Rethinking the Process of Qualifying Service-Learning Partner Sites

By: Gary Kosman, Founder & CEO of America Learns

My friend Andrea is a high-powered, super smart lawyer and do-gooder in Los Angeles who cringes at the idea of working for a small, community-based nonprofit.

When Andrea was engaged in service-learning, the site where she was placed provided her with an incredibly exciting project that was supposedly going to add a ton of value to the organization. While Andrea’s supervisor loved Andrea’s deliverables and while Andrea’s professor awarded her with an “A” for her service, the project Andrea spent countless hours on was never actually used at her organization. Why, thought Andrea, should I spend my time somewhere when the organization doesn’t have the capacity or formal plans to implement the “really important project” they asked me to work on?

This experience led her to steer clear of the idea of working for a community-based organization.

The Problem Doesn’t Stop with Andrea
Last year; a university approached America Learns with a problem: its students were living Andrea’s service-learning experience. Students were being placed in nonprofits, completing supposedly important projects (databases, implementation plans for special initiatives), and then finding that while their projects received rave reviews, their host sites never asked themselves, “Do we really have the capacity to implement what these students create for us?” Nor did they ask, “What steps are we going to take to ensure the projects these people work on will truly help us to realize our mission while giving our those in service-learning a meaningful experience?”

The Host Site Qualifying Process
After listening to the concerns of the university, we spent some time creating this document. Here’s what happens when this document is used:

1. The host organization confirms, even pledges, the project the service learners will work on has real value for the organization. By doing this, we take steps to ensure those involved in service-learning walk away from their experience with the knowledge they really made a difference, hopefully inspiring them to continue making a difference in their community.

2. We try to make sure the host site has the student’s interests in mind. We ask the organization to clearly define the purpose and intended outcomes of the experience for those in service-learning, not just for the organization.

3. The host organization holds one person accountable for the project being successful, both for the organization and for the student. The organization identifies the one employee who will be held accountable for the student receiving everything that’s needed to achieve the project-based and student-focused outcomes described earlier in the application. By holding one person accountable in advance for the student’s success, we make sure the organization itself is not only held responsible for its commitments to the student, but that there’s a single face, a real person, that teachers and professors can hold accountable for how the student is treated on-site. Setting up group meetings or calls to figure out “what happened” should problems arise shouldn’t be necessary.

4. The organization states up front that it has already developed a plan to implement the student’s project (so long as it meets expectations and other variables affecting the organization have not changed). The organization actually submits that implementation plan as a part of the application, and also lists any factors that may hinder the project’s implementation.

This qualifying process would obviously need to be modified for non-project based service experiences (e.g., providing tutoring or mentoring services), but we encourage the organizations we serve to qualify their partners in a similar way by:

· Making sure a student’s service has the potential to deliver real value to the organization;

· Making sure the organization has the capacity to really benefit from the student’s service and has created a plan to really benefit from the student’s service; and

· Making sure the organization’s team members are committed to ensuring that the student truly benefits from the service experience.

Bonus!
Once you have this document, you also have clear criteria that can be used to evaluate the project’s impact.