Title

Transforming the Civic Engagement Leader Program to Create Sustainable Leadership

Author(s)

Lanh Dang, University of Rhode IslandFollow

Major

Pharm.D. (six years)

Advisor

Sarah Miller

Date

11-2013

Keywords

Developing leaders; Build community; Civic Engagement; Transformative

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 License.

Abstract

The Clearinghouse for Volunteers, part of the Feinstein Civic Engagement Program, runs a Feinstein Experience every fall to provide service opportunities to all URI 101 freshmen and other student volunteers. Before fall 2012, URI 101 students were required to participate in service projects chosen by their professors together with their URI 101 class. In fall 2012, the Feinstein Experience changed to fit student preferences and passions. Now, URI 101 students and other student volunteers can sign up for any project that matches their interests and/or schedule. Civic Engagement Leaders (CELs) lead the community service experiences for the Feinstein Experience. My honors project worked on transforming the Civic Engagement Leader program to better suit the new Feinstein Experience model and developing successful future servant leaders through a sustainable leadership training model.

CELs were required to attend a leadership class as part of their experience. As the teaching assistant, I helped implement many new changes to the class structure. One of the biggest changes was fall training. We changed it from a one-day training to a two-day training to ensure leaders understood concepts the first day and saw the concepts executed the following day. Smaller class changes included more in-depth reflection activities through a forum discussion, critical thinking activities that showed the importance of resources, a quiz to assess their knowledge of the program, and more skills acquisition through various trainings such as first aid and Safe Zone.

The main objective was creating more confident and competent servant leaders by developing a leadership toolbox. Many CELs are natural leaders while others need time to embrace their inner servant leader. We wanted to improve on four main areas in the “toolbox” including knowledge, skills, values, and motivation so that all CELs walk away with greater depth in each category. We want them to have knowledge about civic engagement, skills to execute civic engagement projects, deeper understanding of their values as it pertains to civic engagement, and motivation to continue being leaders in their communities.