It was a day ‘on’ instead of a day ‘off’ for more than 100 junior high and high school students who instead of staying home on the Martin Luther King Jr. Holiday, and now a National Day of Service as declared by President Obama, opted to spend their day off at the first-ever youth summit held in Bloomington-Normal, Ill.

“Youth Summit: The Power of a Promise” marked the beginning of a “semester of service” that will culminate on Global Youth Service Day weekend, Apr. 24 – 26. During the “semester of service” students will develop a service-learning project around one of the Five Promises of the America’s Promise Alliance.

Summit Addresses Need for Five Promises
State Farm® announced last October that it would partner with the Alliance to reduce the nation’s dropout rate. “The “Youth Summit” is a perfect way to help students combine service work with identifying and finding solutions to the challenges in their communities,” Kathy Havens-Payne said, senior director of Education Leadership.

“Youth Summit: The Power of a Promise” was created to begin the process of addressing the presence or absence of the “Five Promises” in the lives of young people. The Five Promises as identified by the America’s Promise Alliance of over 150 national community, business and faith based organizations include:

* Caring adult
* Safe places
* Healthy start
* Effective education
* Opportunity to help others

Research shows that the more “promises” a young person has in their lives, the better chance they have of being successful.

Tomorrow’s Leaders Take the Reigns
“Youth Summit: The Power of a Promise” was all about empowering young people to lead. Several of the young people were trained as facilitators and led the all-day event working with their peers and helping them define the Promises in their own terms.

After outlining what the Promises meant to them, the students then divided into school teams and began the process of creating team names and creating projects to address the specific Promise their team will showcase during Global Youth Service Day weekend.

Even though the students were empowered to lead, they won’t have to do it alone. More than 100 adult mentors from State Farm, who also attended the summit, were assigned to a team of students whom they will support throughout the semester meeting on a weekly basis up until the Global Youth Service Day weekend.

The mentor role will be to guide the youth teams from problem to solution through the America’s Promise lens. Mentors will facilitate the project and provide guidance, but they will not lead the project.

On the days between their weekly meetings, students and mentors will stay connected with one another through a new State Farm America’s Promise Alliance Web site that provides live chat, document sharing, email and message boards.

At the end of the all-day summit, students and mentors were brought into one big room to reflect on what they had learned. Many of the students recited their favorite Promise of the Five Promises, but the most common theme of their reflections was community service.

Payne recognizes young people’s yearning to help others and sees an opportunity to make connections to what they’re learning in the classroom.

“Through youth empowerment, students and the caring adults in their lives – which now include State Farm mentors – connect what students are doing in the classroom to real-world applications to address issues they identify through service,” Payne said. “That’s service-learning at its best and these students will help us share this strategy in their schools and our community.”