Youth on Parade
Festival helps build bond between youngsters, city business owners

Tohatchi Cougar marching band trumpeter Matthew Tommie stands at attention while waiting for Saturday morning's Red Ribbon Youth Parade to start. The parade celebrates drug- and alcohol-free lifestyles as part of Gallup's Youth Festival. [Photo by John A. Bowersmith/Independent]

By Zsombor Peter
Staff Writer

Ann Johnson hands out pennants with anti-drug slogans on them to Stagecoach Elementary students before the start of the Red Ribbon Youth Parade in downtown Gallup. The parade down Coal Avenue was part of Saturday's Youth Festival. [Photo by John A. Bowersmith/Independent]

GALLUP — The city's youth and its retailers can be a disparate pair. But they're also a mutually dependent pair, said Kimberly Ross-Toledo.

A community liaison for the Navajo Indian Youth Leadership Project, Ross-Toledo helped organize Saturday's Youth Festival, which filled Gallup's streets, parks and theaters with hundreds of local youth for a marathon of some 30 events and competitions.

The goal, said Ross-Toledo, was to help endear those youth to the rest of the community and, especially, the city's business owners. It's a relationship, she said, that's been strained at times.

From what Ross-Toledo has heard through her work with the Youth Leadership Project, many of the city's youngsters feel unwelcome at local stores, at downtown stores in particular.

"The goal is to help the community engage and start to interact with its young people on a more positive note," she said.

It's the second year of the event, put on by the Coalition of Healthy and Resilient Youth of McKinley County, of which the Youth Leadership Project is a partner. The fact that the event, targeted toward youth ages 3 to 25, drew many more sponsors this year is a sign that it's working, Ross-Toledo said.

It's an important demographic for local retailers, she said, especially considering that the 26-and-under crowd makes up more than half the county's population.

"That's important for businesses to understand," she said. "As businesses, this is a population that they need to target."

The coalition doesn't have exact numbers, but Ross-Toledo estimates that between 300 and 400 youth plus their families and friends participated in events ranging from basketball and volleyball tournaments to cooking competitions to a battle of the bands. The wooly riding, skateboarding competition, chess tournament and pow-wow drew the most participants.

The event started out last year in the minds of the organizers as a conference to tackle some of the more pressing issues affecting the day's youth.

The day's youth, however, had something else in mind.

Rather than debating the issues around a conference table, said Ross-Toledo, "they said they wanted something more exciting, more engaging."

Turning what was to be more of a conference into an event proved a good move.

"We had such a good response on our surveys from last year, we decided to go ahead and do it again this year," she said.

With the continued support of the city and private sponsors, the coalition hopes to turn the Youth Fair into an annual affair.