Cunha Community School hosted our annual "World Cafe" this past Wednesday, March 25th. The event brought together parents, students, administrators, teachers and service providers over delicious food and excellent community dialogue. The evening kicked off with Community Schools Coordinator, Anne Hipskind, describing the model of Community Schools and allowing folks to ask questions. To help explain the model, Anne delineated four main areas of our work: Youth Development, Community Outreach, Parent Involvement and Social Services. She spoke of integrating the Community Schools model more fully into Cunha's school system so that the school can truly be a place for ALL community members to come and thrive.
In order to exemplify the work that Community Schools does, two students from the Youth Advisory Board (Student VOICES) spoke about their experience participating in our programming. Anzony Contreras (pictured) and Estefania Villalobos described their Bullying Prevention Initiative, which involves organizing a poetry contest, doing classroom presentations, and displaying posters that create awareness of bullying and how students can prevent it. They also spoke about the "Health Day" that Student VOICES will be organizing in early May. But what makes these students' work unique? These students have used their voices and ideas to select and create these projects as a collective group. Community Schools coordinators are simply there to guide as needed and assist with bringing their ideas to life. As part of Youth Development, we know that engaging youth in this type of work helps them to build self-efficacy and self-esteem and facilitates their connectedness to their school.
Following the students' presentation, community members participated in a brainstorming activity, in which participants were asked to attach their ideas (in the form of branches and leaves) to a tree on the wall. Each branch included ways for participants to contribute to furthering the Community Schools model at Cunha. Each leaf contained action steps. Some amazing ideas were exchanged and new action plans are being woven into place. Amongst the ideas were:
- Train youth to be peer counselors
- Have the school facilitate carpooling for parents
- Parent volunteers during the school day
- Better communication to the community in both Spanish and English
- Parent Resource Network
- Students do community service in place of suspension
- Ask local business to facilitate after school programs like jewelry-making, etc.
We were so thankful to have such amazing ideas placed around our Community Schools Tree and are already putting many action steps in place! We would also like to invite you to write in to include your ideas and let us know how YOU can contribute! If you'd like to receive weekly emails of our blog postings, please email Anahita Modaresi at modaresia@cabrillo.k12.ca.us.
**Volunteers Needed! We are looking for volunteers who are willing to help supervise students in the Community Center during lunch (from 12:45-1:35). Please contact us if you can help!**
