Sharpening Your Saw Conference (SYSC) 2024

Theme : From Sunrise to Sunset - Leading at the Cutting Edge

April 28th - May 2nd, 2024

Welcome to the Greatest Youth Workers Camp 2024

Sharpening your Saw Conference is an annual residential conference to equip youth workers and members of the organization to be effective in their work. The idea of the Conference is that sometimes you have to take a break from the “work” of your work to sharpen your skills. A dull axe won’t cut a tree nearly as effectively as a sharp one.

Event Speakers

Meet Experts & Influencers Face to Face

While not all conferences offer you the opportunity to meet your idols, your chances are greatly improved when you’re sharing the same space.

But sometimes it’s about taking a selfie with someone who has influenced you or sharing an idea with someone you admire, or making a connection that can lead to finding your next mentor.

Why attend sysc ?

Networking Opportunities

Social media keeps you connected to my peers who are both local and “far away.” However, there’s no substitution for meeting someone in real life.

The Sharpening Your Saw Conference would give you an opportunity to mix and mingle, form new relationships, and strengthen existing ones. Over coffee, lunch, or cocktails, you may make a connection that would help you in the work we do. At a breakout session, you may find yourself sitting next to the next person would be of great help.

Learning In a New Space

Breaking out of the office, sitting in a new space can spark us to new approaches that will help us in the work we do.

Break Out of Your Comfort Zone

Going hand-in-hand with the previous reason, live events force you to break out of your comfort zone.
It’s easy to read a blog post from the privacy of your own office. You won’t break a sweat listening to a podcast.
While there are those who are born networkers, for many peoples live events can be a challenge. But breaking out of our comfort zones is just the type of action we need to take to break out of old ways of thinking that have got us in a rut in the work we do.

New Tips & Tactics

The problem with the web is we believe that everything is at our fingertips. And maybe it is. But it’s an overwhelming amount of data that we often can’t crack, or keeps us from the best material. The Sharpening Your Saw Conference will help curate new ideas to help you improve your approach.

The Energy of Like-Minded Individuals

There’s nothing like being in a room of like-minded people.
Other people who are willing to take time away from the office to learn something new. Other people who want to “better” themselves.
When you sit in a classroom or auditorium, you discover that you’re not alone in wanting to improve your skills and bring something back to the work we do.
That energy is lacking in all online learning channels, regardless of how much chatter there may be around a hashtag.

Greater Focus

The flip side of learning new things is relearning classic techniques.

Invest In Yourself

Perhaps this one is self-evident. Or perhaps we’ve already covered it in whole or in part above. But leaving the office and “sharpening the saw” is investing in yourself.
It’s admitting that you’re worth it. It’s admitting that you still have things to learn. That you can get better.
It’s an investment in yourself, your career, and the work we do as an organization. When you pay for the conference and when you walk up to the registration desk, you’re saying that you’re investing in your own growth.