YAC Receives Funding from State Farm® Youth Advisory Board

NYLC’s Youth Advisory Council recently received a second year of funding from a group of their peers, the State Farm® Youth Advisory Board, for their work across the nation addressing the achievement gap.

YAB has granted NYLC $85,100 to support the annual weeklong National Youth Leadership Training, where high school-aged youth gather to learn service-learning leadership skills. This grant also supports the development of an interactive multi-media training tool on youth-led approaches to addressing the achievement gap, designed to help spread such initiatives across the country. NYLC is one of only 70 programs to receive funding from more than 500 applications from the U.S. and Canada.

YAC members Parth Shah, Farnaaz Farzanehkia, Soaly Pin, and Shivani Bhatt represented NYLC youth and staff in accepting the grant at State Farm’s Regional Office in Mendota Heights, Minn. Shah thanked State Farm for continuing their generous support of the National Youth Leadership Training during tough economic times. “NYLT allows us to learn the powerful effects of service-learning and learn a lot about each other and the society that we live in,” he said.  

Farzanehkia also spoke about the inspiring work done by NYLT participants on service-learning projects in their home communities, saying that the projects “personally inspire me to do so much more.”  She is now organizing a mentoring partnership between her high school and college students at the University of Minnesota-Twin Cities.

The State Farm Youth Advisory Board is composed of 30 young people, ages 17-20, who were chosen through a competitive process to oversee the initiative. They identify funding areas, review and rank funding proposals, and will now provide technical assistance, communication, and oversight to the grantees.

The check was presented by Missy Youmans of State Farm who commented how lucky Minnesota is to have NYLC, an “elite service-learning leader in the nation and the world.”