Youth Programs

Much has been made in recent years of the need to inculcate habits of giving and serving in young people. Volunteer service and service-learning programs have become an increasingly integral part of American culture, sprouting in high schools, colleges, churches and national service organizations. Such programs rightly emphasize the opportunities themselves—fundraising for causes, volunteering in soup kitchens, helping with housing programs, etc.—but they seldom have ready-at-hand resources to help young people explore why they are serving and to what end. What does it mean to choose to serve? Is an activity really service if it starts in self-interest? What is social justice and what is the character of its call? How do we even know if we are doing good or harm? Regular opportunities to read and reflect together on questions like these can create precious opportunities for young people and their service program advisors to deepen understanding even as they develop stronger habits of giving and serving.

Below are some examples of civic reflection activities for youth and youth service programs:

Indiana University Northwest has been holding a series of civic reflection conversations with students from Roosevelt High School in Gary. Using a diverse set of readings from African-American and Afro-Caribbean history and culture, eighteen students, ranging from freshmen to seniors, met in the 2006-07 academic year to explore their responsibilities as citizens and community members. Their conversations are being facilitated by Scooter Pégram, Assistant Professor of French and Minority Studies at IUN, with support from a respected RHS teacher and counselor. Among the questions they have discussed are What responsibilities do I have to myself and those around me? What do I, and those around me, think, value, and believe? What is my relationship to others in my community? How do we "belong" to each other? Pégram hopes to involve more IUN faculty and to secure funding that will allow the university to continue Conversations with Gary Youth over the long term. Click here for a newspaper story about the series.

Free Street, a longstanding arts outreach organization dedicated to opening the potential of youth and teens through theater and writing, has included civic reflection into a theatre project exploring the rise of popular poetry in the 19th century and the rise of rap music in the 20th century. Youth and adult participants in the theatre project meet monthly to step back from the creative process and reflect on questions about social relations as these are affected by conceptions of superiority, inequality, wealth and success, through facilitated discussion of writings by Ishiguro, Poe, Notorious B.I.G. and others. Organizers hope that the conversations will result in a qualitative deepening of reflection among project participants, and that as an organization Free Street will come to know its constituency in a more meaningful way.

A Conversation with Youth formed in one of Porter County, Indiana's poorest and most ethnically diverse neighborhoods. The conversation connected young people and adults who live, work and volunteer in the neighborhood through a larger world of ideas expressed in poetry, stories and essays. Bringing adults and youth into conversation around carefully selected readings in this way helped create a precious opportunity for participants to better understand and learn from each other about their different experiences living and growing up in the same community.

The Oregon Student Assistance Commission incorporated reading and reflection into regular meetings of its ASPIRE AmeriCorps volunteers from around the state in the 2005-06 service year. Organizers believe that providing a structured forum where participants could explore their volunteer experiences in light of selected readings and "most importantly hold their idealism and cynicism up for examination and discourse" helped bring deeper meaning and understanding to the AmeriCorps experience, and hope that it will encourage volunteers to continue civic engagement throughout their lives.

For information about Meaning of Service, a national project of civic reflection for AmeriCorps members, click here.