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Youth-Driven Service-Learning Centers: The Emerging Pennsylvania Model

Cynthia Belliveau, Ph.D.
Janice Steinberg, M.Ed.

A Youth-Driven Service-Learning Center (YDSLC) is a community development center located in a school, managed primarily by young people, which brings together school and community resources for the benefit of all. The YDSLC model was developed at the Simon Gratz High School in Philadelphia with funding from the Pennsylvania Department of Education’s Learn and Serve Office, and has now been implemented in ten centers across the state. The Director of the original Gratz YDSLC, Janice Steinberg, M.Ed., won the prestigious Alec Dickson Servant Leader Award at the National Youth Leadership Conference in 1999.

Serving Communities

The YDSLC model is changing the way service-learning programs interface with communities in Pennsylvania. Instead of offering short spurts of service without follow-up, YDSLCs make long-term commitments to their communities. The service-minded young people who staff each YDSLC draw community members into the school and make them feel welcome and appreciated. YDSLCs bring together schools, community organizations, and businesses to form Community Advisory Councils to address issues of mutual concern. Students participate in these community councils and receive constant feedback from the organizations they serve – about what’s working, what’s not, and what needs to be done next.

YDSLCs avoid the traditional needs-driven approach to community development; they do not simply map the problems in their communities and create deficiency-oriented programs. In the YDSLCs, assessment of community needs is part of a larger effort to identify and mobilize the assets of individuals and organizations within communities. YDSLCs link these individuals and organizations for collaborative problem solving, and leverage resources from outside the community to support and amplify locally-defined development efforts.

Serving Teachers

The Gratz YDSLC makes service learning resources, assistance, and support easily accessible for teachers. The Center library has a collection of books, videos, guides to community services, listings of volunteer work sites, sample record keeping forms, descriptions of successful community service programs, and information about CATALYST mini grants for classroom teachers. Teachers come to the Center to meet with community organizations, learn about their programs and purposes, and plan service learning projects which address community needs while meeting curriculum objectives. Teachers will soon be able to make virtual visits to the YDSLC thanks to GratzBank, the on-line database described below. Service learning workshops are offered by Kellogg Peer Consultants, university faculty, staff from the Pennsylvania Service Learning Alliance and the Pennsylvania Department of Education, and others. The Hub, the Gratz YDSLC’s quarterly newsletter, provides information for and about partners and includes information about service-learning opportunities. The YDSLC is developing a bank of resources called GratzBank, accessible to all Center partners through the Center’s web site. All participating individuals and organizations contribute documentation of their activities, problems, and achievements to this growing GratzBank database, which will become a repository for the collected wisdom and experience of many service learners, accessible and searchable by a variety of means to inform and guide future program developers. Another helpful service provided by the YDSLC is the program management assistance offered by members of the Home Team, the group of students who manage the YDSLC. Home Team members work with teachers to maintain contacts with community organizations, order and manage supplies and materials, handle clerical and other administrative chores, work directly with students, or provide other needed assistance in implementation of new service-learning projects.

Serving Youth

Teams of committed adult and young adult leaders share in the training and supervision of students. The Director of the YDSLC oversees the work of the members of the core student leadership team with the help of one or more VISTA, Americorps, or higher ed assistants. High school faculty from the various disciplines supervise the work of students on projects related to course work in those disciplines, and staff of participating community organizations and agencies supervise the work of students performed in their agencies.

Students working in various capacities in the YDSLC receive much more in the way of recognition than pizza parties and Xeroxed school certificates. Instead, they receive academic credit and satisfy new graduation requirements while accumulating industry-recognized certifications in information technologies, documentation of the achievement of SCANS competencies, recommendations and awards from agencies other than the school, and other items of demonstrable (cash) value for the later pursuit of employment, post-secondary education, scholarships, and other merit-based financial aid.

Preparing Youth to Lead

Never before has there been such an appropriate time for honest attention to youth voice; the computer age has left many otherwise-competent adults feeling like naive children, and the young now have the clear edge in understanding and using technologies that seem to make the world exponentially more complex every day. The Gratz YDSLC embraces this new situation, harnesses the energy that’s released when kids get their hands on these new technologies, and directs their energy and skill at solving problems in schools and communities. The YDSLC enlists high school students as technology coaches for younger students and senior citizens, and is expanding its technology capabilities and technology training programs so that students will be prepared to serve others. Students will act as coaches for community members seeking to develop job skills, as consultants for small community organizations who can’t afford to hire expensive database or web site developers, and as research assistants for faculty members who don’t have the time to fully explore all of the Web’s riches for enrichment of their respective curricula. The Gratz YDSLC has no need for patient adult advisors who’ve been specially trained to pretend that youth input is valuable. The Gratz community is desperately in need of the skills and the voices of trained young people who can help address the community’s most pressing needs.

The competencies and skills outlined in the National Career Guidelines, SCANS, Pennsylvania State Curriculum Standards, and school district curricula become civic competencies when students use them for the public good. In our society citizens come together to serve the public good in the “third sector” – the thousands of non-profit organizations and community agencies and organizations that focus citizen energy on problems and needs not addressed by the for-profit and government sectors. The Gratz YDSLC places students in responsible roles in these third-sector organizations in their community. Aristotle said, “We become just by the practice of just actions… courageous by performing acts of courage… we acquire [the virtues] by first having put them into action.” The Gratz YDSLC fosters the ethic of service and develops civic skills… competencies Aristotle might call “virtues”… by offering students meaningful involvement in community organizations that can train them in the habits of service and commitment.

A pilot study of the Gratz YDSLC commissioned by the Pennsylvania Department of Education included interviews with community organization staff members involved in the work of the YDSLC. One of these staff members had this to say about the Gratz YDSLC’s young leaders:

“[It’s] made me look at high schoolers in ways other than just little people growing up to be big people. It’s made me take the work that they’re doing in service learning seriously… I used to live in Nicetown Tioga many years ago... I hesitated to even come back to the neighborhood, because I wasn’t sure how Gratz was, if you get my drift…. I’ve had to go out to a couple of schools, and I’d see them with the locks on the doors and the bars and the gates and all those things... But Gratz changed my mind about all of that, because I saw some very good and very positive things coming out of it…. [They] need to continue to focus on strengthening that community, looking for other roles in the planning, and to just keep renewing our faith in the future…. because that’s who they are.”

For more information, visit;

http://www.gratzclusterydslc.org

or contact the PSLA.