Introduction
SLYPN is proud to announce the launch of the Peer Mentors Directory and to introduce you to the SLYPN Regional Lead Team.  The Peer Mentors Directory is a network of seasoned, veteran service-learning leaders ready to connect with and support young professionals like yourselves.  Whether you have a question, are seeking guidance, or want to connect with a potential mentor, the Directory will enable you quick and easy access to veteran service-learning leaders throughout the country.

The SLYPN Regional Leads are a team of young service-learning professionals, one from each of the five SLYPN regions, working together to support and promote SLYPN.  You may have already heard of, seen, or worked with the Regional Leads during the Learn & Serve Challenge, October 6-12, as they initiated and lead service-learning events in their regions.  If you have not, here is your chance.

Now, this newsletter would not be complete if we did not share two potentially major policy impacts on the service field, the Kennedy-Hatch Serve America Act and the election of President-elect Barack Obama.  The Serve America Act (summary here) is a major legislative initiative that will expand opportunities for people to serve their communities at every stage of life, from students and working adults to retirees.  The original co-sponsors of the bill include John McCain and Barack Obama.  At the ServiceNation Presidential Forum on National Service, September 11, 2008, John McCain and Barack Obama discussed the value of service and their plans to promote service for all Americans.  Although neither uttered the word "service-learning," it was clear that both strongly support national service and service-learning.

SLYPN Peer Mentors Directory

Atlantic Region
Nelda Brown, National Service-Learning Partnership
Sharon M. Hannaby, Federick Memorial Healthcare
Alan Melchoir, Center for Youth and Communities
Elson Nash, Learn and Serve America
Scott Richardson, Learn and Serve America

North Central Region
Teri Dary, Wisconsin Department of Public Instruction
Angelia Salas, Michigan Community Service Commission
Wokie Weah, National Youth Leadership Council

Pacific Region
Susan Abravanel, SOLV
Mark Batenburg, Youth Service California
Debbie Genzer, Constitutional Rights Foundation
Don Hill, Youth Service California
Carole Lacovelli, Youth Service Hawaii
Deborah Loesch-Griffin, University of Reno, Nevada
Steve Padilla, The Resource Center

Southern Region
Joe Follman, Florida State University

Southwest Region
Shelley Billig, RMC Research

SLYPN Regional Lead Team
Atlantic Region: Andrew Campbell, America's Promise Alliance
North Central Region: Cameron Kruger, United Way of Greater Duluth
Pacific Region: Shalom Cook, Metrocenter YMCA
Southern Region: Rebecca Flood, The Service-Learning Exchange
Southwest Region: Tracy Vlnicka, FrontRange Earth Force

Issue Areas

Advocacy
Commentary by Ace Parsi, NSLP Policy Fellow, Graduate Student at UC Berkeley

"I won't just ask for your vote as a candidate.  I will ask for your service and active citizenship when I am President of the United States" -- President-elect Barack Obama 

The words above are pretty profound, matching the intensity of those uttered by a President of a past generation, "Ask not what your country can do for you.  Ask what you can do for your country."  We just reached a conclusion of an election where two candidates who differed on many issued both embraced one common purpose: the importance of service.  Both candidates are role models for this call, having performed extraordinary acts of service in their own right.  Both embraced the ideal in their vision for the country.  Read the full entry on the Service-Learning blog.

Communications and Visibility
SLYPN website and LinkedIn Group 

The Service-Learning Young Professionals website was designed for young (or new) professionals by young professionals.  Use it as a resource to find articles in your areas of interest, converse with other young professionals, and connect with those in your region.  Remember to take advantage of the opportunities, such as Sage Sessions and Forums.  If you know of a young professional in the field, please refer them to the SLYPN website.

SLYPN is also utilizing the new upgrades to the LinkedIn network.  LinkedIn is a business oriented social networking site.  SLYPN has formed a group to allow members to connect to each other to ask questions, make recommendations, and make business related connections.  Join SLYPN's LinkedIn group today!

Constituency Building
Spotlight on America's Promise Alliance
By Andrew Campbell, Youth Coordinator at America's Promise Alliance, SLYPN Atlantic Region Lead

Founded in 1997 by a summit of five living presidents, America's Promise Alliance is the nation's largest network of youth - and child-serving organizations, with the goal of improving the lives of America's children.  The Alliance's work derives from five developmental resource-the Five Promise-that have been proven to help young people find success in life: caring adults, safe places, a healthy start, an effective education, and opportunities to help others.  In April 2008, we commissioned a report called Cities in Crisis, which proved to be a clarion call for the nation around the dropout crisis.  Startling numbers, such as 30% of students (and over 50% of African American and Hispanic students) fail to graduate with their class, have awakened the population to the country' current failing educational system.

