Youth Davidson is the manifestation of our hope to create an entirely youth led service initiative within the local community. Our initial goal is to foster interest and desire for civic engagement within middle and high school students. From there, students will create service projects for issues they identify in the community.
The 8th Grade Practicum Program at the Community School of Davidson seeks to immerse its students every Friday in activities revolving around the concept of civic engagement. By partnering with the Community School of Davidson, Youth Davidson will develop an 8th Grade Practicum Curriculum for the second practicum session, which begins on March 2, 2012. The curriculum will take the form of an unofficial internship with Youth Davidson, enabling the students to work in cooperation with Youth Davidson to form a joint board and identify its members. The teachers and administrators of local schools will be asked to recommend students with leadership potential and interest in civic engagement to become members of the Joint Board, which will begin meeting following Davidson College’s winter break.
The first activity that the Davidson Service Board will participate in will be an Orientation Day, in order to introduce the students to the members of Youth Davidson and to each other. Orientation Day will begin with a scavenger hunt throughout the town of Davidson, focusing on the issues present in the community. The students will be assigned to a group of about ten individuals including a Youth Davidson member for this part. After the scavenger hunt concludes the students will have a lunch provided by Youth Davidson and the afternoon activities will center around small break out sessions on a variety of topics, such as grass roots political activism, issue-based service, and brainstorming projects workshop. A member of Youth Davidson will teach each break out session.
The Davidson Service Board will then work to identify important issues in Davidson and construct service projects to resolve them (project examples that students could potentially develop are spelled out in the budget.) Students will have full liberty to develop individualized projects that address specific needs in the community. After developing the project idea, the Joint Board must submit a grant proposal to Youth Davidson to request partial funds for their project. The remainder of the project’s budget will need to be met by student efforts via fundraising and donation acquisition, acting in many ways like a non-profit. If the board identifies several issues, it shall prioritize those needs and develop service projects to address each one. In this way, students on the Joint Board will be empowered to resolve the issues they find in their community, while developing a valuable leadership and non-profit skill set.
By late spring 2012, the Davidson Service Board is scheduled to be split into a Middle School Division and a High School Division. The Middle School Board will continue to promote student-focused service by targeting elementary school students and, through issue-based projects, teaching them about local civic engagement. The High School Board will be designing service projects to resolve the pressing issues that it defines. Ultimately, the goal is to enable these boards to become self-sufficient, making Youth Davidson’s primary involvement centered on granting the boards money to complete their projects. Thus, there would be a sustainable, comprehensive emphasis on civic engagement in the local school system from elementary school through high school. This structure would foster and directly correlate to the sustainability of the Middle and High School Boards by empowering youth to seek service opportunities such as the boards.
In the fall of 2012, Youth Davidson will create a Youth Council as the next phase of the project. The Youth Council would be a coalition of the local non-profits, churches, sectors of the municipal government, and individuals that prioritize youth empowerment and involvement. As such, this entity would act as an umbrella organization, led by the High School Board itself, in an attempt to create an environment of collaboration amongst its members. This environment would better allocate the resources of The Youth Council’s members toward the true issues affecting youth.
Long term, Youth Davidson hopes to gain non-profit status and expand. The non-profit will aim to mobilize the comprehensive youth engagement plan developed by Youth Davidson, and recreate similar organizations in the greater Mecklenburg area. Finally, the grant Youth Davison could receive from the Bonner Community Fund will simply act as our impetus. We currently intend to charter through the Center for Civic Engagement at Davidson College, thereby receiving a yearly budget to fund the grant accounts. As a non-profit we intend to gain corporate and individual sponsors that would contribute to the sustainability of our organization.

Problem

Based on the U.S. Census Bureau’s 2005-2009 American Community Survey 5-Year Estimates, in Davidson there are 1,362 students enrolled in grades 1-8 and 459 students in grades 9-12. These 1,821 students account for approximately 18.9% of Davidson’s total population. Despite its substantial presence, this demographic currently has very little input about the issues facing Davidson. Both Mayor Woods and Commissioner Wessner expressed that the lack of youth involvement in civic issues, such as the planning of the Davidson Comprehensive Plan, was paradoxical to the hallmark Davidson way of life. “Civic Engagement is one of the defining aspects of our citizenry,” stated Commissioner Wessner, though she noted that the age of those that were civically active was almost always over 18. Further, Wessner highlighted that many of the students that are civically engaged often attend projects and fundraisers because they are “dragged there by their parents.”2 The need, then, is to empower youth to become intrinsically motivated to serve their community. For it is the youth of Davidson that will inherit the burden of these issues, such as the dilution of the “sense of community” as the local population continues to increase.Therefore, it is imperative that the Davidson community fosters a socially active, civically engaged youth populous, not only for the preservation of its historic identity as a close-knit, politically active community, but for the betterment of society as a whole.

Solution

Our solution is quite simple. The fundamental belief of Youth Davidson is that our students have the ability to truly change their communities and actively address the issues they face. Therefore, we seek to enable our students to pursue their own solutions to their own problems by providing financial support and encouragement and letting them take control. While our solution is quite simple, it is innovative because we believe that the people most directly effected by the issue have the best knowledge of how to address. So when you talk about youth issues and youth activism the best way to address those topics is to allow youth the freedom to develop their own solutions.

Example

Currently, our Middle Division of the Davidson Service Board is working on developing a project focused on promoting recycling in the town of Davidson. In the middle of town there is public park called The Green and surrounding the park there are a number of garbage cans. In fact throughout all of downtown there are a number of garbage cans but there is not a single public recycling bin in downtown Davidson. Therefore, our students decided to create an entire PSA campaign and project to raise funds for the purchasing of new recycling bins for downtown. The PSA was entirely written, filmed, and edited by our students (who are finishing it up this week), and the project they are planning is multifaceted. It first centers around raising funds for the purchase of the recycling bins through a series of creative fund raisers at Davidson's major town-wide gathering in May and it secondly focuses on the creation of a petition to be signed by Davidson citizens, demanding local officials to prioritize green initiatives. Our model of truly giving the students the freedom to chose their projects allows for their projects to be vastly more effective because they address a legitimate need in the community that an outsider (like a college student) would not readily see.

Marketplace

Our biggest competitor is the YMCA Teen Council, which provides a social atmosphere for youth to collaboratively serve their community. However, the YMCA Teen Council does not allow its participants to actively create their own projects around the community issues the students themselves identify. While they limit Youth Davidson's growth simply because of their established presence in the Davidson and Cornelius Communities and the students it draws, Youth Davidson offers a more empowering model that truly gives the students the ability to be social innovators. Youth Davidson also seeks to collaborate with local schools, governments, and non-profits to better address and equip our students with the skills necessary to be truly active citizens of the Davidson Community.