Developmental Assets: A Potential Template for Community Covenants

At the VISTA training last month in Ypsilanti, I was privileged to see a presentation on the Developmental Asset Model for children conducted by the Search Institute. I was so inspired by the research that when I returned to Kalamazoo I told our director Jeff Brown about what I had learned. It turned out that Jeff was already certified in Developmental Assets and wanted to implement that idea into our community covenant to support the Kalamazoo Promise.

From the Search Institute website:

Developmental Assets are common sense, positive experiences and qualities that help influence choices young people make and help them become caring, responsible adults. Studies of more than 2.2 million young people in the United States consistently show that the more assets young people have, the less likely they are to engage in a wide range of high-risk behaviors and the more likely they are to thrive. Assets have power for all young people, regardless of their gender, economic status, family, or race/ethnicity. Furthermore, levels of assets are better predictors of high-risk involvement and thriving than poverty or being from a single-parent family.

There are forty identified Developmental Assets, which are broken down into external and internal assets. External assets include the categories of support, empowerment, boundaries and expectations, and constructive use of time. Categories of Internal assets include commitment to learning, positive values, school competencies, and positive identity. The individual assets vary upon the age group of the children, but all include these basic categories. You can view each of them on their website:

Early Childhood (ages 3-5)
Middle Childhood (ages 8-12)
Adolescents (ages 12-18)

One of the great pieces of this model is that it stresses programs that center on relationship building and valuing youth, rather than simply implementing new programs. It has the potential to be a great resource when the community is ready to create a covenant to encompass the new vision of Kalamazoo. If we build our model this innovative research, it could have the potential to affect a great number of children and families in Kalamazoo

Gilmore Museum Aims to Reach Out to Disadvantaged Youths

Disadvantaged teenagers could have the opportunity this summer to work with antique cars, and get paid for their efforts. The PRI is working with the Gilmore Car Museum near Richland to coordinate an educational program that would support low-income teenagers.

Using the Summer Youth Employment program, it has an opportunity to be both a educational experience and a well-paying job. Tim Morris, Gilmore's Director of Education, has experience leading programs at the Kalamazoo Air Zoo. He already has developed an in depth curriculum that meets state level standards. Additionally, the program is intended to excite and prepare these youths to enter car maintenance programs, such as the highly respected one at Kalamazoo Valley Community College.

The only barrier is finding the right source of youth employment to foster the program. With the Gilmore being just over county bounders, they can not access the large stimulus money for teens being poured into the Summer Youth Employment program. However, if they can access the program through Barry County, they have a great opportunity to employ youths and give them an opportunity to succeed in the future.

Summer Offers More Jobs for Disadvantaged Youths in Kalamazoo

For disadvantaged youths who would otherwise have little to do this summer, hope is arrived in the form of a $800 thousand stimulus supplement for employment this summer. Hundreds of youths ages 14-24 who are low-income now have the opportunity to have a meaningful and educational experience this summer employed in a non-profit in Kalamazoo.

The stimulus money provides the recruitment, administrative, and training costs associated with hiring. Non-profits who need staff will be asked to take on these workers free of charge - as long as they can find them meaningful work to do. This comes in additional to an estimated $300 thousand dollars which will be raised by city officials - coming to a total of over a million dollars in youth employment funds.

So the great task begins of finding opportunities that will not only keep youths, busy but also show them the value of steady employment and engage them in an opportunity to learn. Sure, you can put a bunch of workers in a park to pick up trash, but the experience may do little to actually change their outlook on life. We need experiences that will be transformational for these youths so that they use them to be more successful in the future.



If you administer a non-profit who is looking to have an educational opportunity or employment opening this summer, consider staffing your agency with the summer youth program. Contact Cincy Sullivan 269-383-2536 x 117 or csullivan@kresa.org

Kalamazoo Dig: More Community Gardens Make Sense

Community gardens make great sense for Kalamazoo. This is precisely why the PRI was excited to lay the ground work and facilitate the development of several more projects in Kalamazoo.

A community garden combined with recent stimulus money for a summer youth employment program has the potential to great a lasting impression on Kalamazoo urban agriculture. Basically, the stimulus package is guaranteeing the wages for hundreds of youth up to 24 years old; all they need is a place to work.

