Youth Serving – Your Community’s Best Kept Secret?

By: Learn and Serve – Michigan Team

Global Youth Service Day is coming up this April (23, 24, & 25) and many people are looking for new ways to get young people involved in their communities. Many of Learn and Serve Michigan’s blog readers know how important youth are to our communities and benefits they receive and give when they are engaged in service. What you may not know is that people like Miley Cyrus, Taylor Swift, and Usher recognize youth potential as well and are part of great organizations that encourage and recognize young people to serve their communities.

There are a lot of opportunities out there for young people to get engaged in service and service-learning. There are organizations that give grants, prizes, and awards solely to teens who volunteer. Here are five great websites built to empower young people to serve their community:

DoSomething.org
DoSomething.org aims to inspire, empower, and support a generation of doers. Their website provides valuable tools and resources for teens who want to take positive action in their community. Perhaps the coolest feature of their site is the Act Now Matrix. Young people enter the issue they want to take action on, who they are working with, where they will take action, and the amount of time they have…the Act Now Matrix provides a list (usually 10-20 suggestions) of ways they can take action. DoSomething.org also offers a lot $500 grants for young people to take action. For instance, if a young person wanted to start a club or service program they could apply for a $500 start-up grant to get the ball rolling. There are dozens of these grants youth can apply for to get money to fuel their call to action.

Get Ur Good On
Get Ur Good On is an online community of young people engaged in service. Started by Youth Service America and Miley Cyrus, this community gives teens a place to post photos, videos, and blogs about their service as well as provide advice on ways young people can get involved. This is a great resource for youth to share and promote their projects and gain some national attention for the good work they do while interacting with other young do-gooders from across the country.

Powered By Service
Powered by Service was launched by recording artist Usher at the Clinton Global Initiative to get young people involved in the world’s most important issues. Not only does Powered by Service call youth to action, but it gives them the tools they need to make real change. They strive to make ideas into action by providing toolkits, grants, and other resources to youth who have the drive to make a difference.

Best Buy @15
This is a really cool site from Best Buy where teens get to decide where Best Buy spends its money. Teens earn points by participating in the site’s forums, polls, and discussions. Those points are then used to decide where Best Buy should give money. This past January, Best Buy decided how to split a $250,000 grant between four organizations by asking the teens to put their points toward the organization that should get the majority of the funds. Teens can also vote on which schools should receive grants, which students should get scholarships, and all sorts of giving challenges. If your teens need more incentive they can also get an exclusive look at Taylor Swift’s current tour at the site and capitalize on opportunities to visit important political conventions and events including sending teens to the inauguration of the President last year.

YouthSite
This month the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse announced the debut of YouthSITE a new section of www.servicelearning.org devoted to resources created for youth, by youth. YouthSITE stands for Youth Sharing Ideas and Tools for Engagement. It will be a platform for students of all ages to tell their service-learning stories and inspire each other. Young people can contribute to the site by emailing the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse at nslc-info@servicelearning.org.

Do you have a youth service resource? Post it in the comments section!

Inclusive Service-Learning

“Be open, acknowledge the difference, and remove the human made barrier and stigma.”

By Shana Holet: MCSC Inclusion AmeriCorps*VISTA

My name is Shana Holet and I am the Inclusion AmeriCorps*VISTA serving at the Michigan Community Service Commission (MCSC). My role here at the MCSC is to serve with AmeriCorps, Learn and Serve, and Senior Corps programs in Michigan on disability and inclusion efforts. I provide support; such as resources and information, outreach, and needs assessments. I also serve with our state’s disability community doing outreach and promoting the opportunity for service as an option for people within that community.

As I reflect back to my school experiences and preferred learning-style I was never a participant in a formal grant-funded Learn and Serve program, but I received a similar experience last year as I was finishing my degree requirements at Saginaw Valley State University (SVSU). During my internship requirement, I was placed in a nonprofit agency, the Arc of Midland, and applied concepts from the classroom into the daily operation of this nonprofit. Specific competencies had to be met. Within this experience, I gained a first-hand perspective on how important it is to have the correct supports in place for anyone in all facets of life. Specifically, the Arc of Midland works with individuals who experience intellectual disabilities.

