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Engaging Young People and Schools in Urban Planning and Social Change
CC&S works with civic and educational leaders to engage young people in the transformation of their communities. Through our university-community collaborations, we develop training, toolkits, and resources to support dynamic communities of practice that recognize young people as critical participants in urban and metropolitan change. From the beginning, these efforts have revolved around the Center’s award-winning educational methodology, Y-PLAN (Youth-Plan, Learn, Act, Now!). |
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For over a decade, our signature initiative has been Y-PLAN (Youth – Plan, Learn, Act, Now!), a proven methodology that has engaged over 1000 young people as agents of change, hundreds of UC Berkeley undergraduate and graduate student as “mentors,” and dozens of educational and civic leaders as client partners (AKA “adult allies”) in local planning and community development projects. Around the Bay Area and across the nation, Y-PLAN has supported these diverse communities of practice as they plan for real changes in their schools, neighborhoods and cities.
Today, Y-PLAN is on a fast track to extend lessons learned and educational methodology across the state, the nation and the globe: History: From Parisar Asha to Social Enterprises for Learning to Y-PLAN Parisar Asha – “Parisar Asha” means “Hope for the environment, from the environment”. This short phrase is not only the name of the world renowned educational institute in Mumbai, India, but is also the inspiration behind the development of Y-PLAN, a form of Social Enterprise for Learning (SEfL) initiatives. Founded by Gloria DeSouza, a legendary social entrepreneur and one of the first Ashoka Fellows, Parisar Asha sought to offer young people an alternative to rote education that too often confines thinking and learning to pure memorization, established by British colonial rule. Parisar Asha provides more meaningful and personally relevant education to Indian children, from the wealthier suburbs to destitute shantytowns. After working with Gloria in India the late 1980s, Deborah McKoy embarked on a decade of work, study, and research in cities and schools throughout the United States. Building on her experiences working with refugees in Brooklyn and youth in public housing throughout the country, Deborah sought to find a way to bring similarly transformative experiences to urban youth, their families, schools, and communities. Social Enterprises for Learning (SEfL) – Deborah’s path led her to the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education. Under the tutelage of Professor David Stern, her research focused on school-to-career educational programs, and ultimately led to the co-development of an educational methodology called Social Enterprise for Learning (SEfL) (see McKoy 2000). SEfL’s are school-based, community-driven enterprises in which students identify a community need and work with local government and the community stakeholders to develop a product or specific service to address that need. SEfL was adopted very naturally by a range of career academies as a form of work-based learning. For example, between 2003 and 2008, CC&S partnered with San Francisco Unified School District (SFUSD), the Bay Area Writing Project, and the Pearson Foundation to provide SEfL professional development and coaching to five comprehensive high schools reaching over 500 SFUSD high school students. SEfLs have been adopted in a wide range of ways - from developing a low-income tax clinic to creating a teen health web site. For more information, see SEfL Case Study Handbook and the 2010 article by McKoy, Stern and Bierbaum entitled “Social Enterprise for Learning: A Replicable Model of Service Learning and Civic Engagement”. From SEfL to City Planning – In 1999, Deborah McKoy was invited to teach a course in the UC Berkeley Department of City and Regional Planning that built on a strong tradition of UC Berkeley students reaching outside the walls of the College of Environmental Design in Wurster Hall and into local communities and schools to work with young people through the Urban Land Institute’s Urban Plan program. Building on lessons from Urban Plan and from her own SEfL research, Deborah created a new form of SEfL that focused on engaging young people and their civic partners in the art of placemaking; Y-PLAN (Youth – Plan, Learn, Act, Now) was born! With funding from the UC Links program (originally in the UC Office of the President, and since 2001 in the UC Berkeley Graduate School of Education), Y-PLAN is now recognized both on-campus and throughout the community as a proven means of positive social change and educational transformation. Dozens of UC Berkeley undergraduate and graduate students, high school youth, teachers, and community partners have contributed to the evolution of this methodology. Y-PLAN inspired the founding of CC&S and remains the “heartbeat” of our work. In its constant evolution, Y-PLAN continues to serve as a powerful magnet in CC&S’ ongoing efforts to promote social change through participatory planning and meaningful educational processes.
A Decade of Y-PLAN Projects Over the past decade, young people, mentors, and adult allies have partnered together to create more than 35 Y-PLAN social enterprise projects. For descriptions, see A Decade of Y-PLAN Projects (PDF). CC&S is developing a Y-PLAN Certification process to support a high-quality expansion and partnerships with districts, schools, civic leaders, universities, and foundations. For more information about opportunities to partner with CC&S, contact Susan Hartmann at shartmann@berkeley.edu Theoretical Framework and Curriculum Y-PLAN rests on three central conditions that lead to successful youth participation in community planning projects:
Together these three conditions constitute a framework and theory of change for involving young people and adult allies in community transformation that simultaneously provides powerful, rigorous and relevant educational experiences for all. For a more detailed discussion, see McKoy and Vincent's 2007 article, "Engaging Schools in Urban Revitalization: The Y-PLAN (Youth - Plan, Learn, Act, Now!)" in the Journal of Planning Education and Research. With Y-PLAN, learning is no longer a function of knowledge-acquisition, but rather of knowledge-production by both young people and adults. This reciprocal and iterative process – “learning to plan, planning to learn” – takes the form of an inquiry process, divided into five modules that guide participants through their projects and ensure that students understand what they have done and how it relates to both their education and the community. Module 1: Start up
Module 3: Into Action—Re-visioning Our Future Module 4: Going Public! Module 5: Looking Forward, Looking Back Recognition and Awards
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Module 2: Making Sense of the City