Mayor’s Youth Events Wrap-up Luncheon-October 14, 2014

Mayor’s Youth Events Wrap-up Luncheon-October 14, 2014

Following community conversations and interactions on afterschool opportunities for middle school youth in savannah, the present meeting was a recap and pooling of suggestions for the way forward.

The pre and post surveys conducted at the Mayors conversation on afterschool programs reported that a greater percentage of the respondent are satisfied and feel the City should continue to support a community-wide effort to support middle school students. Again, the Gradnation Conference was very informative for all who participated.

Improving community engagement

Participant at the meeting made several contributions as to how to increase community involvement in Afterschool initiatives:

• Create small and purpose oriented groups to research and develop specific activities in funding, programs, strategies and specific initiatives that may be important for afterschool programs. Instead of having a larger conversation platform, there should be smaller focus groups.
• Generate a comprehensive school list of parents and students. However, activities may vary by school; therefore, there should be a representative list that would capture the schools concerned.
• Again, develop a list of churches that would partner in this endeavor. It is noteworthy that some churches have their own after school initiatives and would be a source of information
• Benchmarking would be an opportunity to learn from other Cities. However, concentration should be on similar Cities, who share the same geographic and demographic characteristics like the City of Savannah
• Sampling for community engagement. This pertains to targeting the underserved communities as they may be more concerned with afterschool opportunities. To engage the community is to better represent the community by engaging the youth and underserved communities
• Advocate for business partnership and intervention in community life. Engaging the small and large scale enterprises in the afterschool campaign would increase awareness and support
• Volunteers’ motivation. To increase sustainability, there should be incentives to keep volunteers at work. Through City incentivized programs for volunteers the call for afterschool engagement would maintain momentum, if not increase.
• More so, increase efforts to track and follow up participants in afterschool to create success stories and dashboard that would sell the initiative.

 

Engaging Middle School Students

Other suggestions were made specifically to engage middle school students:

• Approach and invite parents to encourage their kids. Through sampling of underserved communities or school, a list of parents can be made and targeted for this purpose. A direct engagement of parents would increase participation.
• Community service initiative can get parents and children out to participate.
• Develop partnership with Parent University to provide speakers and resource persons that would help develop parent-focus communications and help put in perspective the afterschool programs.
• Work with schools to create extra credit opportunity for after school participants.
• Use the social media, through special apps, to increase awareness among the students and develop inspirational media contents to showcase how others are benefiting from afterschool participation.
• Develop Apps and Maps that would guide parents and students to afterschool programs.

 

 

 

 

Jonas Subaar

Graduate Intern, Office of the Mayor