The Alliance has also recognized the relevance that service-learning plays in fighting the dropout crisis.  Service-learning increases engagement, as research in Engaged for Success has shown, students identify a lack of service-learning as an explanation for dropping out.  Likewise, recent research from the United Way entitled Seizing the Middle Ground has argued that most students drop out in the 9th and 10th grades.  At America's Promise, we've recognized the importance of the middle school years to dropout prevention.  our national strategy Ready for the Real World plans to impact 12 million middle school students over the next four years by providing them with service-learning and career exploration opportunities/  The goal is to increase engagement and motivation in the classroom by linking their classroom activities to the real world.  Ready for the Real World works closely with a variety of service-focused Alliance partners, including National 4-H Council, State Farm, National Youth Leadership Council, Youth Service America, and the National Service-Learning Partnership, among numerous others.  Some aspects of the current work focuses on providing a service-learning coordinator to identified urban schools and providing Semester of Service resources to service-providers.

Find Ready for the Real World online.

Diversity
From the Fall 2008 Edition of the National Youth Leadership Council's The Generator

One of the standards of the K-12 Service-Learning Standards for Quality Practice is diversity: service-learning promotes understanding of diversity and mutual respect among all participants.  The Fall 2008 edition of the National Youth Leadership Council's The Generator features and article, Beyond "Valuing Diversity" in Service-Learning, underlining the value of diversity in service-learning as a learning and teaching strategy while offing ideas for integrating diversity into all aspects of a service-learning project.

Research
National Conference on Citizenship, 2008 Civic Health Index: Beyond the Vote

This year's National Conference on Citizenship (NCoC) was September 22, 2008, in Washington, DC.  The NCoC's Civic Health Index, regarded as the definitive measure of civic engagement in America, was released at the Conference.  The Civic Health Index was created to assess how Americans were performing on a wide array of indicators of civic health, such as giving and volunteering, and understanding civics and politics.  one of the highlights from this year's report is that Americans are actively engaged in the presidential election, and excitement among Millennials (those born between 1980-1995) is higher than older generations. 

Read the full report here.

Higher Ed
Campus Service-Learning Efforts Boost Voter Participation
Submitted by Karen Partridge, Campus Compact

Some 22-24 million voters in the 18-to 29-year-old age group went to the polls on November 4, a turnout rate that has not been seen in decades.  According to the Center for information & Research on Civic Learning and Engagement (CIRCLE), those under 30 made up an estimated 18% of all voters - only a small increase over the last election, but one that translates into at least 2 million more young voters than went to the pools in 2004.

Get-out-the-vote efforts on college and university campuses across the country played a major role in engaging students and others in the election process.  Through classes and extracurricular initiatives, campuses worked to encourage civil discussion of critical issues, stress the importance of participatory democracy, and give students the information they needed to register, vote and create their own voter education and registration projects.

These schools used a variety of approaches to encourage student engagement.  At the University of California Santa Barbara, students going door-to-door in the dorms registered 2,400 voters in a single night.  Students at North Carolina Central University helped run major registration drives in adjacent communities.  Springfield College in Massachusetts registered students as they moved into the dorms and set a goal of registering every eligible student.  Ohio's John Carroll University created an election web page, sponsored an election-related discussion series. and set up voter registration locations across campus.

Hundreds of other campuses established similar efforts, aided in many cases by Campus Compact's 34 state offices.  These offices were active in promoting election-related activities through the organization's nonpartisan 2008 Campus Vote Initative, which served as a clearinghouse of information for students.

In addition to voter registration and education, campuses worked to ensure that registered students followed through and voted.  To gauge the success of these efforts, Tufts University created the Campus Votes Challenge, which provides third-party verification of the undergraduate voting rate at participating schools.  The Challenge grew out of an earlier service-learning class in which students tracked voting rates.  to date, 60 colleges and universities from across the country, representing more than 400,000 students, have registered for the challenge.

Nonprofit Management and Leadership
The Charismatic Organization 

In the same way charismatic individuals attract followers, charismatic organizations draw dedicated donors and committed champions.  These groups don't depend on charismatic leaders -- rather, they strengthen their core and build strong networks of support within and and around themselves.  In The Charismatic Organization, experts Shirley Sagawa and Deborah Jospin show nonprofits of all types how to restructure their organizations, internally and externally, to become more charismatic-and more effective.

