as a bubble bath. In fact, there’s actually reason to believe that satire is better equipped to critique Trump than mainstream news.

6. Build community and ask for what you need

Some of our community at YEA Camp for Adults

OK, enough about activism. We need to reach out and create tighter community than we’ve had before. We’ve currently got a perfect storm of disconnection. While so many of us communicate more with our friends by typing than talking, we also are more likely than older generations to move far away from our families and to be single later in life. Statistically, we’re less involved in community organizations, whether it be religious or civic, and we are less likely to know our neighbors. And there’s an all-out assault on just about every community of people, animals, and the planet who are not straight white men.

We need to know that we can count on others when we need it, and we will feel good to do the same for others. So meet your neighbors, try going to local events, maybe find a MeetUp, talk to people you come in contact with, connect with like-minded people through social media, and be in better touch with your expanding circle of friends and family. If you need help, there are resources to support you even in the most dire of circumstances.

At YEA Camp, we focus on giving campers the knowledge, skills, confidence, and community to make a bigger difference on their cause when they get home. We believe that being a part of a like-minded and dedicated community makes all of us stronger advocates. We want to be your cheerleader!

7. Manage your life and take care of yourself in ways that are right for you.

Typically, when we think of self-care, we may picture a spa day or yoga class, and these, of course, can be great. But we need to go deeper to assess what we can do to fully take care of ourselves.

In some ways, we all need the same basic things as a baseline, such as eating healthy food, access to clean drinking water, getting exercise, sleeping enough, safe shelter, and nourishing relationships. So many people, especially of lower income, are not getting these basic needs met.

• Evaluate different areas of life that cause you anxiety, from work stress to health issues to your home, relationships, or finances, and start dealing with the most critical ones.
• Get more rigorous doing what you need to do because taking care of ourselves is a precursor to taking care of others.
• Tackle unhealthy and develop healthy habits and practices as directly as possible to take care of yourself and your one precious life.

From stopping smoking to getting check-ups to paying bills on time, healing your relationships to pursuing your goals, or otherwise “adulting,” you are in charge of managing your life. When you don’t do it well, other things start to suffer, including your activism.

As activist hero Audre Lorde said, “Caring for myself is not self-indulgence, it is self-preservation, and that is an act of political warfare.”

8. Figure out and do what you love.

YEA Camp for Adults is held at Woodstock Farm Sanctuary.

To stay in this for the long haul, we need to find ways to enjoy our lives, do the things we love, and step away from stressful situations when we need to. Many people are either not clear about what they truly enjoy doing, and many more are clear that they don’t spend much time doing what they love.

If you love to read or write or play music or be outdoors, make time to do that, even if it’s just for a few minutes a day or an hour or two a week.

One of my favorite things about our YEA Camp for Adults is that it is held at Woodstock Farm Sanctuary, which provides sanctuary and some animal friends to visit with while we are there as well. Animals have an innocence and gentleness that can be an antidote to stress and help restore our energy and feeling of unconditional love.

At YEA Camp, we combine the seriousness of activism training with fun activities to model sustainable activism.

9. Pursue fun and challenging hobbies and distract yourself as needed.

Pursuing challenging hobbies is a great way to trick your brain to take a break from what it was worrying about so that it can focus on the matter at hand. Studying a new language, learning a musical instrument, creating art, dancing, reading novels, playing games, and any sort of vigorous exercise are great for this. Find something you really enjoy that gets your mind off of things, and have that be your go-to when you need it.

10. Feel your emotions — the good, the bad, and the ugly.

Our compassion and empathy has led us to become activists for change, but these emotions can sometimes overwhelm us. We are not robots and cannot go numb. We also need to live our lives and enjoy the beauty and possibility that we can create in life.

Being guided by a healthy relationship to our emotions will not only help us as individuals, it will help us as activists. We’ve got to feel the good, the bad, and the ugly. That might mean crying when we need to, journaling, talking things through with friends, or seeing a therapist. It can mean being quiet and meditating or going out in nature to unplug. It also means being grateful for the countless privileges and opportunities, friends, experiences, and beauty in life. When we don’t run away from our emotions, we can run toward what we want.

Finding ways to celebrate the positives and to fully experience joy might feel difficult at times in the context of all the suffering in the world and the harm being done by the Trump administration, but cultivating happiness and gratitude, and fully appreciating the good in life can help rejuvenate us to get through harder times.

Join us this summer!

It’s been said that activism is a marathon and not a sprint. We need to find ways to show up as activists as best we can in the short term, but we also need to recognize when we need to step back, especially if we are from a community that is more at risk, when we are going through personal struggles, or when we know that we are pushing ourselves too hard or not getting our own needs met.

