Faith In Youth: Teaching Students to Value Themselves and Their Community

Hello! I’m Scott Baumgartner, and I’m a second year AmeriCorps member serving through the Faith in Youth Partnership. FIY, as we commonly refer to ourselves, is a collaboration of area youth ministry centers and churches through Good Samaritan Ministries in Holland. Through the FIY Partnership, our members are currently serving middle school youth during and after school and throughout the summer. We have sites throughout the Holland/Zeeland area, working either to serve students within a specific school district or neighborhood.

The goal of FIY is to provide students with positive activities, tutoring, and mentoring in hopes of increasing the number of developmental assets students in our communities have. Some examples of the assets we aim to increase in our kids include increased commitment to learning, increased ability to resist at-risk behaviors, and increased feelings of positive self-esteem. Some of our sites provide services during school through alternative-suspension programs, where students receive academic and behavioral support, and take part in community service activities. We also engage students at the schools through additional mentoring opportunities. Our sites largely exist to provide after school support, as well. We do this through after school tutoring, mentoring, and recreational programs.

For my term of service I have been placed at the Bridge Youth Ministry Center in Zeeland. We work directly with the Zeeland Public Schools district. I am responsible for developing and facilitating all of our mentoring programming. We run an alternative suspension program, after school community service and one-on-one tutoring/mentoring programs, drop-in activities, and a basketball team. Each of our programs has a mentoring and service component, and we aim to provide all of our middle school students with at least one peer and/or adult mentor.

It is these mentoring relationships that make dramatic and lasting differences in my students’ lives. So often, before having worked with a tutor/mentor, I have seen a defeated and negative mentality among many of the students I work with, and often it is the result of few, if any, positive relationships at home. Within these mentoring relationships, we encourage our volunteers to share a spirit of giving back with our students. Through this, my site has developed a community service program called Bridging Out, which kids love, and we have seen results that illustrate a growing sense of positive values and empowerment among many of our students.

So far this year in Bridging Out we have visited area businesses to learn about the positive impacts of local spending, visited area colleges to learn about the opportunities that exist beyond middle and high school, done yard work for those with disabilities, decorated ornaments for volunteers, volunteered at the humane society, decorated cookies and played games with residents at a local nursing home, and much more. The kids are starting to really understand how fun helping others and giving back to your community can be.

As I begin to hit the home stretch during these last few months of school and into the summer, I hope I can continue to not only stress with my students the importance of being at a place where they feel safe and valued, but that they would also be able to see that taking initiative to give back to your community can be whatever you make of it. In my case, it has been tremendous. After all, isn’t that exactly what AmeriCorps, or any type of service, should be?!