Youth of Ummah Hold Second Successful Annual Conference

The popular Youth of Ummah (YOU) youth program had its second annual youth conference on Saturday March 9th, 2013 at IONA center in Warren MI. The YOU conference was a way of displaying the brotherhood and sense of belonging YOU program provides for the youth who are struggling to understand their Muslim identity in the society and feel a disconnect from the mosques around their communities. YOU provides a fresh new concept of helping youth (high school and up) feel comfortable sharing their problems, build bonds with their community members and start to love Islam as opposed to being born into it. YOU program also produces leaders continuously and it’s a wonderful feeling to see youth who were far away from Islam, become leaders and lead other youth to come closer to Allah SWT.

Youth of Ummah project uses sports as big part of their da’wa to the youth, and runs multiple sports leagues and all the while keeps youth learning about Islam and contribute towards their community. By the end of the sports leagues all the youth know each other very well, they trust their youth leaders, they are not hesitant to come to the mosques and best of all their skillsets are used to further improve the YOU program and give da’wa to more youth. The process is based on quality and doesn’t focus on trying to pull hundreds of youth, give them speeches but not having a weekly system to develop their character and personalities. YOU program has increased in popularity through word of mouth and many new youth have joined as a result of the quality of the program. The YOU conference is simply a way to recognize the youth for their contribution and they are awarded for their hard work during the sports leagues. The YOU conference also showed what the YOU program accomplished and the youth leaders it produced throughout the year.

The conference was full of amazing lectures pertinent to the issues youth want to hear about, team building activities, live skits, prize distribution for the sports leagues, and registration for next sports leagues and weekly programs. Imam Masmari from Unity center, Ameer Abdul Malik from California, Imam Shamsuddin from Michigan, Br. Majed from Windsor and Br. Omar (YOU director) were the main speakers at the conference. The speakers were happy to notice the great sense of brotherhood that could be felt among the crowd because most of the attendees were the youth that attend the YOU program on a weekly basis. The outer community audience were able to see the fruits of the YOU program during the conference.

YOU program has already been presented to many mosques to show its unique strength and leadership model. YOU program produces leaders and doesn’t rely on few volunteers for its growth. YOU program also has popular youtube channel which all youth should subscribe to at www.youtube.com/youthofummah. YOU program also has weekly fun learning programs like Fast and Learn program on Thursday, for both brothers and sisters. Saturdays are usually sports nights. Much of the testimonials, information about weekly programs and future events can be found on YOU website at www.youthofummah.com. YOU team can be reached via email at ummahyouth@gmail.com ( Br. Omar Malik)

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