Honoring MLK through service

“Everybody can be great because anybody can serve.” – Martin Luther King, Jr.

This statement is a philosophy that City Year has adopted all over the country. In honor of the legacy of MLK, City Year chooses to make MLK Day “a day ON, not a day off.”

On the 25th anniversary of this national holiday, City Year San Jose/Silicon Valley will serve at Daniel Lairon Elementary School in the Franklin-McKinley School District.

The school was recently renamed in honor of Daniel Lairon, who served as principal of this school for 15 years. He passed away midway through the 2009-2010 school year.

It is a school that serves more than 550 students with a goal to prepare all children to be global learners.

City Year San Jose/Silicon Valley will engage more than 60 external volunteers in service including City Year alums, friends and family, and employees of Bank of America, Starbucks and Reading Partners. Together, we will complete some really incredible projects which include:

• Rennovating the school garden
• Painting panel murals to be hung around the entire campus
• Cleaning and organizing classrooms and storage spaces
• Painting the blacktop

Want to see the service as it happens? Be sure to follow @CityYearSanJose on Twitter for live updates. To see more photos and coverage from the service day at City Year sites across the country, visit the official City Year Blog Events page.

If you are serving with City Year, be sure to share your service! All you have to do is:

• Email: cityyear@posterous.com
• Attach: photos, video, media files
• Subject: This will be the title of your post
• Body: This will be the text of your post – include your name, role in event, location

All posts will be reviewed and must follow our guidelines in order to be published.

Megan Baker, Recruitment Project Leader & Social Media Manager CYSJ

Serving with excellence

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, everyday this week a City Year San José/Silicon Valley staff or Corps Member will share how the words and actions of Martin Luther King, Jr. has impacted their life. Today, Staff Member Stephanie Kim discusses how physical service fits into City Year’s service model and how it relates to a quotation said by Dr. King.

All labor that uplifts humanity has dignity and importance and should be undertaken with painstaking excellence.

–Martin Luther King, Jr.

Attendance. Behavior. Course Performance.

The overall objective of City Year’s core program, Whole School, Whole Child is to improve these proven early warning indicators of students dropping out of school.

But where does physical service fit in to City Year’s laser-like focus on education?

Senior Corps Member Liz June paints the USC logo with student volunteers and a parent at Lee Mathson Middle School. The service day was sponsored by Team Sponsor Applied Materials.

This seemingly innocent question began to keep me up at night as I agonized over finding the answer to how physical service fits in with City Year’s education focus. After mulling over the question for longer than I’d like to admit, I realized that physical service directly relates to City Year’s efforts to keep students in school and on track to graduate from high school on time.

The Whole School, Whole Child Program focuses on improving the ABC’s of the high school dropout crisis: Attendance, Behavior and Course Performance.

City Year intervenes by providing three integrated service elements proven to positively affect the ABC’s: academic support, a positive school climate and after-school programming.

Physical service enables us to create a positive school climate in high-need schools. We renovate schools, paint murals, plant gardens, create play spaces and refurbish community centers; we transform schools and communities. Through physical service, we breathe life back into drab school campuses and create a positive school climate conducive to learning and achievement.

At my first City Year service day, we painted 32 college logos on Lee Mathson Middle School’s volleyball and basketball courts. Students came bounding onto the blacktop exclaiming, “I’m going to go there!” as they pointed to different logos. The excitement and determination in the students’ reactions made it evident that we are creating a college going culture for students who grow up thinking that college is not a realistic option for them.

Through physical service, we are showing our students that college is a reality for them, moreover an expectation.

Regardless of if we are tutoring in a classroom or building planter boxes, the students are the reason we serve. If I can contribute to beautifying a school campus and getting kids excited to go to school by mulching all day, I will undertake that job with painstaking excellence, for our students.

Thousands of volunteers will join City Year’s 1,750 corps members and staff at 20 City Year sites across the nation to serve their communities on Martin Luther King, Jr. Day. At City Year, Dr. King’s birthday is a “day ON, not a day off.”

