ST. MARY’S CITY — A group of Southern Maryland high school students wants to know what matters most to the people around them, and the answers could shape what they build next.
High school participants and college interns in St. Mary’s College of Maryland’s Youth Resilience Leaders program have launched what they call a listening project, gathering views from friends, family members and neighbors about their communities, according to an Oct. 23 college announcement. The college said the results will guide future community-engaged projects and a local version of a youth summit planned for summer 2027.
The approach flips a familiar pattern. Instead of adults designing programs for teenagers, the teens are doing the asking, and the community’s answers are meant to set the agenda.
From Saturday workshops to West Virginia
Youth Resilience Leaders runs through the college’s Department of Environmental Studies. Last fall it offered three free Saturday workshops on campus for about 15 high school students from Southern Maryland, followed by mentorship in spring 2026. Students of any grade could apply, and lunch was included.
The workshops covered community mapping, media literacy and group discussion about climate impacts and resilience. Each session was designed to help students dig into local issues and find research questions about their own communities, ending with students sketching small action-research projects to develop with mentors.
The program took its next step this summer. Over the weekend of July 24-26, eight Southern Maryland youth attended the Vibrant Transformations youth summit run by West Virginia University’s Center for Resilient Communities in Morgantown. The three days included workshops on place and belonging, wellbeing and disaster preparedness, along with icebreakers, community-mapping exercises, an evening arts workshop and a live concert.
The Maryland group joined a larger cohort of young people from across West Virginia, including Huntington and Charleston. The college said the mix let the Southern Maryland teens compare their home communities with peers from very different places.
An alumna on the other side of the table
The summit had a St. Mary’s College connection on the organizing side. Chrysanthe Kallimanis, a 2025 SMCM graduate now in graduate school at WVU, works at the center and was one of the summit’s lead coordinators.
Kallimanis said the curriculum was built to help teens see themselves as able to start their own projects rather than waiting for something to exist for them, according to the college. She traced her own path to her junior year at St. Mary’s, where she said mentorship showed her what community-engaged research looks like and that she could build projects directly from conversations with people.
Bradley Wilson, a geography professor and director of the WVU center, described the summit as part of a model the center has developed over nearly a decade: pairing structured study with hands-on community work, then giving participants room to reflect, adjust and take on more responsibility over time.
Who went
The trip was organized by St. Mary’s College faculty. The teens were accompanied by Parisa Rinaldi and Matthew Wilfong, assistant professors of environmental studies; Great Mills High School teacher Raquel Grassinger; and three SMCM student interns, Jesse Slingluff, Finch Porter and Armirah Gonzales.
Faculty see the partnership as a way to connect local teens with a wider network of young people doing similar work, and to keep the college’s own community-engaged teaching drawing on models like WVU’s, according to the announcement.
The college did not say how many residents the listening project aims to reach, how responses are being collected or when results will be shared. Residents or families interested in the project or the program can contact Rinaldi at pnrinaldi@smcm.edu.
For now, the students are gathering answers. What they hear is expected to set the agenda for the Southern Maryland youth summit the group hopes to host next summer.
