Service News Worldwide - May 2009

Following support of the Recovery Act, the Congress passed, with significant bi-partisan support, the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act in late March. The Serve America Act reauthorizes and strengthens the programs of the Corporation for National and Community Service, putting AmeriCorps on the path to grow from its current level of 75,000 to 250,000 members per year. It prioritizes programs that address educational, health and environmental needs, and creates service opportunities for veterans.

Of particular note, the Act provides funding for new innovative programs, including a Clean Energy Service Corps (CESC) and Summer of Service programs. The CESC is an environmental national service initiative that will create pathways for young people, from full-time, stipended service experiences to ongoing workforce education and training, ultimately creating a new, green workforce. The CESC will capitalize on the unique role of service to engage young people in their community’s needs, prepare them for careers and build paths to prosperity for low-income people and communities via opportunities in the green collar economy.

The CESC is dedicated to bringing about social and environmental change. According to Green For All CEO Phaedra Ellis-Lamkins, "The Clean Energy Service Corps holds special promise as a pathway out of poverty for low-income youth and moves us closer to building an inclusive green economy. The Corps serves as a strong entry point to sustainable career paths for thousands of people with barriers to employment.”

One of the CESC’s main focuses will be helping to retrofit housing, or improving the energy efficiency of residential buildings, which account for 40 percent of US energy use and carbon emissions. The CESC will also set up training and education programs for clean energy projects, and build the nation’s green collar workforce.

The Serve America Act is working its way through the appropriations process in the US Congress where funding levels will be authorized for varying components. Implementation of the Act is expected to begin in fall 2009, after which Americans throughout the country can look to the Corporation and to state offices for opportunities to get involved.

The CESC is one component of a larger Clean Energy Corps (CEC) initiative that strives to match the people who most need work with the work that most needs to be done by combining job creation, service and training to combat global warming. In February, ICP and others in the CEC Working Group (which includes representatives of the Apollo Alliance, Center for American Progress Action Fund, Green For All and others) publicly unveiled the CEC in a full white paper available on the ICP website.

Through state and local partnerships, the CEC will bring about social and environmental change. In the next five years alone, the CEC hopes to create at least 600,000 living-wage, career-track jobs in green industries, train people for them, and directly engage millions of Americans in diverse service-learning and volunteer work related to climate protection. For more on the CEC, including the white paper and a list of endorsers, please visit the CEC page on ICP’s website at http://www.icicp.org/greenservice.

For example, when leaders gathered for the G-20 meetings in March, the link between rebuilding the economy and fighting climate change was identified through the discussion of a “green global new deal” to stimulate economic growth through support of jobs and training in economic opportunities that address climate change.

Service opportunities worldwide provide ample space for training young people in skills for the green economy while actively addressing climate change. In the United States, recently passed stimulus and national service legislation is investing in plans to weatherize homes and buildings, stimulate innovative solutions to climate change and create opportunities for young people to be involved in a Clean Energy Service Corps to gain valuable “green collar” skills while joining in the climate change mitigation movement. Information about other green service opportunities in the US is available at: www.icicip.org/greenservice.

Internationally, governments and organizations are undertaking projects to engage and empower young people in climate change initiatives cleaning up their cities, creating awareness campaigns and improving the environment, while gaining employment skills. Some examples include:

• African Youth Initiative on Climate Change (AYICC), in which students on university campuses build skills through campus energy-efficiency schemes or by providing their scientific research to practical situations.

• In Kenya, the Kenya Muslim Youth Alliance is engaging young people in its Climate Change program focusing on advocacy, designing educational materials, raising awareness, planting trees and research on climate-friendly technology.

• In Nepal, Youth Engagement Sustainability (YES Nepal), engages young people in its Change the Bulb Campaign raising awareness of the benefits of changing to energy-saving light bulbs.

• In Canada, Katimavik’s Eco-citizenship and Healthy Lifestyle program involves  young people in six months of voluntary work promoting environmental stewardship and meeting ecological challenges in three Canadian communities.

Governments and organizations are beginning to see the need for investing in these types of efforts and engaging young people in opportunities that will benefit the environment and provide skills for jobs in the emerging green economy. More information about international green service programs is available at: www.icicp.org/greenservice. 

ICP: Can you please tell us generally about Earth Force’s method for engaging young people in environmental service-learning?

Lisa: What we do primarily is train and support adults who want to work with young people. And what the adults do is support a process of exploration, research and then project implementation that the young people do. The idea is that the young people’s service is only what happens at the end after they have gone through the hard work of doing an assessment of their community, figuring out what is an issue there they want to address and then doing the planning, the research, identifying stakeholders, developing a plan of action to come up with a project that they think will address that issue for the long-term. Our commitment is not only to that environmental service and the kind of physical outcomes that could happen in a community, we are committed to those young people really developing the skills and dispositions they need to know how to address these issues and to want to do it in their communities for the long term.

