Spring 2026 Winner of the Youth Mentor Scholarship

Brantley Winn

Brantley continues to instill the importance of working towards the common good. He hopes to inspire the next generation to recognize the power of service. Congratulations, Brantley, we appreciate your insights!

Read Their Essay Here:

Throughout my life, I have seen firsthand how youth services and mentorship programs are vital to the community. I have participated in Trail Life USA since I was eight years old. The scouting program itself differs from Boy Scouts in the sense that it is Christ focused, allowing all the things to come after it. However, service and servant leadership were the two main things that I gained from this experience along with seeing it gained in my friends’ lives.

In a community, it is made up of parts that all work toward the common good. Aristotle defines the common good as a good that benefits a community, attainable only through everyone’s collective effort. However, if we don’t have services that teach people how to be good citizens and help others in need, how will we as a society ever attain the common good? This is why youth services and mentorship programs are so vital to the community to teach the future generations how to not only be good humans, but be humans that want to do the good, hard thing. Through this bolstering of future generations in these programs, we are equipping them with lifelong skills of leadership, humility, networking, and ultimately success.

I have seen this in my own life through Trail Life USA. Its leaders have a want and love to teach the boys how to not only become good trailmen, but also good men who can lead a family (through the badgework of “Family Man”) or be responsible with their finances (through “Personal Resources”). The leadership of TLUSA strive to teach the boys how to become responsible men in order to make society a better place. This reflects the Aristotelian values that I talked about previously. However, there is much more to service organizations than just making people better citizens. I have witnessed many young boys come into Trail Life with no father or mother and look to the mentors as people who act as those parental roles in their lives. Tommy Tisdale, the local Trail Life Headmaster has been a father figure to many fatherless boys who have come from the community and have helped turn their lives from a place of drug abuse and ultimately failure to one of success through the mentorship of TLUSA.

This one small program of Trail Life reciprocates the mission of many mentorship and service programs around the world and illustrate why these services are vital to the community. If we as a society don’t have services that can raise thoughtful generations who have humble spirits and work for the common good, we are ultimately failing as a past generation. Not only this, but I would argue that the future of the word would be doomed. Some of the most notable presidents, such as Barack Obama or John F. Kennedy were both Boy Scouts. Not only this, but Bill Gates, Michael Jordan, and Steven Spielberg were all Boy Scouts, showing that mentorship programs can produce members of society who are successful and helpful for the community around them.

In all, youth services and mentorship programs are one of the most vital elements to a working community and society as a whole. When we as a world give up on these organizations, we give up on future generations and people who are equipped with leadership, humbleness, and success