California First Lady Maria Shriver Visits The National Service-Learning Conference

On Friday, March 18, 2005, California First Lady Maria Shriver and her daughter joined participants of The 17th Annual National Service-Learning Conference in Long Beach, Calif., to create school-supply baskets for a local Head Start program. The baskets, created as part of a conference service project, were decorated with ribbon, filled them with supplies and creative materials, and adorned with handmade cards and pictures. When all was said and done, 100 baskets had been completed.

Echoing the conference’s theme, Educating for Change, Shriver stressed the importance of engaging young people as a force for positive change in their communities. "I believe we can all do great things by volunteering," she told the projects' participants and assembled journalists. "Even young children are not too young to serve."

Supporting Head Start — a comprehensive early childhood program to ameliorate the effects of poverty on preschool children and their families — was particularly important to Shriver, as her father, Sargent Shriver helped established the federal program in 1965.

Photo of Maria Shriver by Bryan Thao Worra. © 2005 National Youth Leadership Council.