For the past two years I’ve had the pleasure of teaching at the Service Learning Project (SLP) whose mission is to provide opportunities for young people of all ages to think critically about the world, engage in service learning, and help make public policy. Through school-day, after-school, and now remote programming, SLP serves about 1,000 students in grades K-12 each year. SLP offers in-person youth programs in New York City, Vermont, and Los Angeles while the virtual SLP Labs are open to students throughout the U.S.
During the pandemic I had the time to think about this extraordinary program and what it contributes to public school children, as well as their teachers. The following is an interview I conducted with SLP Founder and Director, Liz Pitofsky.
Liz, thanks so much for speaking with me. To start, how is SLP approaching its work during the COVID-19 pandemic?
When schools closed in late March, we were in the early phases of our spring session. Our school partners suspended their projects with outside partners, with everyone assuming we’d be able to resume within a few weeks. Once it became clear that schools would not re-open, we had to permanently suspend the spring session. Fortunately, our Youth Board, made up of New York City high school students, was able to begin working remotely right away. They did an amazing job of responding to the crisis at hand, quickly launching the #SLP Service Challenge, a social media campaign to help children and teens advocate from home. Early on, the challenges were a response to the pandemic. At the end of May, after George Floyd was killed, the challenges became a direct response to the nationwide protests. We were eager to take our lead, as we always do, from the young people in our organization and were so inspired by their work during this difficult time. We also worked hard to create a remote version of SLP, and were able to launch SLP Lab in time to offer summer clubs to families. Our Summer Labs served mixed-age groups at the elementary, middle, and high school level. A very exciting aspect of our remote program is that young people can participate not just from multiple schools but from multiple states. We had young people from New York, Oregon, North Carolina, and Florida participate over the summer and are hoping to have even more states represented in our upcoming Fall Labs.
What are you hearing from the DOE about outside providers such as SLP and school starting in September?
We haven’t heard a uniform policy about outside providers from the DOE but our individual partner schools are choosing to work with SLP remotely, at least during the fall months.
What challenges does this crisis pose for educational non-profits such as SLP?
I would say there are two main challenges: First, how to continue providing high quality programming when we cannot meet in person. SLP is a student-driven and very hands-on project that benefits from the immediacy and excitement of in-person discussions. We were thrilled by the success of our virtual summer program because it meant that, during the pandemic, we could continue to serve our young people at a high level.
The second, which will come as no surprise, is how to sustain our organization financially. At SLP, we are dedicated to full participation in our youth programs and, to that end, we cover the expense for about half of our school partners. All of our funded schools, located in historically under-served neighborhoods, serve predominantly low-income families of color and these school partners would not be able to participate in SLP if we could not cover the expense. We lost multiple sources of funding as a result of the quarantine and have worked hard over the past few months to supplement these funds. There is so much need right now -- much of which is more urgent than SLP -- but our community has continued to be so generous: buying tickets for a postponed annual benefit and helping us exceed our fundraising goal for our first-ever virtual raffle.
Tell me about SLP and how it got started.
As you know, I am VERY passionate about kids and service! SLP is inspired by work I did in the early 2000s for an amazing non-profit, The After-School Corporation (TASC). TASC’s founding mission was to ensure that all New York City public school students had access to free, high quality after-school programs. I had a few different roles at TASC but my last project there included an after-school leadership club for middle and high school students living and attending schools in historically under-served New York City neighborhoods. Similar to SLP, the students would identify a community problem and try to help solve it. I was so inspired by the tremendously positive impact of the experience on students and felt like I had found my calling: to help ensure that all young people have the opportunity to become leaders and agents of positive change in their neighborhoods and schools. I started by bringing action civics into the school day, my first group was a third grade inclusion class in a Brooklyn public school. They decided to help prevent deforestation and produced an incredibly powerful PSA about how we can all make changes to our daily routines to help protect the environment. And SLP has grown from there: we now serve close to 1,000 students per year, in grades K-12, and in New York City, Vermont, California and nationwide through our new remote program.
With the pandemic, the economy, racial injustice, an ineffective and indifferent administration, and a crucial presidential election, what can all students take away from the lessons of SLP?
I think our Summer Lab experience is a perfect illustration of how SLP can benefit young people. All of the summer groups chose issues that were a direct response to the Black Lives Matter protests: school segregation, the dangerous overuse of 911, and the bias inherent in the existing school curriculum. The students who participated this summer began the process with incredibly honest and productive discussions about race in the United States. These conversations were challenging, and the issues could feel overwhelming, but as they continued to work through them together, they began to feel more optimistic about the potential for solving these problems and more determined to play an active role in addressing these issues in their own schools and neighborhoods.
Young people of all ages are more aware of social problems than we may always realize. For example, we have had many groups of younger students choose gun violence as the issue they are most concerned about. Sometimes their concern is gun violence in their neighborhoods, sometimes it’s the possibility of a school shooting. It’s a very scary topic and the process of working with their peers to address it helps reduce the anxiety they feel and counteracts a natural feeling of helplessness that we all can feel about issues like gun violence, climate change, homelessness, and more.
We have found that regardless of the issue of focus, young people leave the experience feeling more optimistic about their ability to solve these problems, more excited and determined to use their voices to call for change. And it’s really a privilege for us to help amplify their very strong and important voices.