KU's Lawrence and Edwards campuses have teamed up with Kansas City, Kan., to take service learning to the streets. Together, they used a $400,000 three-year start up grant from the Department of Housing and Urban Development to form the KCK-KU Partnership Center. The school of social welfare and public administration department at the Lawrence campus initiated the grant.
Students, faculty, staff and city representatives working through the center set forth three projects to help connect residents of Kansas City, Kan., with new opportunities.
Social work graduate students from the Edwards Campus are working with J.C. Harmon High School freshmen to help reduce truancy, boost graduation rates and provide resources for academic success.
In Kansas City, Kan., only 11.7 percent of residents hold a bachelor's or higher degree. A high percentage of youth living in the urban core live in poverty, and many do not finish high school.
To combat the problem, the Step Up Program works with students at the school and their families. Graduate students offer direct counseling to J.C. Harmon students and their families.
They also encourage students to get involved and take pride in their school. They involve them in projects to improve the school, such as beautification work. The students not only contribute, but also learn while doing so by developing and submitting proposals for projects funded by mini-grants. Once approved, the students carry out the projects.
The program also provides community outreach outside of the school. Many students are truant simply because they don't have readily accessible transportation to take them to and from school. The center is working on boosting transportation programs.
The partnership center is also working to stabilize neighborhoods in the Kansas City, Kan., area through a program called Home Savers. The privately funded matched-savings program helps low-income homeowners save money for repairs. The goal is to help maintain homes as family assets and to help maintain the value of neighborhoods.
The program, which includes partners Kaw Valley Habitat, El Centro, the Family Conservancy and KCK Housing Authority, selects first-time homeowners who qualify. The program saves money with a 2:1 ratio. For every dollar participants save in a bank account, up to $500, the fund contributes $2.
The program has raised an initial $20,000. A strategy has been set forth to continue building it through contributions from businesses, individual donors, labor unions and other sources.
The third arm of the partnership center's strategy is to increase involvement in the community. The center selected 10 community ambassadors through a process of nominations of community members. An additional 15 ambassadors will be selected, and they will gauge awareness of access to housing, recreational facilities and social and government services. They will then report the results to the community through grassroots presentations. Once the information is gathered and presented, the center's goal is to work to determine how the needs can be addressed.
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