What if every person involved with an organization was fully engaged and shared a common goal? What if the efforts of a relatively small ring of staff and board members were amplified by everyone touched by the organization, including current and former volunteers, staff, board members, clients, constituents, funders and supports? That, the authors show, is the way a charismatic organization operates.  They provide numerous examples of how successful organizations have made this shift, as well as action steps that all organizations can take to perform better.

Too many nonprofits today are unable to operate at their full potential because they are stuck in effective "business as usual" paradigms.  The Charismatic Organization offers a guide to reframing nonprofit work so that organizations cna expand their resource base and sphere of influence to further their missions and achieve greater impact.

Offering real-life examples form nonprofit organizations, as well as business and political enterprises, this book will transform nonprofit leaders' understanding of how to build high-yielding relationships between their organizations and the people who can help them.

Who should read the book?

• Organization managers and leaders from all sectors interested in increasing their impact and resources
• Aspiring social entrepreneurs and other change-makers building organizations from the ground up
• Nonprofit board members engaged in helping their organizations go to another level
• Volunteer leaders hoping to connect their efforts to a larger purpose
• Business leaders who care about doing well by doing good
• Donors who want their philanthropic dollars to make a difference
• Students and academics interetsed in organizational behavior and the social sector
• Government executives, policymakers and grantmakers interested in organizational effectiveness and program sustainability

SLYPN and NSLP Connections will host an online book party for The Charismatic Organization during the new year.  Please look for the invitation in the near future.

Professional Practice
By Jessica Bynoe

Jessica Bynoe, Program Officer for Youth Engagement at the Academy for Educational Development, recently authored a white paper titled Confronting the Glass Ceiling of Youth Engagement.  This paper investigates the questions: Can young people truly engage in community institutions and decision-making or are they destined to hit a glass ceiling? And, furthermore, if there is a glass ceiling, what can young people, adult allies, and communities do to prevent, circumvent and crush this obstacle? In the paper, examples from the Youth Innovation Fund and interviews with youth engagement experts indicate that seemingly successful partnerships between young people and adults with institutional power can suddenly and without good reason be diminished or terminated-especially when young people begin to ask for more change and push harder on the operation, policies, or culture of the targeted institution than adult allies are prepared for.  Bynoe presents several recommendations to confront and crush the glass ceiling.  This obstacles exists, and only by naming it, understanding it, and preparing young people to address is, the glass ceiling will be shattered.

Grants and Awards Opportunities

• Teach Something Grants (Deadline: December 15)
  Do you want to improve education in your community? Do Something and Tutor.com are offering $500 grants for your ideas or projects that make a difference around education issues.  DoSomething.org is giving our ten $500 grants for education projects.
• UnitedHealth HEROES Service-Learning Grants
  UnitedHealthcare and Youth Service America are excited to offer the UnitedHealth HEROES service-learning grant program for youth-led community education projects in AL, AZ, CA, CO, FL (selected counties), IL (Chicago-land and Peroria) IN, MD, NC, NJ, NY (Long Island, NYC, Syracuse), OH, PA, SC, and TN.  Email for questions.
• Allstate Foundation Funds for National and Local Programs (Deadline: Varies) 
  The Allstate Foundatoin provides support to national programs as well as local programs in company communities throughout the United States.  Proposals must address needs within one of the following three focus areas: Tolerance, Inclusion and Diversity; Safe and Vital Communities; and Economic Empowerment. 
• Teaching Tolerance Grants (Deadline: Ongoing)
  Teaching Tolerance grants of $500 to $2,500 to preK-12 classroom teachers for projects designed to reduce prejudice among youth, improve intergroup relations in schools and/or support educator professional development in these areas.  proposals from other community organizations and houses of worship will be considered on the basis of direct student impact. 
• Wells Fargo Charitable Contributions Program (Deadline: Varies by State)
  Wells Fargo is committed to improving the bank's local communities in 23 states through grants and volunteer activities.  Visit the website and click on your state in order to review the local funding guidelines and application procedures.
• Literacy, Youth Leadership and Volunteerism Grants (Deadline: Ongoing)
  The Comcast Foundation supports organizations that make communities stronger through literacy, youth leadership development and community service programs.  Award amount range from $1,000 to $570,000.  Eligible applicants include nonprofit organizations with 501(c)(3) status that operate within a Comcast service area. 

© 2008 Service-Learning Young Professionals Network

SLYPN is administered by the National Service-Learning Partnership at the Academy for Educational Development—with strategic support and leadership from Youth Service California.

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