Outreach Highlights
August 2008

Youth with a Future offers a guide to service

Sam Levy is a volunteer for Student Bridges, a UMass Amherst student organization that helped create and direct the Youth With A Future workshops. He recently led city youth on a tour of the campus.

College students looking for rewarding community service opportunities and to more fully engage cities like Holyoke and Springfield, Massachusetts now have a detailed guidebook to follow.

Youth with a Future, a downloadable manual available at http://youthwithafuture.net, grew from a successful program teaming college students from UMass Amherst, Hampshire College and Amherst College directly with youth programs in Holyoke to prepare disadvantaged teenagers for college or career.

The project was funded by a three-year $498,000 Community Outreach Partnership Center (COPC) grant from the U.S. Department of Housing and Urban Development administered by UMass Amherst Outreach. The grant has funded a wide variety of programs aimed at economic development, educational opportunity, community empowerment and cultural preservation. (Read more about other work UMass Amherst Outreach is doing with community partners and area colleges in Holyoke.)

The seventy-page book compiles material developed by the college students, youth program staff and peer leaders in creating and implementing college awareness and preparation workshops for early teens in the city. The book takes users through a history of the program, guides them on building partnerships and designing the workshops, and offers a series of examples.

With titles like "How to Build and Write a Resume" and "Starting the Journey," the workshops are designed to inspire and encourage youth and create a framework for career or education advancement. The workshops and manual are also designed to be flexible and easily tailored to suit individual communities and organizations.

The city of Holyoke has in recent years provided a range of unique opportunities for university outreach, community-university partnerships, and community service learning.

Mishy Leiblum, graduate coordinator for Student Bridges, a UMass Amherst student-initiative community outreach program that provided volunteers to help create and direct the workshops, said the workshops aim to help youth whose families may not have experience considering, choosing, and preparing for college. Student Bridges works with the Community Service Learning program at UMass Amherst’s Commonwealth College to introduce students to in-depth community experiences accompanied by challenging reflection, reading, discussion and writing, providing volunteers to help create and direct the workshops.

"We try to prepare them for the bureaucracy," she said. "We spend a lot of time on SAT testing, the application process, and grants and loans."

“We sometimes joke with them that 'It takes a PhD to get into college,'" she said.

Youth With a Future co-editor Imre Kepes is co-director of El Arco Iris Youth and Community Arts Center in Holyoke, co-coordinator of COPC College Prep and Youth Development, and he helped originate the partnership with area college students. He called the resulting online manual a work-in-progress.

“We hope that as more college students get involved, we’ll be able to issue updated editions” he said.

Karen Barshefsky, director of UMass Extension initiatives in the federal Children, Youth and Families at Risk (CYFAR) program and coordinator of the COPC grant, said, "This project is unique in that it gives ownership to the college students. The manual," she added, "is an outline of how to think about working with youth and emphasizes collaboration and community partnerships."