NYLC and State Farm® Announce 2004 Award Winners
2004 state farm awards
On March 29, NYLC and State Farm honored service-learning's brightest and best at the National Service-Learning Conference in Orlando. The occasion was the Third Annual State Farm Awards Ceremony and Luncheon, and the honored parties were Jane Hammatt-Kavaloski, a practitioner from Malcolm Shabazz City High School in Madison, Wis., and P.A.C.T. (Perceptions Actively Changed by Teens), an outstanding group of students from Central High School in Grand Junction, Colo.
Hammatt-Kavaloski received the State Farm Service-Learning Practitioner Leadership Award, recognizing those who have equipped young people to lead and serve, both through their direct work with youths and by nurturing other practitioners to expand their service-learning skills and knowledge.
A teacher, school social worker, and service-learning coordinator, she has organized service-learning classes at Shabazz for the past 20 years. Those classes have encompassed countless disciplines and connected hundreds of organizations and communities locally, nationally, and internationally. Under Janes leadership, Shabazz was named one of 1999's National Service-Learning Leader Schools by the Corporation for National & Community Service.
As a peer mentor with the National Service-Learning Exchange, Hammatt-Kavaloski supports service-learning programs in schools and organizations across the country. She promotes replicable program models through publications and informal presentations, and her workshops have trained hundreds of educators and students.
The young people of P.A.C.T. received the State Farm Youth Leadership for Service-Learning Excellence Award, honoring kindergarten through 12th grade service-learning programs and projects that demonstrate outstanding youth leadership.
A proactive, youth-run organization, P.A.C.T. provides participants with ways to change negative perceptions of youths. "Operation P.A.C.T," a weekly teen talk show on a local radio station, discusses teen issues in a positive way. Using skills from their civics and social studies classes, the students select and research topics, applying speech and forensics to clearly convey messages and sustain the forum.
The two-day P.A.C.T. Conference enlists high school students as mentors to teach middle school children about leadership and service-learning. As part of the event, mentors help the younger students to create and complete a service-learning project. Since its inception, the P.A.C.T. Conference has grown into the largest youth-run conference in Colorado.
P.A.C.T. students Emily Taylor, Derek Farnsworth, Shelby Aker, Rachel Hermann, Heather Ahuero, Jon Gallegos, Jessica Walden, Jared Prochnow, Erin Pifer, Trever Hoffman, Lainy Wood, Whitney Roseberry, Savannah Logan, Annie Li, Ryan Taylor, Matt Haynie, Ashley Bates, and Regina Grace received the award, along with their adviser Lanc Sellden.