Alyssa: What I really think makes it relevant to (the students) is partly that it is environmental, and students can see and touch and feel and experience it, but it is also that we make sure that the issues are in their community. They are not doing projects on the rainforest in Brazil. They are doing projects around their school in Denver or around their watershed in Missouri. They are working on issues that they can see, that impact them, that have some relevancy in their life. Because we work in their communities and they get to choose what they work on, they are incredibly motivated and dedicated to finding good solutions for these environmental issues.

ICP: What are some of the key civic skills that students and educators take away from their experience with Earth Force?

Lisa: We have an evaluation that we do with Brandeis (University) that really looks at a lot of the critical skill sets that folks have identified as being really important around civic engagement. We look at those and do very, very well. From our data, there are really two different strands.

A real goal is changing how teachers teach and how young people think about themselves and their abilities and predilections to take civic action in their community. For us, in terms of teachers, some of the most powerful impacts we see are that they change how they work in the classroom. They lecture less, they are more likely to use community resources, all of those things that really say teachers are treating their students differently in the classroom and they are adopting more innovative and effective pedagogies. The other part is that they also start to see their students differently. We’re seeing that teachers change their acknowledgement and realization of what students can accomplish, which is huge. If we can also be changing educators’ perception and how they view their young people and what they can do in their classroom, we are dramatically changing that sort of fabric or the web of support that young people have.

In terms of the young people, another important thing to understand that what we do is that we focus on group work. So if a classroom is doing Earth Force you are going to see one project, not 30 coming out of it. As a result, a lot of the civic gains and skills that we see relate to young people doing group decisionmaking, team work, figuring out how to make democratic decisions, how do you bring in the slackers, how do you get a group dynamic working that actually lets them move forward. So lots of technical skills about how to run a meeting, how to make decisions, how to set up committees, how to make a plan of action. Very tangible kinds of things. The other ones again are about young people’s sense of who do I go to for help, how do I critically analyze this issue, where do I find resources, how do I talk to adults, how do adults treat me and those sorts of things.

Alyssa: The key learnings are two things for teachers: facilitating with students and allowing them to drive the process. Today’s classroom teachers weren’t necessarily taught how to teach in this way, and these are often new skills and pedagogies that they are learning in an Earth Force training. That is often new and uncomfortable for teachers. They will tell us that it is more difficult to teach in this way, but they are much more fulfilled in their jobs.

For students, I would say a key learning would be communication. How do you communicate with your peers, with adults, with decision makers, how do you present your project, how do you talk to the media, how do you ask questions in a good way. The communication skills that young people should leave the process with are the kinds that they will need and use for years to come.

ICP: The recent passage of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act signifies the increased attention toward national service in the United States and brings additional funding to service initiative throughout the country. What are your thoughts about the potential impact and promise of this legislation?

Lisa: It has been really exciting for us to watch it build out. I think the opportunities for us are around the legislation that’s committed to the youth empowerment zones and not just doing the service, but how to build a web of support for young people around doing that service. I hope the piece that continues to come out of it is that it isn’t a just a bunch of funding or one time opportunities, but that there is that investment in really magnifying the opportunities that young people have…That there is this added commitment to giving back, to sharing, to educating, and to making sure that you helped somebody else learn how to fish, and not just fish for them…If we bring that psyche to every one of these opportunities it doesn’t necessarily cost more, it just magnifies and deepens what that opportunity does in terms of benefiting the community and helping everyone go the next step.

Alyssa: I think the most exciting part is the actualization of this community-based focus. Our learning over the last 10 years is that it actually does take a village. If you are training one teacher or one partner in a community, it isn’t really sustainable and if we want systemic change, this focus that the legislation has on really investing in communities can be very powerful. If we can embed service-learning into multiple kinds of organizations -universities, school districts, corporations, community-based organizations - if everybody is carrying that service-learning torch - young people will have multiple opportunities and it will last. It isn’t just going to be about a simple light-bulb change, it’s going to be about how people run their business. People will consider engaging young people to help get the work done and that is a paradigm shift that I think could really happen if we were engaging whole communities in this kind of effort.

From February 27 to March 2, an estimated 12,000 young people from colleges and high schools throughout the US, Canada and dozens of other countries converged at the DC Convention Center in what amounted to the largest youth summit on climate change in history.[1] Organized by the Energy Action Coalition, Power Shift ’09 strove to push Capitol Hill to take “immediate federal climate action,” and to bring together passionate young leaders from across the nation.[2] As in 2007, the goals of this year’s Power Shift were to “mobilize, network, learn, teach, make a statement and lobby Congress to make some real progress on climate change.” [3]