City Year
From Service-Learning Wiki
| This program was profiled in Growing to Greatness 2004. |
City Year also engages citizens in service by organizing large-scale physical service events such as renovating community centers, painting schools, planting community gardens, and other community investment projects. Starting with the first site in Boston, Massachusetts City Year has grown to 14 sites across the nation, including New York, Philadelphia, San Antonio, and Seattle/King County. A fifteenth site is under development in Little Rock.
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Service-Learning in City Year
While specific service varies among City Year’s sites, service-learning is a major strategy to enhance learning and civic development. City Year’s primary approach to engage students in community-based service-learning is through corps-led team-based youth corps modeled after the City Year corps model for different age-groups: elementary (Starfish Corps), middle (Young Heroes) and high school (City Heroes). Young Heroes program, the middle school service corps, is the oldest and most developed of the three programs. It emphasizes five elements: teamwork, diversity, study of social issues, community service, and mentorship. Each Young Hero must complete more than 75 hours of service in areas such as visiting with and serving with senior citizens, participating in immunization drives, promoting healthy ways of living, restoring green space, planting trees, or painting murals.
Each service project is preceded by a workshop on the specific issue to be addressed. At the end of each day, the teams reflect and extract lessons from their experience. Young Heroes has received national recognition from organizations such as AmeriCorps, Points of Light Foundation and America’s Promise.
Scope of Service-Learning
The Young Heroes program engages over 1,000 middle school students in ten communities across the country: Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Columbia, Columbus, Detroit, Philadelphia, Rhode Island, San Jose and Washington D.C. Since 1994, over 6,000 middle school students have participated in Young Heroes nationally. In 2003, 125 City Year corps members led over 1,000 Young Heroes in over 70,000 hours of service. City Year plans to expand the Young Heroes program to all of its 14 sites.
Intended Outcomes
Young Heroes seeks to enhance participants’ awareness of and sensitivity to community issues, and to enhance their motivation, capacity, and commitment to take action to address those issues. In 2003, City Year contracted an external evaluator to conduct an exploratory study of outcomes in the Young Heroes program. The findings of this study are leading to the development of measures for standardized outcomes, and are informing the design and implementation of a system-wide evaluation of the program that will yield empirical data on outcomes and impacts.
