Creating Kindness
Hello everyone, I'm Jaida, I am 12 years old and I came to the SLC with me and my mom's nonprofit KIDS CARE. Being the service people that we are and the horrible Nashville school shooting that just happened, we decided to make kindness cards for the front-line workers who responded to the shooting. With the help of the SLC and our new friends at Laurel Springs School we were able to collect 115 Kindness Cards from the people at the conference. We drove 20 minutes from where the conference was to the Nashville Fire Department #20 which is right [...]
Reflecting on the 34th Annual National Service-Learning Conference
By Grace Chenxin Liu, YAC Member Recently, we wrapped up the 2023 National Service-Learning Conference and celebrated the National Youth Leadership Council (NYLC)’s 40th birthday! This experience was incredible and impressive in every way. From the number of enthusiastic participants (even leaders from overseas!) and supportive environment on the Youth Advisory Council (YAC), to the astounding work of the NYLC staff and unique storytellers and presenters. There was so much trust and teamwork there, which I felt from the moment I met the NYLC team and YAC all the way to the way we embraced each other when saying our farewells. [...]
What would service-learning be without reflection?
Reflection is a power tool in the practice of service-learning. Often it seems like a simple act - think about what you experienced, write about it, talk about it, create something, but in reality it isn’t simple at all. It requires you to think deeply, to explore not only what you experienced, but what you gained from the experience. It asks you to not think about what you did, but how you grew as a person. Reflection is a building block of service-learning and one of the K-12 Service-Learning Standards of Quality Practice. Without reflection, we may focus on what [...]
Latinx Youth Saving Lives Through Culturally-Specific Service-Learning
When Minerva Garcia and Izabella Varela noticed the effects of COVID-19 on Latinx communities, they jumped at the opportunity to involve the Ascendencia affinity group at Northside College Prep in Chicago to be part of the solution. They joined a national initiative of Latinx people serving their communities and country to help prevent the spread of COVID-19 through targeted bilingual messaging in English and Spanish. As of September 2021, only 39% of Latinx people in the United States had been fully vaccinated, and Latinx groups continue to have disproportionately higher hospitalization and death rates due to COVID-19. As a national [...]
Service-Learning is a Budding Seed of Hope
Our nation is facing catastrophic challenges. Southwestern US cities across California, Arizona and Nevada, among other states are dealing with a water crisis due to climate change. Schools across the country are reeling from the ever increasing acts of gun violence like was witnessed in Uvalde, Texas where 21 lives were lost in the nation's third largest school shooting. Just a week earlier, 13 people (10 of whom were black) were killed in a racist hate crime at a Buffalo grocery store. And, then just yesterday four more people were killed by a lone gunman in a Tulsa hospital. These [...]
The M.I.N.D Project – A Reflection on Successful Service-Learning
By Christian Buonfiglio, Guest Writer Before graduating from the Foundation Academies’ Collegiate Academy, a public charter school in Trenton, New Jersey, each student must take a Civic Service-Learning course. Though the course is facilitated by English teacher Colleen DiDonato, the students, who are all in their junior or senior year, develop their service-learning projects together. This year, students from the course have led a service-learning project that has changed the lives of their fellow students -- and changed the school itself. One group of artists, athletes, and young leaders, led by then-junior Nomy Yanes-Castro, all saw the same need in [...]
Reflecting on the Youth Leadership Summit on Education Equity
By Talia Yohai, Guest Writer Participating in the 2020 Youth Leadership Summit by NYLC taught me a lot about the importance of leadership and service learning in order to address issues regarding education inequity all over the world. In this conference, I had the chance to talk to many teenagers from many different parts of the world that wanted to come up with solutions to the education inequity in their own situations. Talking to these very different people, I realized that for many people, education inequity is seen more in terms of the diversity and the intersectionality of the students. Meanwhile [...]
Equity in Education During COVID-19
Imagine all students starting their school days by eating a healthy breakfast, then jumping on their laptops to connect with their teachers through Google Classroom, then Facetiming with fellow students to complete their group projects. Imagine all parents knowing that their children are receiving the best educations despite classrooms having been moved from school buildings to living rooms. Imagine every teacher equipped with the training and knowledge to ensure that every student has the opportunity to succeed. Unfortunately, this is not the reality for many students across the United States. Issues of equity become readily apparent when students go hungry [...]
Connecting Girls Across the World to Change the World
By Christian Buonfiglio, Guest Writer Daisy Leonard and her sisters, Coco and Sunny, have problems of global importance to solve. Racial and religious hatred, the decline in the mental health of young people, and the marginalization of girls drove them to create Dynamic Champions of Sisterhood, an online reading club that connects girls from all over the world to help them build confidence, challenge old ideas, and change the world. The Leonard sisters created DCS with funding provided by the Points of Light Foundation, a nonprofit dedicated to engaging with people from all walks of life to help the world [...]
Twenty Teams Receive Project Ignition Grants to Promote Safer, Smarter Driving
ST. PAUL, Minn. (August 19, 2019) – Coordinated by the National Youth Leadership Council® and funded by The National Highway Safety Traffic Administration, Project Ignition has selected 20 teams from throughout the United States to receive $1,000 service-learning teen driver safety grants in 2019. According to the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration, auto crashes are the number one cause of death for teens in this country. Project Ignition is a youth-led response that connects academic goals to address the issue of teen driver safety through service-learning. The grants will support student-designed and student-led campaigns aimed at preventing car crashes in their community. “Young people [...]