During the last week of September, five Juniors from Holliston High traveled to the 2026 Alcohol Policy Conference in Arlington, Virginia to present a workshop! Maeva Thomas, Julia Buonomano, Colin Clougher, Luca Huntington, and Kallum Kelley taught a train-the-trainer model that showed the adults how to prepare their students back home to advocate through public speaking skills and speech writing for policy makers.
This opportunity was brought to them by Boston University professor and international alcohol policy researcher and advocate, Dr. David Jernigan, and his brilliant student Hannah Martuscello. These five students, along with a few others from Holliston, and dozens from across the state, have gone through David and Hannah’s workshops over the last two years, which prepared them for our State House trips. Our last visit to Beacon Hill had 80 high school students from across 14 communities, but Holliston’s Youth Action Team stood out.
After our last visit, Hannah approached us about having our students represent the incredible work Massachusetts was doing on alcohol policy, especially with youth at the forefront, at this national conference. This was a huge honor for our students, we couldn’t possibly refuse! That began the preparation process for these young people to not only understand the training they went through, but to become masters, so they could train others. They ran through the workshop a dozen times, each time building those public speaking skills: getting louder, slowing down, and animating their voices!
On the actual day of their training, we had a smaller crowd of 13 adults from across the country become trained in their best practice model. They received overwhelmingly positive feedback from the crowd, and others we met while attending the conference as a whole. ADD QUOTES
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This opportunity was a reminder that their age does not always make them the student. During that workshop, our five youth were the experts, the teachers of the room. We plan to have them train our other students back here in Holliston on these skills soon. They are leaders here, and they are leaders wherever we take them! As always, we are so proud and lucky to work with such empowering young people here in Holliston!