Service-Learning Update/ Wired for Service

Looking for a way to help improve your community and make it safer? Are you creating a service-learning project that will integrate several community organizations? Help Your Community is designed to assist multiple community organizations achieve common goals by creating community coalitions.

The site, http://www.helpyourcommunity.org/, offers resources to start your own community coalition and the ability to search by zip code for coalitions that already exist in your community. If you are interested in starting a community coalition, the site provides a step-by-step plan of what to do. The site lists the following steps as crucial to beginning this process:

Define the community problems and their impact on the community.
Identify key stakeholders.
Convene a meeting.
Share perspectives.
Discuss both the current reality and your hopes for the future.
Create a vision for your community.
Determine next steps.

The site has further explanations for each of the aforementioned steps. Once your community coalition is established, you can register with the website, so that other interested parties can search and find your contact information. The site also offers established coalitions tips on how to improve their initiatives. Finally, the site provides a list of useful links to help community coalitions get started.

For teachers, this site may be helpful to create a service-learning project, where students create community coalitions in their school or in their community. Students can create a list of organizations that may be interested in effecting change in their school community or the community at large. Once those stakeholders are identified, they could sponsor and host the initial meetings. Help Your Community is a superb resource for a service-learning project because it hosts a wealth of information for the early stages of community coalition development.