Article by Crystal Nielsen | Photo courtesy of University of San Francisco’s Leo T. McCarthy Center
Seven University of Delaware students recently traveled across the country seeking an answer to the question faced by public policy advocates everywhere: ”how do you change a community?”— a quest spurred by the Equity Interns Program in June.
In its second year, Equity Interns is a collaborative offering of UD’s Joseph R. Biden, Jr. School of Public Policy and Administration’s Biden Institute, the University of San Francisco’s Leo T. McCarthy Center and the YMCA of San Francisco, which provides students an immersive, summerlong experience supporting equitable education in San Francisco’s public elementary school system.
This year’s cohort of 14 UD and USF students was placed in the YMCA’s Power Scholars Academy (PSA), where, over the course of seven weeks, they gained a deeper understanding for how public programs and policies can positively impact the needs of a community’s students and their families.
A signature initiative of the YMCA, PSA is designed to reduce and reverse COVID-related achievement gaps and summer learning loss for K-8 students from under-resourced communities. During their time with the Academy, the Equity Interns worked directly with enrolled youth and their families, empowering the young scholars to harness the resources, personal strengths and relationships needed to reach their highest potential. As a result, interns and scholars alike realized the benefits of public programming and gained an answer to the question that first motivated the interns’ participation — that community change is incremental and sometimes comes in the form of helping one school, one family or even one child at a time.
“It is critically important that students are able to put the knowledge they’ve gathered from their studies into practice,” said Valerie Biden Owens, chair of the Biden Institute. “Working with YMCA Power Scholars and learning about the challenges that school-aged children and their families face while helping them develop the skills to find solutions — in the classroom and in life — is a vital component to ensuring that our next generation of policymakers and educators move through life and their careers with an equity-centered mindset.”
The interns came from a variety of undergraduate disciplines, such as education, nonprofit management, public administration, social services and youth development. Kalli Ruffennach, a UD junior studying psychology and interpersonal communication, found that the program highlighted the structural inequities that are repeatedly reinforced by societal systems and hinder the education of young students.
“Under-resourced communities continually do not receive the proper funding and resources needed for children in these school districts to stay on track to the next grade level,” Ruffennach said. “As a result, the achievement gap and summer learning loss is very prevalent in these communities.”
Ruffennach joined fellow interns, like recent USF graduate in business administration and management Sela Priana Aquino, in exploring the several pillars that make up the PSA, including achievement gap reduction, social-emotional learning, family engagement and advocacy and policy in under-resourced communities.
“I feel very fortunate to have worked with the San Francisco community that I have spent my last four years alongside as an undergraduate student at USF,” Aquino said. “This has also been a great opportunity to learn and engage with like-minded students from the other side of the country who are also committed to transforming and improving education policy.”
Through readings and research projects, guest speaker presentations, peer networking opportunities and more, the Equity Interns also learned about academic intervention, family support programs and community resilience. The program concluded with group presentations by the interns on their proposed solutions to some of the challenges they witnessed during their experiences. The groups’ findings and research-based suggestions addressed topics like communication accessibility between educational staff and caregivers in the home, language justice by offering both students and families the multilingual resources needed to be successful in a school setting, and mental health and emotional learning considerations in the aftermath of virtual learning due to the COVID-19 pandemic.
Falah Al-Falahi, a UD public policy and political science major, was part of the group that presented on emotional and mental health support for young students. “I learned that grassroots policy change works, maybe even better than the typical routes that policies are enacted, because you get to observe firsthand what is missing and needed,” Al-Falahi said. “It's not necessarily more funding that under-resourced communities need — rather, we need to be thoughtful in how we focus funding. Different schools require different kinds of resources to support their students and community. The Equity Interns program helped me to really understand what is meant by equity in policy and how we can achieve that through hands-on, grassroots policy.”
With a strong commitment to social justice and equity, UD, USF and the YMCA are dedicated to ensuring the continuation of the program for its students for years to come.
“I am so proud of this amazing bi-coastal partnership that has brought together college students from all over the county to reduce and reverse COVID-related achievement gaps in under-resourced communities,” said Derick Brown, senior director of the USF Leo T. McCarthy Center. “It's an absolute honor to watch our students become agents for change within our citywide neighborhoods.”