Whether at a social gathering, in a service-learning program, at an internship, in a classroom, or at your place of employment, it is crucial for the correct supports to be in place, in order for a meaningful experience to occur. For individuals with disabilities it is important to acknowledge the differences and then acknowledge how full participation can occur, in whatever facet of life may be up for discussion. Far too often, society is resistant to try something that is unfamiliar to them or venture to working towards including all members of a community because the difference is not understood. The fact is people with disabilities are different, but it is not the disability that prevents full-inclusion. It is the barriers put up by society and the stigma that surrounds disability.

For example, during my internship at the Arc of Midland, my supervisor asked that I assist with facilitation of a night class for people served by the organization. I am an individual who does not drive and the public transportation between Midland County and Saginaw County where I traveled to and from SVSU is very limited. Yes, it is due to a disability that I do not drive. And it was due to limited resources that another way had to be found so I could fully participate in the internship experience and have the opportunity to practice facilitation. The solution was that I would be provided a ride after the night class by a personal assistant who helps one of the individuals served by the Arc. The individual served by the Arc was able to provide a taxi service for individuals who were not adequately served by the traditional services in place. This service was provided because of his own need for personal assistance and support as a result of a disability.

It was not my disability that made the prospect of travel during a specific time of day difficult, but the lack of funding, acceptance of public transportation, and the fact that Michigan is an automotive-driven state. Relying on others does have a stigma, but as demonstrated here, creativity, willingness, and lack of a stigma allowed for a full and meaningful learning experience. This concept of creativity can be applied to any situation. All one has to do is be open, acknowledge the difference, and remove the human-made barriers and stigmas.

Service-Learning: A Perfect Fit for Me

By: Sue Wilson

It seems like community service has always been a part of who I am as an individual. I grew up in a rural community and was taught the importance of helping others in our neighborhood. As a high school student, I belonged to clubs that focused on servicing local organizations. After I was married, my husband and I passed on these values to our children. They too learned and embraced the importance of giving back. For many years, our summer vacations were spent helping others on mission trips to Detroit, Pittsburg, Kentucky, West Virginia, or border towns in Mexico.

When the opportunity to work on a second career became available, I decided to become a teacher. Five years later in my new teaching position, I was introduced to service-learning at a workshop led by my soon-to-be mentors and friends, Renee Weaver-Wright and Deb Wagner. Service-learning was a perfect fit for me. I was excited to be able to combine classroom learning with community service. I couldn’t wait to get started!

My first project was a hit with my eighth grade language arts and social studies students. The class novel we were reading focused on the time era of the Great Depression. My students expressed interest in learning more about that time period from those who actually experienced it. (Talk about youth voice!) So we did some investigating and discovered a vibrant Senior Center in our community that had seniors that were old enough to remember some stories about the Great Depression. My students wanted to interview them and create Legacy Booklets about the senior’s life. After bringing in a newspaper editor to teach us how to interview others, we then contacted the Senior Center. We asked Mrs. Bartoes, the Senior Center director, to talk to us about senior citizens and how they might react when interviewed about the Great Depression. Students worked with their peers to write interview questions, then practiced interviewing each other before they met with their seniors. What resulted was an incredible intergenerational experience with eighth graders and senior citizens listening, learning, talking, writing, and laughing. Their final products, the Legacy Booklets, were presented to the senior citizens and their families at an Ice Cream Social held at our school. My eighth graders were empowered and learned more about language arts, history, and serving their community than any textbook could have taught them.

I continue to use service-learning (the Clarkston Community Schools district calls it Academic Service Learning or ASL) in my classroom to give my students the opportunity to take their learning to the next level. ASL is a tool not a program that I use to teach skills in language arts, civic responsibility, and leadership. All students, no matter what their background or learning level, can benefit from experiencing ASL. I can’t imagine teaching without it!