Join us on Monday, January 17^th, 2011 as we create a positive school climate at Daniel Lairon Elementary School to honor the life and work of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and his dream of the “beloved community.”

Stephanie Kim, Development Associate CYSJ

Change comes from love

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, everyday this week a City Year San José/Silicon Valley staff or Corps Member will share how the words and actions of Martin Luther King, Jr. has impacted their life. Today, Senior Corps Member Krista Corwin shares how the words and actions of Dr. King has inspired her in her service.

Krista Corwin takes part in a spirit break at Project Inspire. Physical service is one of the major ways we engage our community.

On Monday, January 17, 2011, I will proudly serve alongside my teammates to honor the legacy of the greatest American, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

I don’t say that lightly – he was not just a civil rights leader, not just a charismatic orator, not just a philosopher: he defined a culture. He, a person of color during Jim Crow, Superpower, Vietnam-era America, schooled Americans on the proper way to get things done.

He created a new method for affecting social change in our country.

“NO,” I imagine him saying in his time. “THIS is how we are going to make change in America. We’ll do it non-violently. We’ll do it with dignity and with respect for one another.” There aren’t many countries in the world where that is true.

“The ultimate measure of a man is not where he stands in moments of comfort and convenience, but where he stands at times of challenge and controversy.”

Strength to Love, 1963

I know that this quotation has much deeper meanings, but truthfully, it is the quotation that got me through my service year.

It was the hardest year of my life. I have never put so much of my soul in any other thing, but what a thing to put my soul into! I gave a year, I changed the world, and still I didn’t feel like I gave enough. That’s why I came back to City Year for round two.

I believe Dr. King would be proud of our corps.

We return day after day to fight injustice, even though it’s hard and tedious and exhausting. We understand that if the solution were easy, we wouldn’t be here. Dr. King believed that change comes not from violence and hate, but from love.

That’s how City Year operates – we love. We give of ourselves. We care. Even when it’s challenging or controversial, our weapon of choice is loving service.

Krista Corwin, LACY and Training Project Leader CYSJ

Serving for the present and the future

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, everyday this week a City Year San José/Silicon Valley staff or Corps Member will share how the words and actions of Martin Luther King, Jr. has impacted their life. Today, Corps Member Jake Beaman reflects on Dr. King’s “I Have a Dream” speech.

“I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character.”

- Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.

I will never forget these inspirational words because in third grade our teacher asked the class to memorize parts of Dr. Kings “I Have a Dream” speech.  This was the excerpt I had to learn by heart.

I remember thinking how amazing Dr King’s speech was because he was protesting not only for that time of 1963, but for his children and the future.  As a nine-year-old I realized that sometimes when you fight for something, you aren’t fighting for yourself but for the future to be a better place.

Now as a 23-year-old City Year Corps Member,  I realize that my team and I are not only tutoring and mentoring students to help them this year; we are working towards helping them create  a future for themselves with more opportunities.

I serve at Lee Mathson Middle School on the east side of San José, where we run an afterschool program and do one on one literacy and math tutoring during the school day.

Many of our students have unbelievably tough backgrounds whether it’s growing up in gang-ridden neighborhoods, living in poverty, or struggling to learn the English language. With all these hardships, I am incredibly inspired by so many of our students who are forced to grow up so fast.

If I can help teach a student to read in English and another team member can encourage a student to be confident in themselves, then I know we are we are not only helping today, but the future as well.

In the long run, maybe this helps one student go to college and another avoids entering a gang. I am so proud of the work my Mathson Middle School City Year team does because I know we will have lasting effects in the community.

I end with this Dr. King quote because it reminds me why I serve and am proud to be a City Year Corps Member:

“Life’s most urgent question is: what are you doing for others?”

Jake Beaman, Corps Member CYSJ

Finding inspiration in history

In honor of Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, everyday this week a City Year San José/Silicon Valley staff or Corps Member will share how the words and actions of Martin Luther King, Jr. has impacted their life. Today, Corps Member Laura Peters reflects on a social justice project she took on while she was a college student.

My supervisor, Nadia, had invited me to stay on campus for the January break during my junior year at Wheaton College in Norton, