PRYDE 2024 Recap

In November 2024, nearly 200 seventh-graders from across Riverside and San Bernardino counties traded their classrooms for two days at Thousand Pines Conference Center, high in the San Bernardino Mountains, for the Personal Rotary Youth Development Experience — PRYDE.

They came from dozens of different schools, most of them not knowing a soul when they stepped off the bus. What they shared by Sunday was something harder to put into words: a new sense of what they’re capable of, a handful of friendships they didn’t have two days earlier, and the quiet realization that the kid they’d been underestimating — themselves — had a lot more to offer than they thought.

A Message That Stuck

If PRYDE is about showing students what they’re capable of, the 2024 guest speaker was living proof. Ryan Stream — an award-winning speaker, bestselling author, musician, and two-time U.S. Army veteran — took the stage with a story most of the room could hardly imagine. Before the degrees, the books, and the TEDx talks, there was a childhood shaped by foster care, homelessness, and hardship, followed by two combat tours in Afghanistan. He didn’t share it for sympathy. He shared it to make one point land: where you start does not decide where you finish.

Weaving storytelling together with live music, Ryan challenged the students to become — in his words — the heroes of their own lives. He walked them through his “5 C’s of Leadership” — Choice, Clarity, Consistency, Connection, and Courage — a framework for leading yourself first and others second. For a room full of seventh-graders, many of them quietly wrestling with their own doubts, the message was as simple as it was powerful: struggle is normal, you are not defined by it, and the next choice is always yours to make.

It was exactly the kind of moment PRYDE is built to create — a reminder, delivered by someone who has lived it, that resilience can be learned, and that every young person in that room carries more strength than they know.

What the Weekend Looked Like

PRYDE packs a remarkable amount into forty-eight hours. Students rotated through small discussion groups — eight or nine of them paired with the same trained Rotarian leader all weekend — where conversations that don’t usually happen at school suddenly did. In between came the parts they’ll brag about back home: team challenges out in the mountain air, recreation, music, and the kind of late-into-the-evening fun that turns a busload of strangers into a class that cheers for one another.

Watching over all of it was an all-volunteer crew — group leaders, high-school Interact assistants who’d once been PRYDE campers themselves, a camp nurse, and a chairman keeping the whole weekend on its feet. For many of the high-schoolers helping out, returning as a mentor is its own kind of full-circle moment.

Powered Entirely by Rotary

Every student at PRYDE 2024 was there because a local Rotary club believed in them — nominating them, screening them, and quietly footing the bill so that no family paid a cent. It’s one of the largest investments the clubs of District 5330 make in young people each year, and the reason is simple: the seventh-graders who come down off that mountain a little more confident are the same young people who will lead their schools, their teams, and one day their communities.