If we are to expand several more gardens this summer, we will need young people to staff them. These two programs have the potential to work in perfect symmetry. Not only will youth be employed, but it will be far more interesting and involved work that a typical summer job.

There are several other reasons why more gardens make sense in Kalamazoo:

• They give youths who would have no activities to not only have a productive focus but additionally get paid for their efforts
• They offer healthy fruits and vegetables and no cost to community resident
  
• They are a education tool to teach each other how to create their own garden
• They build relationships between different ages and backgrounds, and bring each other face-to-face in the community

With plenty of open lots available in Kalamazoo to convert, it should not be difficult process to being. What matters know is if community organizations can embrace and take on gardens as projects of their own interest.

PRI Launches new website

Yes.. it has finally come. The PRI is now online and up to modern standards with its beautiful new website.

Among other things, users may

• Register for volunteer opportunies
• Sign up for newsletters
• Donate directly online
• Read PRI stories
• Host poverty simulations and presentations
• Analyze poverty statistics in Kalamazoo
  

Please take your time, look around and enjoy!

http://www.haltpoverty.org

-Kevin Lignell

Could Kalamazoo be home to an Educare center?

What's a best way to make sure our youth grow up with the highest chance of success? Support them when the are young and most vulnerable. That's what successful Educare centers across the United States are doing to give their at-risk children the best chance of succeeding. Their goal: to dramatically improve the quality in programming for early children and create a platform for broader policy change.

Educare centers are state-of-the-art early childhood centers designed to meet the needs of today's families who are making the transition from welfare to work and are recipients of a mix of Head Start, child care and preschool services. They serve 150-200 of their community's at-risk children (birth to 5 years) and their families. Each classroom provides a BA-degreed teacher, an assistant teacher with a AA degree, and an aid from the community. All classrooms are supervised by teachers with Master's degrees in early childhood.

So why haven't we implemented one of these innovative ideas already? Basically, its purely a financial motive: Educare centers cost around $4-5 million to build and nearly $2-3 million each year to maintain. We simply haven't allocated the resources for such a project, though of large foundations are willing to help, it wouldn't be difficult to attract the funds. Organizations such as the Gates Foundation have contributed to projects on equal scale in the past and could be a possible avenue for the future.

Kalamazoo has the unique opportunity of already having an amazing program, the Kalamazoo Promise, in place to garner support for of these centers. What better argument that to suggest that our program is not the only solution but a perfect place to start for MORE programming to ensure our children have the best possible future. We are already a model for how to make education a real possibility for every child; lets make sure that they are supported from their earliest times of learning.

VISTAs for an Economic Future in Michigan

In a conference designed to continue the development of VISTAs designated in Michigan, what resulted was a strong discussion on how to make Michigan a legitimate economic, education, and political force in the United States.

The topic that keep arising continuously in my groups discussion: the fact that Michigan needs to be an economic force again before it can improve the other facets that involve quality of life in the region. One of the great struggles as we all know is keeping the young population of college graduates from moving out of state (Chicago is the largest thief). Everything here is cyclical: We need to bring in new industry to support the graduates and we need the new graduates to stay to support and create the industry.

An idea surfaced of creating more VISTAs that focus on serving microenterprises and staff organizations that specialize on economic development. I think it would be beneficial to look into the ways in which we can push the maximum amount of resources into ingniting an economy: It seems that VISTAs would be a very efficient way of doing it.

Americorps Prepared to Expand

According to Washington Post columnist E.J. Dionne Jr., a bill to expand Americorps program from 75,000 to 250,000 volunteers appears ready to be passed by congress.

"This week, the House is expected to pass a bill that would increase the number of federally funded service slots to 250,000, and the Senate will soon begin moving similar legislation.

The House proposal won committee approval last week with overwhelming support from both parties."

It would also increase the education award Americorps receive from $4,725 to $5,350 and requires that it match any future increases in Pell Grant scholarships. Being an Americorps volunteer myself, obviously I have some embedded personal interest in the bill.

But beyond supporting myself, this bill will further aid poverty reduction efforts across the US in a extremely affordable way. Americorps are basically paid a poverty-level wage, so the cost of labor is insignificant. We also create millions of volunteers: it is estimated the current 75,000 in service responsible for creating over 2.2 million volunteers to their organizations.

