PRYDE 2025 Recap

This past November, nearly 200 seventh-graders from across Riverside and San Bernardino counties boarded buses and headed up the mountain to Thousand Pines Conference Center for the 2025 Personal Rotary Youth Development Experience — PRYDE.

Some arrived quiet. Some arrived nervous. Some had never spent a weekend away from home. But across two days of leadership activities, small-group conversations, mountain recreation, and inspiring keynotes, something shifted. By Sunday afternoon the students who climbed back onto those buses were more confident, more connected, and more sure of themselves than the ones who had arrived the day before.

PRYDE is one of District 5330’s most impactful youth leadership programs — a weekend built entirely around one idea: that every young person has the potential to lead, and sometimes all it takes is the chance to discover it.

High in the Mountains at Thousand Pines

Held the weekend before Thanksgiving at the Thousand Pines Conference Center in Crestline, the camp brought together students from public and private schools across the district, each one nominated and selected by their local Rotary club for their leadership potential. The mountain setting — tall pines, crisp air, and a campus far from the distractions of everyday life — gave the weekend its own rhythm: shared meals, cabin life, and long conversations that don’t happen anywhere else.

Leadership, Built One Activity at a Time

Throughout the weekend students moved through hands-on leadership challenges, team-building games, recreation, and small discussion groups — each one paired with a trained Rotarian leader who stayed with the same group of eight or nine students the entire time. The activities were the framework, but the real growth happened in the moments between them: when a shy student spoke up for the first time, when a group rallied around a teammate, when a camper realized that leadership isn’t about being the loudest person in the room — it’s about character, empathy, and lifting up the people around you.

Made Possible by Rotary

PRYDE runs on the energy of an all-volunteer Rotarian staff — chairs, discussion-group leaders, high-school Interact assistants, and a camp nurse — who give up their own weekend to mentor, guide, and look out for every student in their care. Behind them stand the Rotary clubs of District 5330, who nominate the students, sponsor every camper’s place, and underwrite the experience so that families pay nothing. It is Rotary’s belief, put into action: invest in young people today, and you build stronger communities tomorrow.

For many students, PRYDE becomes a turning point. They return to their schools more involved, more willing to take positive risks, and carrying a quiet new confidence that follows them long after the buses pull away from Thousand Pines.