Models for future BC involvement with PSO

October 26th, 2007 at 05:21pm Chris Wells Permalink

I want to continue the discussion that began earlier in the week with Toby’s post on partnership development. The next two quarters will be quite important for the Becoming Citizens program, as we design a program that hopefully will complement PSO for some time. As I mentioned at the UW-group meeting on Tuesday, several possible models for doing this have emerged. I want to lay these out in order to (1) ask for feedback/suggestions; and (2) encourage us to think about the BC program as we develop partnership models, which have important bearing on what the BC program can do.

Track A: One model for BC interaction with the SoundOff emerged from a recent meeting with Lois at Service Learning Seattle (we are speaking again soon to look at some other ideas). In Track A, students would be placed directly with an organization (as most are now), and find ways for the work already going on to have an outlet on PSO. For example, with Service Learning Seattle, BC interns would work with public school 8th graders to learn to communicate the work they are doing in their service placements through the PSO. Beyond simply communicating about their experiences, this could also be an opportunity for those youth to connect to more information and deeper engagement about the issue (e.g. learning about a bill in Olympia that is relevant to their project).

Track B: Another possibility would be for BC students to spend their internships facilitating management teams with various organizations around the city. Here, again, BC students would be working with a continuing group of youth at a local community organization or community center (perhaps a library?). They would be working as small sub-groups of the larger youth management team.

Track C: A third possibility would extend the Service Learning opportunities of public school youth to include participation in the PSO, perhaps on a management or editorial team. In this case, the youth would earn their service learning ours directly from us, and BC students would be assigned to work with a group of such youth. I will talk to Lois soon about whether Service Learning Seattle would be open to that kind of partnership.

Track D: A final model for BC/PSO interaction would be the workshops Toby described in her post early this week. This would be the least demanding in terms of BC students’ schedules or the commitment of partners. BC students would intern with the CCCE (much the way the Focus Group interns did in the spring), they would design or at least learn to run skills workshops on various aspects of PSO (e.g. blogging, video production), and they would use PSO as the framework for the workshops. Workshops could be given at organizations either one-off or perhaps in a sequence (like two meetings separated by a week, with an assignment in between). This would give a large number of youth in many organizations exposure to PSO and the opportunities we offer; however, there would be no way to ensure that they continue to use PSO or that further content is produced after the workshop(s).

I think that, at least for the next two quarters, we probably will be best off with a combination of these tracks. Designing a program for BC interns doing different projects should not be a problem. I’d appreciate any feedback, suggestions or new ideas.

Entry Filed under: partner strategy