“One fact remains undisputed: for youth engagement to endure, young people must care about the work they are doing and see intrinsic value in their contributions.“
— Ryan & Thomas Growney SG’24
Discover How to Design Local Youth-Centered Service Ecosystems for Sustainable Youth Engagement
Youth service today falls short as largely a performative exercise to meet obligatory requirements. Consequently, the promise of social impact engagement — personal development through intentional service — is eclipsed by the college admissions arms race. Youth service must be in service of youth and their communities and not just the college application process.
One reason for this shortcoming is that youth are often not seen as a valuable resource for their communities. Youth and communities alike must recognize that young people have the power to change the world, starting where they are, right now.
As a result, there’s a glaring deficiency in local youth service support structures. Existing service programs more often than not offer trivial and performative service alternatives while failing to create a vital personal connection between youth service activities and their personal aspirations. Because of this, millions of young people don’t view service as the transformative pathway it can be to achieving their ambitions and self-fulfillment.
Powerful youth support systems already exist, just not for youth service. For example, youth athletic programs, which have strong support structures and incentives, foster high participation rates and valuable outcomes.
Our extensive research, engaging thousands of young change-makers, educators, and youth service leaders worldwide, reveals a sobering truth: local youth service programs are failing at their fundamental purpose: empowering youth.
Untapped talent and ambition are everywhere. Opportunities aren’t, especially ones that engage youth.
We have firsthand experience at our own school which clearly shows that this is not due to a lack of interest. In fact, a 2016 Allstate Foundation survey found nearly half of America’s youth are yearning to engage more but are unsure of the opportunities available to them. “Despite 51-year highs among entering college students in their desire to engage in their community,” a University of Maryland School of Public Policy study discovered, “volunteering among high school and college students has declined since the early 2000s and remained relatively low and stagnant for the last decade.”
When local youth service programs don’t engage young people, the community denies them valuable opportunities for personal and leadership growth, academic and social confidence, career readiness, and civic engagement, while foreclosing on a pathway to belonging and fulfillment. Without effective local youth service programs, the most impact-ambitious youth seek opportunities elsewhere, and the local community fails to develop the next generation of changemaker leaders and reap the powerful social benefits of their efforts.
There is a desperate need for a paradigm shift in how young people perceive and participate in service activities. At Service Academy, we’re rewriting this narrative.
Consider the potential of harnessing the energy, talent, and potential impact of the 15.1 million high school students in the United States alone. Assuming just 10 hours of meaningful service per year, students could yield over 150 million service hours of powerful personal development and impactful community engagement annually. By engaging youth in a sustainable service ecosystem, we can harness a collective effort equivalent to 75,000 full-time workers, year after year.
Imagine a vibrant, self-sustaining youth service ecosystem, tailored and led by the very youth it serves, and supported by the wider community. Continuously adapting to the shifting needs and aspirations of the community’s young changemakers, this ecosystem becomes more than just a program; it’s the engine driving local social change. Through this dynamic blend of leadership development and collaboration, it not only enriches the lives of participating youth but also becomes a center of gravity for raising awareness, educating, and taking action on social impact within the entire community.
This approach centers on the profound benefits of service for personal growth and community engagement and the impactful interplay between the two.
Apply these principles to foster systems change leadership awareness and skills and build a contemporary service ecosystem locally that will deliver enduring benefits for both youth and communities.
Through Service Academy, a non-profit we established, we’re documenting our experiences, designing a framework, and developing a scalable template for other young changemakers to adapt, implement, and build upon to make the existing youth service programs in their communities work better.
Principle 1: The Power of Self-Belief in Youth Engagement
Service engagement can be much more than just volunteer hours, it can be a valuable opportunity for personal growth and experience that nurtures self-fulfillment and self-belief.
Without self-belief, the transition from reluctant volunteer to purposeful, active community participant is next to impossible because many young people grapple with fear and lack confidence, a fundamental barrier to engagement.
Effective youth service programs provide support structures that empower young people to discover their unique strengths, a cornerstone of self-belief, and chart an experience journey to achieve their personal aspirations. It creates a nurturing environment for reflection and self-discovery where social impact experiences become stepping stones in understanding one’s abilities and in building a personal relationship with the community by helping address the most acute social challenges.
When youth are empowered to identify and leverage their strengths in pursuit of something larger than themselves, they build resilience. Sustained engagement and the active pursuit of one’s goals through progressive, impactful experiences is key to nurturing self-confidence, cultivating a sense of fulfillment, and developing leadership attributes that also benefit the community.
Principle 2: Critical Foundations of Engaging Youth Service Opportunities
The art of engaging youth is crafting opportunities that are practical and appealing. For those creating youth volunteer opportunities, three elements – structure, social connections, and ‘fit’ – should serve as foundational principles.
Structure is fundamental. Service opportunities should be structured to show why it helps young people. By structuring service opportunities with a learning model that mirrors their classroom studies, it enhances the appeal and likelihood of engagement. Opportunities with clear outlines of service expectations and their outcomes empower youth to make informed choices, visualizing how each succeeding experience broadens their skills and enriches their personal narrative. The alternative — disoriented youth, racking up hours with little self-development or positive impact — is a disservice to both them and their communities.
