Years ago (never now, of course) I didn't always have time to think about and plan elaborate and well-thought-out meetings. In my bag of tricks for those weeks was this current favorite, requested again and again by our group years later: If You Really Knew Me.
The concept is so simple even MTV made it into a half hour show, but it's complex enough that you can spend 2 hours on it if you want to debrief, which would be a good idea.
Gather your group of any size and count off so you have about 5 youth in a group. Have them sit in a tight circle in their 5-person group and explain the rules to them:
"Once we start, you'll take turns going one by one around your circle and say, 'If you really knew me, you'd know...." and then complete the sentence for yourself. You'll continue going around the circle until I say stop. You will not say anything other than 'If you really knew me, you'd know...'; you will not comment on what others say; you will not skip over people in the circle. We'll do this for 20 minutes. Any questions? Okay, go!"
What is powerful about this exercise for the youth in our group is that it allows them, who already are tight knit, to get even tighter and get into deeper sharing. But it works great for a group of youth that don't know each other, too. The level of sharing will just be different.
If you want to spend more time on it, try asking youth to re-group themselves up in ways that might change the nature of what they share (age, race, social group, boys/girls, etc,), and then talk about what changed depending on who they were grouped with.
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