Moving On & Moving In...

As some of you know, Alison (Alie) Huxta served as the UCCP’s VISTA for two years, during which time she took what was a very small POWER Internship program with a handful of students from a couple of high schools and built it into a truly POWERful part of the UCCP’s Leadership Development Continuum serving 30-35 juniors and seniors from over 20 high schools each year. The issues that these students have taken on during their internships (e.g. sexual violence; excessive consumerism and environmental sustainability; teen pregnancy; and media influence on youth), the energy and passion that they bring back to their schools and their fellow students and the written and verbal evaluations of the program from both participants and teachers, provide ample evidence of the amazing impact of Alie’s work. Alie also played a major role in shaping the Youth Action Scholars, the newest part of our Continuum, in which youth serve as peer educators on critical issues facing their communities and their schools. Despite our best efforts to keep Alie within the UCCP, she has decided to take a much needed “chill.” The entire UCCP family wishes Alie all the best as she travels, on foot and by car, through the back roads of the US. We are confident that she will make many discoveries and share them all with us when she returns. We can’t wait to hear the stories!

We are thrilled to welcome back Johannah Bennett, a former Leaders Corps member, who will become our new VISTA and who will coordinate the POWER Internship. Although Johannah left the Leaders Corps in 2009, she never really left the UCCP. She has formally collaborated with us from her positions with other organizations and, as the consummate networker, has always sought out exciting opportunities for the UCCP. Johannah already has a long list of plans for the POWER Internship and for the UCCP overall. I know they will be innovative, ambitious and lead to many fruitful prospects. If Johannah has not reached out to you yet, she will be doing so shortly. Let’s give her a wonderful welcome back!

Going National: Redefining What Civics Education is About

In early September, the UCCP joined four other organizations in Boston for two days of intensive sharing, brainstorming and visioning on how best to prepare young people to be lifelong participants and leaders in the civic and political spheres. The organizations represent geographic and programming diversity but all share our passion for equipping young people with the skills, knowledge, and values that enable them to have an active voice in the issues that matter to them and to the larger society. The meetings resulted in a commitment to collaborate on promoting and expanding the practice of Action Civics, a process through which young people identify and address issues of importance to them through research, constituency building, action and reflection. Action Civics meets youth where they are and supports and values their voice, knowledge, experience and perspective. The organizations will share practices and tools, reach out to other organizations engaged in similar work, and develop strategies for re-defining the way civics is understood and practiced in schools and after school settings. We are thrilled to be part of this timely and critical work with CIRCLE (Tufts University in Massachusetts), Earth Force (Denver), Generation Citizen (Boston and Providence, RI), Mikva Challenge (Chicago) and Youth on Board (Boston). Stay tuned for updates on this exciting campaign.

Funding Updates

We are extremely pleased to announce that the UCCP has been awarded three year grants from both the Pew Charitable Trusts and the William Penn Foundation. The Pew grant is to support our Progressive Youth Leadership Development Continuum while the William Penn Grant is to help us better align our activities and the activities of other out of school time providers with the city and school district’s educational priorities of decreasing the dropout rate and increasing the number of Philadelphia students who enter and complete college. We are proud to be a key part of these important goals. We also extend a deep thanks to YOUTHadelphia, the Youth Philanthropy Committee of the Philadelphia Foundation, for its support of our Youth Action Scholars initiative and to PHENND (the Philadelphia Higher Education Network for Neighborhood Development) for providing funding to help us launch our newest initiative, Youth Action News. Finally, we thank the wonderful individuals who gave generously to help us out in these hard economic times.

Summer Academy 2010

The UCCP concluded its 2010 Summer Academy with a genuine triumph. On August 10th we hosted what will hopefully become an annual tradition – the Summer Summit – a day long event engaging youth and allies in interactive workshops, film screenings and community presentations.

The 2010 Summer Summit was an example of UCCP’s Youth Leadership in action. It was planned and facilitated by this year’s Leadership Development Institute participants – 18 and 19 year old youth training to become part of our Leaders Corps. The LDI participants created flyers, signs and program agendas, MC-ed the event, directed the audience to appropriate destinations, ordered and served food and made sure everything ran smoothly. They did a fantastic job and gained an experience in organizing and coordinating events that will be useful in their work at the UCCP and in colleges they heading to in the Fall. In addition to their preparation for the final event, the LDI participants learned many aspects of youth leadership development, lesson planning and facilitation and created and facilitated activities for younger youth from UCCP's programs and a new partner this summer - Cradles for Crayons.

Our second year cohort of Youth Action Scholars had the opportunity to test their workshops on Education and Race, Culture and Mass Media that they have been designing and practicing over the summer. The Scholars created 4 workshops on: how oppression affects education, contemporary representations of blackface in the media, where school funding comes from and how it works and analyzing symbols in popular and ancient cultures. They did a great job facilitating and engaging their workshop audience in interactively learning critical issues and applying them to their own lives. If you or your organization is interested in hosting a YAS workshop, please contact Phil Scott at apscott@temple.edu.

The Summit also features a gallery exhibit and documentary screening by a group of 10 students who participated in a PhotoVoice process of documenting positive and negative aspects of their Philadelphia communities through digital photography. Graciously hosted at Tyler School of Art’s beautiful Student Lounge, the exhibit, entitled “The Ghetto is Not Our Final Destination” showed Philadelphia from the eyes of these youth. Their documentary elaborated on issues of safety and violence in Philadelphia. The PhotoVoice project is especially grateful to our partners Maria Kefalas, Jill Chonody, Jill Welsh and Shayna McConville for supporting the group through contributions of finances, facilitation and facilities!

Finally, this summer’s three introductory VOICES groups presented their films on Violence, Teen Parenting and STDs. The groups spent 6 weeks learning essential skills including teamwork and public speaking while identifying a collective issue, researching about it and working together to create a film to address it. The groups created informative and engaging videos and power point presentations that they presented to an audience of youth and adults and received feedback for their work.

We as the UCCP staff and Leaders Corps feel incredibly privileged to have had the opportunity to spend 6 weeks with these amazing and inspiring young people.