Advancing the Service-Learning Field in a World Without Learn and Serve America

I recently wrote about how the President’s fiscal year 2013 (FY13) budget request failed to include even a compromise position on funding for Learn and Serve America (LSA). As we’ve seen over the past year, the loss of a highly leveraged funding stream for service-learning has been harmful to the web of connections across and within states as well as schools’ abilities to improve, highlight, and sustain outcomes for students and educators. While this is a significant setback for the field, in many ways, we have been unshackled from a relatively small federal investment within the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS).  We all know that the bulk of service-learning across the country, and the world, is not funded by this single federal program which has never received over $42 million.

In other words, we can choose to see this challenge as an opportunity. 

In fact, I believe we have never had a better chance to reshape how we think about outcomes for youth and how we see the imperative of engaging citizens of ALL ages as part of the solution to our nation’s toughest challenges—not only as problems to be solved. After more than 20 years of increasingly effective service-learning practice, research, and evaluation, we are poised to capitalize on this strategy that engages between 4 and 5 million students nationwide.[1] Yet, we are in a new economic and political environment and we must be willing to think and act differently if we truly want to reform education, close the achievement gap, and engage all citizens in our democracy. 

NYLC is determined and eager to embrace a new way forward.  As we strive to continue to be a resource for the field and an advocate for the outcomes that can be achieved through service-learning, I ask for your help in this endeavor:

• We need your stories of achievement through service-learning, especially testimonials from students, as well as from parents and administrators who can raise their voices on behalf of their children.
  
  
• We need organizations and individuals across the country to help lead and participate in these conversations at the state and national level. We are incredibly fortunate to have so many in the field willing to share their good thinking, and we continue to reach out in collaboration to convene small groups, leading up to a larger conversation at the National Service-Learning Conference. The goal is to develop consensus around a set of ideas that can help propel youth and solutions forward by using service-learning as a key strategy, and to help build and support the movement necessary to achieve it.
  
  
• Contact your elected officials. NYLC has secured a modest set of resources to bring new focus to our government relations efforts. Working in partnership with a Washington DC-based firm, we are working to develop new bipartisan champions and raise awareness of the positive impacts that service-learning achieves for and with youth, in education, and in communities. We believe this investment also brings value to the entire field as we engage a broad spectrum of partners to help develop the strategy and engage new stakeholders and advocates in this work. As this work reaches pivotal points, we will be calling on the field for input and to mobilize and contact elected officials.
  
  
• Contribute your ideas. Current federal investments as well as the President’s FY13 budget include support for numerous programs across the federal government that include service-learning as a strategy or could be leveraged as such, from the Department of Education, Labor, Interior, and others. We are working to develop an effective strategy within the current political climate and I would love to hear your ideas for how to engage other federal agencies and expand the resources and visibility afforded to service-learning.
  
  
• Join us at the National Service-Learning Conference for a fireside chat hosted by CNCS. Current grantees are able to use LSA funds for educators, administrators, and students to attend the National Service-Learning Conference to hear the information presented by CNCS, ask questions, and participate in important sharing and close-out activities. Please register today to attend the Conference. 

It is more necessary than ever that we come together, demonstrate the resiliency and creativity that we aim to build in young people with strong participation at the Conference, and collaboratively determine a new path forward.

I am eager for your thoughts and input. Please feel free to contact me directly.

[1] Corporation for National and Community Service, Office of Research and Policy Development, Community Service and Service-Learning in America’s Schools, 2008