Having Americorps volunteers work for the Kalamazoo County Poverty Reduction Initiative has greatly increased our capacity to fight poverty; it will certainly aid other organizations as well. I strongly recommend to anyone, young or old, this exciting opportunity to serve their country.To learn more on how to serve, visit http://www.americorps.org.

Stimulus to deliver major projects in Southwest Michigan

A recent report from the Kalamazoo Gazette article highlighted the major amounts of money going towards projects in Southwest Michigan. Of the projects, two strike strike me as projects that could be harnessed to aid the local economy: additions to the Kalamazoo County International Airport and Kalamazoo's Metro Transit. From the article:

The Kalamazoo/Battle Creek International Airport is to receive $1.6 million toward construction of a new terminal and $894,000 for a new air-traffic-control tower.

Kalamazoo's Metro Transit will receive $950,000 from the federal spending bill for expanding its Rose Street offices.

These projects are particularly interesting because of the mass amounts of public money going into the projects. Using a community benefits agreement model, it could be very beneficial to leverage for standards that provide local construction and hiring requirements for the construction. Over the next several months, it will be important to monitor the development updates to see if they can be influenced to use local labor to ehance the local economy.

Transportation Still a Major Issue for those in Poverty

Transportation issues have always been a source of frustration for anyone who has experienced poverty. In a country dominated by the automobile for the past century, it is a large obstacle for anyone trying to make it to work on a weekly basis on top of accessing the support services that a low-income person needs to survive.

Cars are expensive - from their initial cost to purchase, to the high-priced gasoline they consume, to the burdening cost of repair. For someone making minimum wage who has a family, the cost can be crippling. For many in poverty, they simply cannot afford the cost associated with an automobile.

If you aren't driving around to get to where you need to be, then you have to rely on either friends or public transportation. Public transportation, while strong in some major cities in the country, is completely unreliable in Michigan. In our cities, at most what is available is a scattered system of buses which do not even serve all the relevant population areas.

Anyone who's ever ridden a bus to get someone knows how difficult their routes can be to traverse. If you don't live near a route, or if that route does not lie where you need to go, you can forget about an easy travel. It could take 3-4 hours a day to reach what a car would feasibly do in 30 minutes.

What we need to mend the struggles of public transportation is a system of both light rail and high speed trains. This would make it easier for any residents, regardless of income, to access the resources around them. It would also be environmentally friendly, reducing pollution and increasing mobility of the region.

In the Michigan Business Review, writer Nathan Bomey asks if a high speed train could be in Michigan's future.

In fact, the Windy City is the top thief of Michigan's top college graduates, according to Ann Arbor-based think tank Michigan Future.

Which is just part of the reason why he believes high-speed rail could provide a significant boost to the region. If young people could visit Chicago regularly, why not stay in Michigan after all? Not to mention the fact that high-speed rail could introduce a wave of new people to the Detroit region.

For now, though, high-speed rail is still largely a fantasy for most of the country. The sheer amount of investment needed - tens of billions of dollars for hundreds of miles of track and trains - is daunting.

But the Obama administration's commitment to enhancing the nation's transportation infrastructure and the inclusion of $8 billion in high-speed rail funding in the $787 billion economic stimulus package are promising steps.

Rick Harnish, executive director of the Chicago-based Midwest High-Speed Rail Association, argued that Michigan needs high-speed rail.

"I don't see how Michigan remains in the global marketplace if it doesn't link itself to fast trains with Chicago," he said.

Please add Kalamazoo to the list of High Speed stops in this senario. For a city who prides it self in being the transition from Chicago to Detroit, this would reap millions for the economy. So what's holding all this potential economic development back?

Ultimately, the barriers to high-speed rail present significant obstacles, though. Freight carriers own most existing tracks, for example, meaning Amtrak trains have to yield to freight trains during routine trips.

Harnish said high-speed rail investments would require the construction of new tracks to avoid freight trains as much as possible and renegotiation of deals with freight companies.

We need to make these forms of transportation a priority again. It simply isn't feasible to rely on hybrid car development to push the future - the roads are crowded and potential slower than a train anyway. The development of trains in Michigan would help both its poverty residents as well as those well-off.