Open letter to the Get Involved community
Dear Get Involved Community~
We have learned that a concerned individual or group recently contacted some of our friends, followers, or participants regarding our programs and work in the community. We have offered to set up a Zoom call to clarify but have not had success. Please feel free to forward any Instagram messages or unflattering posts to us so that we may continue to monitor and address the situation. One dissatisfied community member, however brazen in approach, does represent the thoughts and concerns of others. Our website and some projects have been built and managed by students, so we are aware that there is always room for improvement.
We felt it necessary to address some existing concerns and provide some clarification. For some context, internships for high school students are an extremely rare commodity. If you know of one, please let us know and we will add them to the list on our website. A group of staff, parents, and students built the Get Involved database of nonprofits over ten years working on one high school campus and giving the President’s Award for Volunteer Service to more than 3,000 students. Our students constantly asked us to help them find internships beyond simply volunteering, but we could only ever find 5-6 possibilities for minors. In 2015, we started to develop our own internship program, which is project-based learning, to promote the mission of an organization in our database, or to further a cause that the student selects.
We work directly with the student and the organization on a project that we devise together, solving an existing problem and creating something new that wasn’t there before. For example, a student who is interested in STEM careers worked with Get Involved to develop an educational program serving a school in an underserved community. We start with a student’s interests, coach, teach and build a project from scratch. Get Involved Foundation follows robust service-learning curriculum and standards. We partner with Youth Service America, Points of Light, and Stanford University Haas Center to help determine best practices for our community engagement internships and projects. Some of our more intensive work with students requires tuition, as this is our livelihood and we work extremely hard to make sure students are successful in our programs. We support a student’s project indefinitely, with verification as needed.
Our donors provide funding so that we can invite more students from historically underserved populations to participate. We are always reaching out to find more underserved students to give them this advantage and opportunity. We see that this type of experience better prepares students for college and career success, and our primary focus for fundraising is to provide more of our programs to these students. In fact, our board is composed of 5 students from first-generation underserved communities and 3 students whose parents work in the tech sector.
The 5 tiers for our community engagement program are as follows:
Free: Teens use our website and database, social media, and project portfolios to get ideas for their own service hours, projects, and community engagement work.
Free: We do school and community booths and presentations to share ideas and inspiration for meaningful community service hours and projects.
Tuition: Create a project to earn the President’s Award with our service-learning curriculum and portfolio presentation.
Tuition: Project-based internship to promote the work of an agency, organization, or cause.
Free: Students who successfully complete an internship may join either our board or a board committee to help their peers pursue meaningful community engagement.
There are many internship programs that charge tuition or fees, for example: https://www.globalexperiences.com/internships/new-york-internships/ Due to the complexity of building projects with students, we are not able to provide Get Involved internships for free at this time. We do have some generous community donors who provide funding for students who are first-generation college going, who qualify for free or reduced lunch, or residents of East Palo Alto. Of course, if we receive more donations, we can work with more students with less means to pay for the program. If a student does not fall into the fee waiver categories, we are happy to set up a fundraising project to help them pay the cost of a Get Involved internship.
This work to help teens find a sense of purpose by getting involved in their interests and giving back has been a labor of love for 16 years and counting, likely we will be doing it for decades to come. We welcome your suggestions, concerns, and community support.
Sincerely,
The Get Involved Board
Christina Owen, Founder