Transitions

I completed my summer internship on Friday afternoon and flew back to Cambridge last night. Still not fully re-settled back in my apartment and beginning work tomorrow as an Orientation Advisor for the incoming MPP1s, I haven't had much time to fully reflect on the summer and its impact.

I feel honored to have had the opportunity to serve the White House Council for Community Solutions for the past eleven weeks, and I'm indebted to the Women and Public Policy Program and the Adrienne Hall Fellowship for their generous support, especially in cultivating a community of incredible women doing important work across the globe.

Working with the Council deepened my content knowledge about programs and networks of interventions that support youth who are disconnected or at risk of becoming disconnected from education and the workforce; about the imperative of service and civic engagement as strategies in catalyzing community development; and about the promise of cross-sector collaboration in rebuilding isolated and fragmented parts of communities. The Council also taught me a great deal about the politics of decision-making; about using strategies of negotiation and crisis management; and about the ebb and flow of progress in the unyielding global struggles to alleviate poverty, rebuild communities, and prepare the next generation of young people to be educated, productive, and engaged citizens of the world.


As the summer comes to a close, and as I reorient myself to my neighborhood (and reminisce that it was today one year ago that I moved to Massachusetts for the first time!), I'll say goodbye for now, for I'm sure that for the next nine months my life will be consumed by my coursework, my classmates, my second-year policy project, my work with the Student Public Service Collaborative, and other exciting adventures. Thanks for following my summer's work!

$173,000,000,000.00

In 2010, volunteers served 8.1 billion hours, which has a low estimated value of $173 billion.

This morning, the Corporation for National and Community Service released the latest data available on Volunteering in America. The website, updated annually, hosts the most comprehensive set of data on volunteering and national service in America, with some pretty interesting trends and demographics at the national, state, and local level.

Some highlights:

• In 2010, 8.3 million Young Adults dedicated 844 million hours of service to communities across the country -- this amounts to just 21.9 percent of young people, ages 16 to 24.
• The District of Columbia has an average annual volunteer rate of about 30 percent.
• The Twin-Cities win for having the highest proportion of residents volunteer of the 51 largest US cities -- a rocking 37.1 percent.
• 29.3 percent of women volunteered in 2010, compared to 23.2 percent of men.

The site profiles how volunteers help solve community issues through public-private partnerships and community-based organizations. These spotlighted examples amplify the founding principles of the White House Council for Community Solutions -- that all across America, individuals and community groups are finding solutions to local problems, and that every American community can create the civic infrastructure or local road map to drive significant progress on any community challenge.

An NU professor of mine always repeats the mantra, "Think globally. Act locally." Indeed, as models like Cities of Service continue to scale-up, I expect that next year's volunteering statistics will be even higher. The Cities of Service focus on “impact volunteering" -- strategies that target community needs, use best practices, and set clear outcomes and measures to gauge progress -- is particularly exciting. The philosophy moves beyond simply doing service to do a good deed and instead considers service as a mutually beneficial activity that leverages an individual's assets and strengths to address local community needs.

Is your city a city of service?

From good intentions to great impact

Over the weekend, a teacher-friend of mine from Chicago and I stopped by the Save Our Schools march/rally/festival that was taking place in the Ellipse at the White House. We didn't stay for very long, but we were both puzzled by how rapidly polarizing the rally was. A few of the guiding principles of the march -- demanding equitable funding for all schools and community leadership in local school decision-making -- are  worthy of support and noble in theory, but the words thrown around with derision towards data ("end testing now!" and "no federal competitive funding!") were unsettling.

The fatalistic rhetoric that our schools need "saving" and that joy and creativity are dead are far-fetched. I know that protests and rallies have their purpose (and, sure, I've participated in many myself!), but I couldn't help but wonder what this throng of people was gearing up for. Parents and teachers advocating for more community involvement in Washington? Posters blaming Arne Duncan and Barack Obama don't really accomplish much. Angry fear-mongering rhetoric clouds the real message that improving education is a national imperative, and reform ideas can percolate both downwards from the federal government and national organizations and upwards from local communities. First, though, the national conversation on education reform must move beyond ideologies, finger-pointing and false dichotomies. This CLASP piece on task forces on poverty and opportunity gives me hope that state-level efforts to move new ideas can have great impact.

This morning, I had the pleasure of meeting Dorothy Stoneman, founder and president of YouthBuild, a comprehensive support program in communities across the country for low-income young people to work towards connecting to education and the workforce. She is an incredible advocate in the arenas of youth development, civic engagement, and service-learning, and it was wonderful being able to sit down with her and speak candidly about this work. She expressed the growing tension between supporting programs that work and attempting to shift systems towards equilibrium change. Obviously, it's not an either/or question, but in the same way that prevention and intervention must be balanced, programs and systems must be balanced as well.