Social engagement moves youth to action. Shared experiences draw youth, mentors, peers, and those with lived experiences together, enriching the service activities with supportive bonds, guidance, and connection. These shared experiences motivate youth to act collectively, creating powerful relationships. This sense of belonging cultivates a committed community and enduring service participation.
Service activities that ‘fit’ — align with a young person’s interests, growth aspirations, or personal narrative — make engagement easy.
Each successive achievement not only develops a young person’s skills, confidence, and self-fulfillment but also exponentially benefits the community. This cycle of increasing mutual value creates a sustainable engine for positive social change.
Principle 3: The Interconnectedness of Societal Challenges and the Power of Empathetic Leadership
Systems change awareness and relational leadership form the twin pillars needed to convert well-meaning efforts into powerful catalysts for personal growth and lasting change.
Systems change awareness is the ability to understand and address the complex web of interrelated factors that contribute to social, economic, and environmental challenges. It involves identifying and addressing root causes, rather than just symptoms, to create sustainable and impactful change.
Relational leadership focuses on building meaningful connections, empowering others, and influencing change through collaboration. It emphasizes the importance of valuing and respecting the perspectives, experiences, and goals of those being served, involving them in the problem-solving process, and fostering trust and collaboration.
These represent the medium and mode of social impact work: the interconnected nature of societal challenges and the power of empathetic leadership.
Consequently, young people who approach their active social contribution through this lens are primed to understand service not just as isolated acts of benevolence, but as fundamental components of self-development and systemic change, thus magnifying the significance and influence of their efforts.
A powerful local network, composed of local governments, nonprofits, educational institutions, and neighborhood groups, lies at the heart of effective community development. These entities work together to create a potent support structure and living repository of social service knowledge, amassing valuable insights, educational tools, and resources that target the area’s most urgent needs.
Principle 4: Community Priorities and the Consolidation of a Sustainable Changemaker Development Network
This network has two important roles in a contemporary local youth service ecosystem:
- It informs the public about the top community priorities, guiding the direction of attention, resources, and research. This transparency facilitates understanding of the historical context of these issues, ongoing initiatives, successes, failures, and crucially, the specific and relevant areas for effective volunteer engagement to support existing solutions.
- It can connect youth volunteer programs to a wealth of social impact professionals working across various sectors. These professionals are not only looking to grow awareness for their causes but also to recruit and mentor volunteers, creating a network of mutual support and learning.
Communities should not engage youth solely in times of crises like natural disasters. The silent crises of poverty and inequality need youth participation just as urgently. Everyday service from an empowered youth network doesn’t merely fill resource gaps, it develops local resilience, acting as an incubator for systemic change, leadership development, and sustainable impact for generations to come.
Not only does this network foster a contextual understanding of community challenges and channel youth strengths where it can be most effective, but it also creates a robust support structure and knowledge center for the entire community. By engaging, developing, and empowering thousands of ambitious youth, this network amplifies its mission by tackling regional challenges and developing the systems change leaders the world needs.
Principle 5: Establishing a Community-Centric Youth Service Hub with Essential Infrastructure and Functions
At the center of a thriving local social impact system lies a crucial question: How can young people access this network and work to optimize and amplify its impact? Ideally, a network of schools would streamline and share service program resources to weave existing threads into a local youth service center of gravity, undertaking key essential tasks for the benefit of all the community’s youth.
These would include the identification of local social impact priorities, the provision of individualized student service counseling, the sourcing of opportunities from local governments and nonprofits, the facilitation of connections between aspiring activists and social innovators, and the organization of service learning and social impact programs, including lectures, conferences, and networking events.
This center of gravity should be at the heart of the neighborhood it serves, mirroring its diversity, echoing its voices, and promptly responding to its distinctive needs. The Service Academy framework and template are designed to be adapted or applied by any local community organization, whether it’s a school service club, a university’s social innovation lab, a local school service learning coordinator, a church or community center, or local government initiatives.
Bringing it All Together: Local Youth Service Ecosystems that Work
One fact remains undisputed: for youth engagement to endure, young people must care about the work they are doing and see intrinsic value in their contributions.
To achieve this, we need to create a local youth support network as dynamic, adaptable, and responsive as the youth it serves and as powerful as the range of social challenges our communities face.
Empowering youth service support structures foster self-belief through transformative impact, uniting young changemakers with their communities for a future defined by collective growth and powerful social benefits.
Youth service engagement should begin well before the college application process and continue to evolve, amplifying the personal and social benefits throughout the college experience and beyond. Embracing lifelong service engagement enriches not only the college years but all future experiences and relationships.
There’s a compelling force in involving youth in local social challenges — it evokes a profound sense of ownership and personal stake. The neighborhood they aid is familiar; it’s their home, a place infused with their roots and identities. This personal connection and act of reciprocation — of caring for the community that cared for them — instills their service with added meaning and boosts the likelihood of sustained participation and lasting personal and community change in the present and for all future experiences and relationships.
A youth community, cognizant of its strengths and armed with tailored opportunities to apply its skills for personal growth and maximal effect, becomes a potent catalyst for widespread youth empowerment. A new generation of engaged changemakers is the transformative force that our communities desperately need.
– Ryan & Thomas Growney SG’24