Year in Review

Hi Everyone. I finished my first City Year!

It turns out that blogging during my first year of service was more than I could handle. Luckily, "posts or it didn't happen" isn't how the world works. 10 months just happened. My first year out of college just happened. In my 5 posts of 2013, I probably captured less than one percent of all the incredible little joys, questions, struggles, triumphs, disappointments, and seeds that were planted, harvested, experienced in my first year of service.

In 12 days, I am going to start my second year of service with City Year. I want to do better than I did last year when it comes to documentation. I think that an important part of this work is sharing it with you. You and I are part of one very large community which is working to make the world a better place. The more that we can learn from one anothers' wisdom and experience, the better a job we'll be able to do. And so I willingly embrace the challenge (round two) of capturing elements of my year and sharing them via this blog.

So, a quick recap.

Flagship Service 2013
Last year I was a corps member. I was one of 10 team members, guided by a Team Leader (TL) and overseen by a Program Manager (PM), who worked one-on-one with students in the classrooms every day to help City Year fulfill their mission of keeping kids in-school and on-track. Here are some pictures from that time:

Welcome to the City Year Room!

My team. These are some of the most wonderful and hard-working people I know. 

Two of my teammates having fun with the "Cherian Method", an innovative and time-saving way of prepping locker decorations for application. (Yes, we were all very excited to have found a better way to put (academic) decorations on lockers). 

Much of our work happens in the form of small-group tutoring interventions. This is an especially small group, and we are spending time going over the day's English lesson to help make sure that the girls really understand what is going on. 

In the days leading up to the DC CAS, a brightly colored sign greets students as they come up the stairs in the morning. The CAS is the high-stakes standardized test used to measure, among other things, teacher and corps-member impact on student learning.

City Year teams start and end each day with a Strong Circle and a Spirit Break- a circle where we can all see one another, share announcements, and prepare for (or debrief from) a day of service . The spirit break pictured is a flu-season edition- we didn't want to get each other sick! 

All I want is for our students to be able to believe this about themselves, and to be able to actually do it, especially when we are not there.

Student Service Week 2014
Last year, I also had the unique opportunity to serve as the executive director for an alternative spring break camp for local high school students. Do you want to know what happens when you put a very diverse group of urban and suburban high school students together for a week of workshops, community service, and discussion all oriented around urban social justice issues? Magic happens. 

Below is an excerpt from the email I sent to my site after the week was over. 

"Students started their week with discussions of identity and of the different approaches that service can take to alleviating suffering. Monday ended with a student simulation of a town striving for prosperity despite an unfair system of class preferences. On Tuesday students interacted with different facets of poverty, hunger, homelessness, and incarceration. They deployed to service cleaning homes for the elderly, preparing meals for the hungry, building furniture for a shelter, and corresponding with juvenile inmates. On Wednesday students learned about urban environments, touching on food deserts, play deserts, and the relationship between DC’s waste and the Chesapeake Bay. Their service included Anacostia River cleanup, urban farming, and guerilla gardening. On Thursday, students explored healthy relationships on all levels from intimate partnerships to intergroup dynamics. Their service on this day included work with womens’ shelters, anti-bullying initiatives, the #ThereIsMoreToMe campaign, HIPS, and MetroTeen AIDS. On Friday, students participated in a final service project, reflected on the day, and created partnerships that would allow them to continue their service beyond the week of SSW. On Friday they also celebrated their success through a touching graduation ceremony.

Ultimately, the students are the ones who can best speak to their experiences:

     ·“This week has been a major eye-opener for me. I love the conversations we had and loved helping the community." --Alayshia

     ·  “At first I just came here because I needed more service hours but now I'm a little sad to leave. Thinking about joining City Year. It was amazing!” –Kayla

     · “I had way too much fun for such an educational experience.” –Sarah

     · “CYDC, thank you for revitalizing my passion to save the world!”  -Tremayne

The energy and optimism radiating from our students at the end of the week was palpable. Students developed personally, felt solidarity with a larger service community, and were empowered to leverage their time and resources to #makebetterhappen. I am grateful to have gotten to play a part in such a special week. 

Dig Deep, Rise up, and Break Through,

Kami

Planning and delivering this program, called Student Service Week, was one of the most challenging and rewarding things I've ever done. From the logistical side to the leadership development side, the lessons and reverberations of the experience will stick with me for a long time. 

Here are a couple of pictures from Student Service Week 2014:

Students and CY volunteers after a human rights workshop. 

These students had to tolerate aggressive cops, discriminatory real estate agents, and  unresponsive banks as they struggled to succeed in a simulation activity which tasked them with "building a prosperous community".  In this picture, they are attempting to cope with the highway that was just built, which cuts their neighborhood in two. 

Student responses to a warm-up activity asking them, "how do you think the world sees you?" Our whole week was geared towards empowering students to learn from their own observations, to make connections between the personal and the political, and to take action to make the world a better place. The biggest thing that we wanted to teach them was how to think critically about social justice

Final circle on the final day of spring break. I can't really describe what it felt like to have so many of my flagship team members there by my side, doing a rockin' job, during our spring break program, so "awesome" will have to suffice. On this day, they took inspiration from the week's theme ("The rose that grew from concrete") and gave me three dozen roses to celebrate the culmination of our hard work! 

Coming up next....
In two weeks I am going to start my second year of service! I'm going to be a Team Leader, guiding a group of first years through the experiences that I had last year, and helping them to be the most powerful agents of change that they can be. None of them know anything about City Year culture yet. My seventh graders will be eighth graders, applying to specialty high schools. I am going to have to manage data and coach people. It's going to be a phenomenal year. I look forward to sharing the nitty gritty (as well as the big picture inspirational) aspects of this work with you via the blog. Stay tuned!

Yours,
Kami