P.S. Cathryn Berger-Kaye taught me the importance of surrounding my students with inspiring service-learning quotes. My favorite:

“Educating the mind without educating the heart is no education at all.”
- Aristotle

Sue Wilson is a teacher with Clarkston Community Schools, a former Learn and Serve – Michigan grantee. She also received the 2010 Outstanding Service-Learning Award for a K-12 Teacher/Practitioner.

Service-Learning – A Strategy to Keep Kids Engaged

By: Cathy Berger Kaye 

Seeing service-learning as part of a viable strategy to improve high school graduation rates makes good sense. Increasingly, high quality service-learning is seen to improve attendance, test scores, and lessen disciplinary referrals. I also see service-learning adding meaning, purpose, and relevance which kids (and teachers) crave. In the February issue of Principal Leadership, a magazine of the National Association of Secondary School Principals, I wrote the lead article “Work that is Real.” The opening paragraph includes these lines: “Like adults, students want a significant reason to turn off the alarm clock in the morning, get out of bed, go to work or school, and learn. They crave purpose to their lives like everyone else. And they want relevance—they want to know that what they are studying, practicing, researching, and remembering can be put to use.”

About six years ago the Los Angeles Unified School District asked me to develop a program that could be used as a summer transition experience to help keep kids invested in school as they move in or out of middle school. Having many years of working with kids often seen as being on the brink of dropping out, I was thrilled by the opportunity and the challenge (I had three weeks to develop the original version). This grew to be Strategies for Success: A Learning Curriculum that Serves, a comprehensive program that we implemented with more than 40,000 students in Los Angeles with most favorable results. This research-based approach integrates high level literacy skills and social and emotional development with service-learning opportunities integrated throughout. Now the program, in its fourth edition, has found a home in many states and districts from Hawaii to New York to Florida to Texas. And Michigan! Implementation varies from a summer experience to being integrated into existing academic classes during the school year to being a program for every seventh grader in a New York district. Adaptations have been made for students as young as fourth grade and all the way up through tenth.

What makes this approach unique, desirable and effective? Several key elements include:

• Engaging teaching methods modeled during the professional development create a platform for bringing learning to life and encouraging even reluctant participants to give their all.

• Incremental skill development that breaks down complex skills into their discreet parts allowing transparency into the learning process so students learn HOW to learn; this aligns with all current ideas about the value of metacognition. Keep in mind also that once you know how to learn you can learn again and again and ... you get the idea!

• Worthwhile experiences that move the acquisition of skills and knowledge straight through to application (service-learning). This improves retention and makes good sense if you agree with educator Ralph Tyler who said, “Learning is like fish. If you don’t use it, it won’t keep.”

• Transforming the entire learning process from “Do I have to?” to “I want to!” replacing boredom in school that can lead to dropping out with staying in school!

Of course this approach is part of a larger response to the dropout issue; however I am certain this approach works. What’s also fun (for me) is how the professional development provided for Strategies for Success with Literacy is a pure pleasure to lead. I have the best time watching teachers light up as they go through the processes, remember the best teaching methods we all too often forget as they acquire new knowledge that rejuvenates them as professionals. The well-articulated and designed curriculum materials, the integrated literature approach, the cross-curricular possibilities, and examples of what students have achieved inspire and prepare teachers to effectively take the process to their kids. And teachers of all grade levels K-12 attend due to the learning theories and how so much of what is presented can be adapted to improve teaching across the board.

Come to the Michigan Strategies for Success with Literacy Summer Institute hosted by Ionia this summer – August 10-12. Find out more by contacting me at cbkaye@aol.com or Deborah Wagner at dawagner@ioniaisd.org. Other institutes are being held in western Massachusetts in later June and another in the Chicago area in late August with yet another still being planned. Please let me know if you are interested in finding out more, or in bringing these ideas and the program into your school or district.

Thanks to Learn and Serve – Michigan for asking me to blog on this subject and share ideas about this program!

All the best in service,

Cathryn Berger Kaye, M.A.

CBK Associates
Author of the revised The Complete Guide to Service Learning, Second Edition  (Free Spirit Publishing, March 2010)

Contact her at: cbkaye@aol.com or www.abcdbooks.org