Today’s post comes from Shane Williamson, Community Learning Specialist at HandsOn Battle Creek
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HandsOn Battle Creek, located in Battle Creek, Michigan, has worked with their local community college (Kellogg Community College), K-12 public/private schools, and The LEAGUE Michigan, to lay the foundation for a community wide service-learning partnership. The goal of the partnership is to incorporate the concept of service learning into school lesson plans and missions as well as increase the amount of support and capacity for non-profits to manage volunteers and their own community impact goals. While this process takes time, there are some guides, from our experience, for those volunteer centers looking to start these types of initiatives in their community.
- Seek out your local higher educational institution. Colleges and universities are almost always looking for a way to get involved in the community in which they are located. Between your volunteer center’s contacts, the college’s contacts with community partners and their base of students (who are great volunteers), you will be able to begin incorporating service through those channels. This can lead to inclusion of faculty and academic programs in the future; thus leading to service learning.
- Do not try to “reinvent the wheel”. Work with organizations that are already doing the work you want to accomplish. At HandsOn Battle Creek, we already were partnered with The LEAGUE Michigan. This organization’s mission is to recruit and train K-12 teachers in the concept of service learning leading to a sustained presence of this concept in the schools. HandsOn Battle Creek was able to use their partnership to branch out to almost every school in the Battle Creek area. We are now seeing positive results from the trainings with the amount of projects taking place in the schools that are tied back to academic curriculum.
- Engage community partners every step of the way. Your community partners will let you know what type of capacity they have for student volunteering. They will also let you know what they need in order to increase that capacity. Meeting with community partners, offering trainings on the concept of service-learning, and regularly checking in, has made the process of building this community-wide initiative possible. Without these commitments from our community it would be impossible for our college to begin making a service learning experience mandatory in the coming academic year.
These are basic types of guidelines, but the bottom line to each of them is that you must listen to your community at every level. This type of concept cannot be prescriptive. If all groups, students, schools, and organizations come together and have a stake in the process of building this type of relationship; the outcome will be more sustainable and long lasting.
We would love to share our experiences, information, and work in this field. let us know what your experience working to build a service-learning program has been in the comments!
