Staff photo / Brandon Cantwell Howland High School juniors Joshua Chuba, left, and Destiny Nguyen gave a presentation Monday to the Howland Rotary Club about their experience at the Rotary Youth Leadership Awards conference in Canfield in late January.

HOWLAND — A Rotary Club’s investment in a pair of local high schoolers for a conference earlier this year paid off when the club’s members learned of experiences that broadened their knowledge of leadership and the world around them.

Howland Rotary Club members welcomed Howland High School juniors Destiny Nguyen and Joshua Chuba to their regular meeting at Shepherd of the Valley Monday, where they spoke about their time at the Rotary Youth Leadership Awards conference in Canfield in late January.

The RYLA program teaches students about leadership and communication skills in an effort to create positive decision-makers who make a difference in their communities.

“We learned about different types of leaders and we met many good people; they had different leadership games, showing that you have to communicate, even if it’s not words,” Chuba said. “There’s other forms of communication.”

Chuba said the experience inspired him to do other things, such as starting a nonprofit after learning about how they can benefit a community.

Chuba said he co-founded a nonprofit, “Un4gotten,” with his friend, which is focused on telling older individuals’ stories.

“You know how, in life, if you’re not really famous, you’re gonna be forgotten, because not everyone’s going to remember you?” Chuba said. “What we’re doing is, we’re going to nursing homes and then talking to people that don’t really have so many people to tell their life story to, and we’re interviewing them.”

Chuba said they plan to post the interviews online with the person’s permission, adding that it is nice because he doesn’t want to be forgotten when he gets older.

Nguyen said she built upon her mechanical skills at the conference, noting that she was never good at anything mechanical, but her group won the building competition.

“It’s just something I never thought of doing before or would have tried outside of that,” Nguyen said.

“We did a lot of activities — one where we had to be blindfolded for a few activities,” Nguyen said. “We had to listen to instructions and work with our team to get to the endpoint.”

Nguyen said she and Chuba learned about the different types of leaders, noting that she never realized how much it applies to their everyday lives.

“I like to take the initiative, and I didn’t realize that until we were separated into our different groups,” Nguyen said. “You get to see how similar you are to the different people around you.”

Chuba and Nguyen said they were without their phones for the weekend, which Chuba considered to be fun.

“If I’m on my phone, I won’t be able to talk to anyone — I’m more absorbed in my phone. I think it was probably the best thing,” Chuba said.

Howland High School Principal Joseph Simko thanked the club for Chuba and Nguyen’s opportunity to attend the conference, noting that the pair will be helpful moving forward to select next year’s attendees.

“Their names came up this year, this past year, and they’re great leaders in a lot of other ways,” Simko said.

Gary Lehman, the Howland Rotary Club’s president, said the club has been sponsoring Howland students’ attendance at the RYLA for at least the past 20 years.

“It’s great to see how the kids find out what they can actually do when they’re there,” Lehman said. “It’s like they were saying, they never realized they could do that stuff until they’re actually put in that situation. They never realize what they have inside them until they work.”