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Tuesday, August 22, 2006

Youth as Leaders
By nsbyrer @ 4:50 PM :: 390 Views :: Volunteering

Engaging youth in service and citizenship is as important to America as teaching youth to read and write. Read the new (2005) American Youth Policy Forum Study, titled Restoring the Balance Between Academics and Civic Engagement in Public Schools, available at http://www.aypf.org

The T/MC web site links library hosts information that shows what some programs are doing in some locations and which could be duplicated in hundreds of other locations if people knew about the ideas and had the resources to put them to work in more places.

Here are samples of Web sites where youth are making a difference by taking the lead:

Service Learning Offers Opportunities for Youth to be Engaged in Leadership and Learning. Visit the National Service-Learning Clearinghouse web site to find information about service learning opportunities. http://www.servicelearning.org/

Learn and Serve America web site provides information on how service-learning provides our nation's youth the opportunity to make a difference in their communities while learning. http://www.learnandserve.org/

YOUTHNOISE is an Internet forum and listserve that encourages young people to connect, reflect, share ideas and get involved. If you operate a youth technology center, this is a great place to connect your young people with peers. It's a great way to teach civic engagement. http://boards.youthnoise.com/eve

Teen Think Tanks of America, Inc. (TTT) is an innovative program that gives teenagers a voice in identifying the causes of teen violence and in developing ways to stop the violence. http://www.teenthinktanks.org

The Service-Learning Listserv (K12-SL) of Learn and Serve America has been discussing ways to involve youth in high quality service-learning projects that would make a meaningful contribution to learning, but would also contribute meaningful solutions to the war on poverty.

Converting Service Learning into long-term involvement and leadership is a goal of the Tutor/Mentor Connection. Engaging mentors to teach this process is one strategy.

The following suggestion was submited on 7/13/02 by Cynie Parsons, founder, SerVermont.

We invite you to read this and consider the following challenge: What would it take for 5% of the k-16 public and private schools in the US to have projects like this in place by the end of the 2002-2003 school year? Schools that implement these projects could show what they are doing on web sites that are built by students as part of the project's communications effort.

Background information: 1) Sixty-two percent of the labor force in the U.S. can be defined as "working class." That is, they are not a supervisor or the boss, but people in both white collar (teachers) and blue collar (janitors) work who have little or no control over the pace or the content of their work.

2) The income-restricted poor come overwhelmingly from the working class at the time they are not working at steady jobs, and while probably only 14% of the people in the U.S. are economically poor in any single year, over a decade as many as 40% of the working class can fall into (and out of) poverty.

3) Two-thirds (2/3) of all poor people in the U.S. are white. one-fourth (1/4) of all black people are poor.

These statistics are for the start of our 21st Century, and come from Michael Zweig, professor of economics at SUNY.

USING THIS INFORMATION AS A STARTING POINT, HERE'S CYNIE'S RECOMMENDATION FOR A SERVICE-LEARNING PROJECT

Elementary school principal and teachers, concerned about reports of terrible famine in an African nation, decide to share concern with the children appropriately at each school level, asking the pupils what they might want to do. They ask if anyone "official" is going to that country to help, and the pupils in the oldest class (grade 6) do some original reseach and learn of three organizations preparing to be of assistance.

They ask the 5th graders to write letters to the three organizations and request that a representative come to the school to tell them what they are planning to do. Two do not respond, so the one who does come explains that they are sending a nutritionist to tell them how best to use the foods coming to them from several countries.

The students vote to collect money to help pay the cost of the nutritionists trip. They decide that they will collect the money based on the number of books they read from lists made up by a joint committee of pupils from each grade, parents of pupils, and teachers.

The local radio station, cable tv unit, and a give-away paper all tell of the activity and X amount per book is pledged.

The fourth graders are the record keepers, a team from all six grades are the treasurers.

But half way through the reading/collection period, the children begin to wonder whether there are any hungry children in their own town. The sixth graders are once again doing the research; the fifth graders contacting relevant organizations.

The whole student body discusses what could be done, and a food distribution program is put in place monitored by the students.

When the nutritionist returns from Africa, he comes to the school to give his report -- what he had done with the money provided by the students.

Each one wrote a report on what he/she learned.

Geography; history; arithmetic; language arts.

Not only have youth developed a sustainable project to help reduce world and neighborhood poverty, they have empowered themselves to be leaders who will use this process to identify and solve problems for the rest of their lives.

If any of you adopt this project for your school and create a web site to tell about it, please send the ULR to tutormentor2@earthlink.net

Note: Add your own web site links to the Links Library and join in discussions that help create the resources needed to duplicate good ideas in more places....and to keep good programs funded in the locations where they already operate!