When the government doesn’t take care of its people, we need to work extra hard to take care of ourselves, each other, and animals and the planet too. Each of us has an important role to play in bringing about the change we wish to see in the world.

For more tips on strengthening your change-making abilities, download YEA Camp’s free ebook, The Beginner’s Guide to Changing the World. Want to see how we integrate self care with leadership training at camp? Join us this summer at YEA Camp for teens or YEA Camp for Adults.

About the Author: Nora Kramer is the Founder and Director of YEA Camp. She is a long time activist who practices self-care by swimming, playing with her dog, Daiya, and eating vegan ice cream sundaes.

The post A Different Approach to Self-Care for Activists in the Age of Trump appeared first on YEA Camp.

Today, there are a million reasons to unleash your inner activist: combating injustice, educating people on issues you care about, fighting for those without a voice, and the general state of our planet (i.e. THE WORLD DESPERATELY NEEDS HELP) are some that come to mind. But did you know that the pursuit of activism can also make you happier?

Here are four reasons following your inner activist will not only make the world better but actually make you feel better.

1. Decrease your cognitive dissonance.

Cognitive dissonance is an idea in psychology that says that people feel better when their actions align with their values. We all have experienced that icky feeling when we are doing something that goes against our core beliefs, such as consuming animal products when we know how farm animals are treated and the effects on the environment, purchasing a pair of sneakers that are not ethically made, or keeping your money at a bank that furthers economic inequity or diverts funds toward the destruction of the environment.

Yet often, we push that inner tension to the back of our thoughts. Following your instinct to do what’s right is an effective way to lift the veil of cognitive dissonance. When your actions serve your beliefs there is a remarkable amount of empowerment, peace, and fulfillment that come with that.

Deep friendships

2. Make meaningful friendships.

One of the great benefits of following your inner activist is that it inevitably leads you to people who feel similarly about the issues you hold dear. Imagine meeting someone and skipping past the awkward what do we have in common icebreaker-ey talk. That is what it is like when you connect to fellow activists. A bond naturally forms because you already know you share a common cause.

Making friends based on a mutual desire to help the world can often result in deeper connections too. We all made friends in school because we had the same interests. We all made friends at work because of a mutual dislike of the boss. But being understood and seen by our fellow activists is profoundly fulfilling and a strong foundation for deeper friendships. These friends also bring out the best in us, join us in our activism, and inspire us to get even more active on a cause we care about.

My favorite aspect of having activist friends is that there is no competition whatsoever. We all want the same thing, so I cheer on my friends who have made headway and continue to make a difference.

3. You actually have a reason to go on social media.

Instead of aimlessly, habitually, scrolling through pictures of everyone’s “happiest” version of their lives (which may have taken numerous shots and carefully worded text to craft), YOU are there with a purpose.

Whether spreading the word about an issue you are dedicated to, educating yourself or other people on a cause, or connecting with others who are passionate about the same things — you are not wasting your time. You are also not feeling inadequate, comparing your life to the people you follow (we all do this) or getting annoyed at your aunt’s narrow-minded tweet. You are focusing on something bigger than you, and following through on your desire to help.

Numerous studies show the way social media and unhappiness are directly correlated. And while it would be great to disengage from it altogether, for many of us, this is not possible. Reframing our use and the ways in which we interact on social media platforms allow us to get the most fulfillment from it.

4. Science says so.

According to a famous psychological study by Sonja Lyubomirsky, about half of our happiness is biologically predetermined. This is called our “happiness set point.” Another 10% correlates to our living conditions. The last 40% of our happiness has to do with our actions — the things we control.

Taking meaningful, purposeful action makes us happy. Working toward other people’s happiness and improving the lives of others increases confidence and decreases depression and anxiety.

We often view activists as disgruntled, angry, combative radicals who alienate people who don’t believe what they do. This couldn’t be further from the truth. In a study where college students were interviewed based on their level of involvement in issues and their personal level of happiness, those with high levels of involvement tested as the happiest.

Ready to spend the summer with your inner activist?

Are you looking for ways to make a bigger difference in the world? Are you looking to add greater fulfillment and happiness to your life? If so, join us at YEA Camp this summer!

For the past 10 years, we have been training people to make a bigger difference in the world and to have a great time doing it.

This summer, we have two sessions for teens and one session of YEA Camp for Adults, with folks coming from all over the country to attend. Not only will it be super fun and help you make a bigger difference on the causes you care about, it might even boost your happiness set point.

About the Author: Camilla Rubis is a TV Writer in Los Angeles and YEA Camp volunteer. She is passionate about the spread of financial literacy to empower and support future generations.

The post How Following Your Inner Activist Makes You a Happier Person appeared first on YEA Camp.