UNITY Youth Highlight
Chenoa Scippio’s fall 2022 speaking engagements brought Native youth leadership into conversations about community advocacy, data, cultural celebration, and public service. As a National UNITY Council Co-President, she moved between webinars and in-person gatherings while reflecting on how UNITY had prepared her to represent others.
Scippio served in the National UNITY Council Executive Committee cohort, the elected leadership group that connects regional youth councils and individual members and brings their concerns into a shared national forum. The co-president role includes representing that network and helping youth perspectives remain part of broader discussions.
Her activities included presenting about UNITY for the Administration for Native Americans Alaska Region Training & Technical Assistance Center and attending RADx’s Making Sense of Native Youth Data webinar. Together, those experiences involved both sharing what UNITY offers and learning from work focused on understanding Native youth.
She also spoke at the Coalition to Stop Violence Against Native Women’s annual 5K and joined fellow UNITY leaders for an address during the National Congress of American Indians General Assembly. Each setting called for communicating with a different audience while carrying a youth perspective.
“It is important for me to accept these speaking engagements when asked because I think this is exactly what UNITY has been preparing me for – to be the best advocate for my community and to represent my tribes in a good way,” Scippio wrote.
At the Indigenous Life Celebration, Scippio served as keynote speaker and staffed a table on behalf of Native Organizers Alliance. The table created an opportunity for conversations after the presentation, allowing interested youth to move from hearing about leadership to asking how they could participate.
“At the Indigenous Life Celebration specifically, so many youth came to my table after my speech to talk about ways to get involved in leadership,” she shared.
That response gave her a concrete example of the impact a short talk could have. Public speaking became an opening for relationship-building, with follow-up conversations extending beyond the presentation itself.
Across the engagements, Scippio connected UNITY’s leadership and citizenship priorities with the practical work of advocacy: accepting responsibility, learning from partners, communicating clearly, and making space for other youth to see themselves as leaders.
