When outstanding high school students in the Civic Education Project (CEP) go to class, they may be at a homeless shelter, a mayor's office or a newsroom. The classroom for this service-learning program is the urban world, and the goal is to educate in leadership and citizenship.CEP, headquartered at SESP's Center for Talent Development, runs intensive service-learning programs for high schoolers both over spring break and summer. New locations have been added for both in 2007.
Over the next several weeks, high school students will be participating in CEP's one-week "alternate spring break" experiences. Called CivicWeek, these immersions in a host city explore a social issue, such as urban poverty, conflict resolution or civil rights. The newest CivicWeek program is Hunger and Homelessness in San Francisco. Other 2007 offerings are Education and Youth Development in New York, Hunger and Homelessness in Chicago, and Politics and Urban Poverty in Washington, D.C.
For summer, the newest program is also in San Francisco, adding to existing three-week programs in Chicago, Baltimore and New York. Combining academic work and community service, each three-week Civic Leadership Institute analyzes social problems affecting specific communities, and helps students learn how they can use their own skills and abilities to help create positive social change.
Program director Rob Donahue, a Northwestern alumnus, founded CEP in 1997. "My goal was to connect kids at a younger age with meaningful civic engagement," says Donahue, who also started an alternate spring break program for Northwestern undergraduates when he was a student. "I wanted to educate high school students about how the world could be their classroom and to plant the seeds of social responsibility so that they could make more strategic use of their time and opportunities in college." He sees gifted children as future leaders who extraordinary potential to impact social problems.While all CEP programs integrate academics with meaningful volunteer service, the academic focus is always front and center. "It's primarily about student learning," says Donahue, who works hard at planning meaningful curriculum, meetings, reflections and policy briefings for each program. For example, a CEP summer course called Civic Engagement and Contemporary Social Issues introduces participants to the complex challenges affecting communities today, as well as current strategies for positive social change. "Students balance learning in traditional ways about social policies -- like current approaches to affordable housing -- and at the same time, they have many opportunities to meet a variety of the stakeholders involved, and to see the impact of policies first-hand," Donahue says.
Experiences in the community open students' eyes to many issues. For example, students in the Chicago program on Hunger & Homelessness visit the Chicago Food Depository and a homeless shelter, serve food at a soup kitchen, learn to sell Streetwise, visit the mayor's office to find out about Chicago's 10-year plan to end homelessness, and meet with a Chicago Tribune reporter about media coverage of hunger.For several of these programs, Northwestern partners with Johns Hopkins University, where Donahue began his work with gifted high school students.
One of the nation's only service-learning immersion programs for academically talented high school students, CEP serves about 300 to 350 students a year, according to Donahue. "They might not 'solve' homelessness in one week," he quips, "but they will leave the program with a higher commitment to making the world a better place."
More information about CEP is available at www.ctd.northwestern.edu/cep.
Photo captions:
Shiram Chauhan, a high school junior from Michigan, collects surveys on the streets of Washington, D.C., during a CivicWeek service project focused on Politics and Urban Poverty.
A group of CivicWeek students learn about Chicago's City Farm, an initiative to turn abandoned urban lots into sustainable organic gardens.
CivicWeek students in New York complement their study of Education and Youth Development with volunteer service at the Harlem Children's Zone.
Last Modified: 8/14/09