- Social Innovation Fellowship
Award Year
Over the course of the next year, the Starr Fellowship will allow Aaron Regunberg and me to focus on making our concept of a Providence Student Union a reality. Our program proposes a new style of youth voice facilitation in Providence. The key component is locating meetings after school in the buildings themselves to promote school community and increase attendance. This will allow us to facilitate student campaigns within and without the school to promote both short-term change and long-term committment. It also allows students to discover organizing skills, leadership skills, and a heightened capacity for critical and systemic thinking that students can put to use in their own communities - their schools. Ultimately, the vision is a linking of individual chapters across schools to facilitate city-wide student action.
With the Starr Fellowship, our project hopes to establish a solid launching point for the future. Currently, we are running a pilot program at Hope High School, Hope Student Union. The many lessons we are learning now will be critical in outlining a flexible curriculum during the summer. This summer, we also hope to lay out a sustainability plan, a procedure for responsible expansion into new schools, and delve deeper into pedagogy and grant writing, among other things.