The Background of Youth Service in Connecticut
Serve Connecticut is Connecticut’s Commission on Community Service, housed in Connecticut’s Office of Higher Education since 1994. Our charge is to promote and facilitate service and volunteerism among all ages; our strategic prioritization of youth service engagement is actualized with youth (16-25) representation on our governor-appointed board as well as in a youth service-related objective in our State Service Plan. Serve Connecticut has for over 20 years funded several AmeriCorps programs that include youth service as a key component, the most recent being HealthForward, which engages high school and college students in health-related service corps.
In 2021, Serve Connecticut received a Charles Stewart Mott Foundation funded youth service planning grant from America’s Service Commissions; the Commission used this funding to engage a consultant to conduct a landscape assessment of Connecticut’s youth service ecosystem as pertains to underserved/underrepresented middle/high school students. Key informant interviews were conducted with K-12, Out of School Time, Higher Education, AmeriCorps, tribal, and other relevant stakeholders.
The resulting Serve Connecticut Youth Service-Learning Discovery Project (YSLDP) Report provides insight into the youth service, service-learning, and civic engagement landscape in Connecticut and makes recommendations on actionable items to further assess/deepen understanding of elements of that landscape, enhance youth service provider connectivity and capacity, and improve access/overcome barriers to youth service for participants.
In 2024, Serve Connecticut was awarded a second Mott Foundation grant to “Deepen Youth Service” in Connecticut, as well as a grant from The AllState Foundation to “Empower Youth-led Service;” both of these grants were facilitated through America’s Service Commissions (ASC). These funds were utilized to provide Youth-led Service Mini-Grants to support and improve access to youth-led service/service-learning projects and improve access to capacity-building supports for youth service participants and providers.