“I’m tired of all the shootings,” yelled Zaair, a high school sophomore at Barringer High School in Newark, New Jersey. A small group of students were in the middle of an important brainstorming session. “Yeah, me too. It’s all over the place,” said another student.
They were discussing ideas for a ServiceWorks community project. Other options had come up, but talk kept coming back to gun violence. It’s a grave topic with an enormity that can be hard to grasp, much less address. And the weight of being constantly surrounded by violence showed on the faces of the participants — called Service Scholars — who’d spent the last three months in the program.
ServiceWorks is a program from Points of Light, AmeriCorps and the Citi Foundation designed to help disconnected youth gain workplace and leadership skills through volunteer service. And capstone projects, for which the Service Scholars were brainstorming, are the most personal components of the curriculum because they give Scholars the opportunity to address issues that directly impact their daily lives.
[For more of this story, written by LaRhonda Boone, go to http://youthtoday.org/2016/09/...ake-on-gun-violence/]
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