Semester of Service

This article is an email distributed by Stephen Culbertson, President & CEO of Youth Service America.

The Semester of Service is a new, public-private strategy to help young people find their voice, take action, and have impact on the most critical problems facing the world, such as climate change, hunger, homelessness, malaria, water scarcity, disaster preparation, aging, violence, and literacy.

For the last 20 years, millions of American children and youth have participated in highly visible service and service-learning projects on Global Youth Service Day (The Largest Service Event in the World) and for the last 14 years on Martin Luther King Day (A Day On, Not A Day Off).

In January 2008, Youth Service America and the Corporation for National and Community Service are encouraging students, ages 5-25, to develop a 14 week service-learning project that launches on the Martin Luther King Day of Service (January 21, 2008) and culminates on the weekend of Global Youth Service Day (April 25-27, 2008).

The Semester of Service will link each event's existing partnerships, create a quantum leap in the number of children and youth engaged in service, and advance bold quantitative goals that the Corporation and YSA have both set to expand the American youth service movement.

Projects will take place in classrooms as part of the academic curriculum; in schools as part of the extra-curricular activities of student councils, honor societies, student clubs, and sports teams; in congregations of faith; and in youth development groups in neighborhoods across the United States.

"Recent research has shown that projects must be of sufficient duration, typically at least a semester of 70 hours long to have an impact on students...Fewer hours simply do not give the students enough time to grapple with difficult issues or to have a deep enough experience to make the learning endure." --Dr. Shelly Billig, Unpacking What Works in Service Learning

"Martin Luther King was interested in big results not the short-term. So, the idea of King Day being the signal for a long-term commitment by millions of students, during or after-school, over a semester would have warmed his heart. Martin always asked us to do more than we were doing because the Road ahead was still so long...the Mountain to climb was still so tall. The Semester of Service is just that opportunity to do more." --Senator Harris Wofford, Colleague and Lawyer for Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Visit the Semester of Service website to download tools and resources including the Semester of Service Strategy Guide, a Timeline Tip Sheet, and Learning Modules for various issues such as Hunger and Homelessness, The Environment, and Stopping Youth Violence.