Friday Night Live (FNL) is a summit that is enriched with speakers, workshops, and opportunities to engage the youth in becoming leaders in their communities. 

The California Friday Night Live Partnership (CFNLP) was originally developed in 1984 by the California Department of Alcohol and Drug Programs (ADP) in Sacramento, California. 

On Nov. 5 and 6, the FNL summit hosted over 1,000 people from all over California, a local group that attended was the Placer County Youth Commission (PCYC) with advisors Alex Wride and Amie Skraber. 

FNL areas of focus are alcohol, gambling, traffic safety, tobacco, and other drugs including cannabis and meth. 

“Friday Night Live is a statewide program of youth advocacy clubs that work on many different aspects of youth advocacy, such as distracted driving or drunk driving,” Wride said in an interview. “We work on substance abuse issues, Tobacco Control and Prevention, and then also creating safe environments for youth to be able to thrive, grow and be leaders in their communities.” 

To break down the summit, Skraber said that “the opening session [was] where we met the California Youth Council, and we got to learn a little bit about them and the event. And then we broke into workshops, and we had three different sessions and each session you got to go to a different workshop, and you got to pick which one and topics included things like distracted driving, tobacco and other substance abuse, PSA creation, script writing, social media and much, much more.”

One resource that was provided to FNL summit attendees was Casey’s Pledge, honoring the work of Casey Goodwin who fought against drinking and driving and advocated for positive and healthy lifestyles. 

Members of FNL learned that Goodwin was killed by an 18-year-old drunk driver on her way home from college. Casey’s Pledge encourages the youth to commit to staying away from alcohol and avoid drinking and driving.

Beyond this, attendees heard from motivational speakers about leadership, and the importance of bringing the knowledge they gained from the summit to their communities. 

A few of these speakers were Caroline Inspires, Darryl Bellamy Jr., and Scott Backovich. 

Caroline Bennett’s message was to promote the youth to “show up so unapologetically authentic” and to create their own path to success. 

Bellamy Jr. focused on fearlessness; he encouraged the audience to push their fears as they lead and to reject negative thoughts that are preventing one from reaching their goals. 

Backovich created an engaging speech where he asked the audience to share issues they see in their community, and what they are doing to take action. Overall, he provided the audience with a number of anecdotes to help them be an effective leader. 

“The Placer County Youth Commission is a group of youth from throughout Placer County,” Skraber said during an interview. “[They] come together to work on changes in their community and they identify what they want to work on based on issues that they’re seeing in their schools,”

As the Placer County Youth Commissioners are working on projects to combat issues affecting the youth in Placer County, Skraber says that with the knowledge the Youth members will be taking away from the summit will “help hone in the trajectory for their projects for the remainder of the year and they can take the skills and knowledge that they’ve gained to improve their projects and make more of an impact.” 

Beyond this, Wride said that “Placer County is going to be made for the better because the youth coming back are armed with more knowledge from youth around the state of California, different perspectives and they feel excited and empowered and ready to go out and change.”