PRYDE 2023 Recap

Every seventh-grader who arrived at Thousand Pines for PRYDE 2023 brought a backpack, a sleeping bag, and — whether they admitted it or not — a quiet voice in the back of their mind telling them all the reasons they didn’t belong there. Over one weekend in November, nearly 200 of them learned to talk back to it.

PRYDE — the Personal Rotary Youth Development Experience — gathers middle-school students from across Riverside and San Bernardino counties for two days of leadership, friendship, and self-discovery in the San Bernardino Mountains. In 2023, the through-line of the weekend was the one conversation every young person has but few ever name: the one happening inside their own head.

Meeting the Mental Heckler

The 2023 keynote came from Scott Greenberg — a nationally recognized speaker and author who studies how high performers manage their mindset and emotions when the pressure is on. He gave the students a name for that nagging inner voice: the mental heckler.

The mental heckler, Scott explained, is the voice in our head that acts as our own worst critic — the one that says you’re not smart enough, you’ll embarrass yourself, you don’t belong. It feels like the truth. But Scott challenged the students to do something simple and powerful: stop taking the heckler at its word, and look at the evidence. Is what that voice is saying actually reality — or just a story fear is telling? More often than not, the facts tell a very different tale than the heckler does.

For a room full of twelve- and thirteen-year-olds — an age when self-doubt can feel deafening — it was a revelation: the critic in your head is not a narrator of facts, and you get to decide how much you believe it. Students left with a tool they could carry far beyond the mountain, into classrooms, tryouts, and every nervous first day still ahead of them.

A Camp Built on Belonging

Around the keynote, the rhythm of PRYDE did what it always does. Students spent the weekend in small discussion groups led by trained Rotarian mentors, took on team challenges in the mountain air, and found, often to their own surprise, that the strangers they’d met on Saturday felt like friends by Sunday. The weekend is deliberately built so that every camper is seen, encouraged, and given room to step a little outside their comfort zone.

The Clubs Behind Every Camper

None of it happens without Rotary. Clubs across District 5330 nominated and sponsored each student, covering the full cost so that no family paid a thing, while an all-volunteer staff of Rotarians and high-school Interact assistants ran the weekend from sunrise to lights-out. The gallery below features the students each club sent to the mountain in 2023 — the heart of why PRYDE exists.