Youth and Education

Do you enjoy spending time with kids? Are you passionate about equity in education? If you choose to engage deeply with our Youth & Education Issue Area, you will participate in mentoring, tutoring and addressing policies that affect children and education. Most importantly, you’ll leave a mark on the generation behind you.

Becoming a Mentor

Sometimes what kids need most is you. Through our Youth & Education Issue Area, we provide many opportunities for you to directly work with young people, honing your own skills while making an investment in a child. These opportunities include:

• Engaging middle schoolers in hands-on science experiments through SLAM, a science education program at a local elementary school.
• Giving farm tours to young people, educating them on how food is grown in sustainable way

Educational Policy

Working with children one-on-one and seeing the direct impact of your work is incredibly rewarding. But we know that sometimes policy can be a more effective way of making large-scale change. It’s why many of our Issue Areas encourage you to engage in the policy governing our actions.

You might engage directly in policy like Michael Nowak, ‘19, who served as a Community Advocacy Fellow with Children First, learning about legislation and advocating for North Carolina to raise the age of adult sentencing to age 18.

Or apply your knowledge of policy in new ways, like Kaylah Bell ‘22, who worked with the LEAF Lights Program, which is a youth music ensemble, to facilitate drum and guitar classes and to help administer the LEAF Schools and Streets program to deliver music education to low income public schools.

Culturally Competent Educators

EDU 315 is a course designed to prepare you to work with children and youth from diverse backgrounds and to help you develop a culturally competent teaching practice. You’ll learn about the complicated nature of racism and bias and the strong hold it has on children, schools, teachers, and families within our society. In addition to completing community engagement in a public school, you will also be required to attend a community based anti-racism program.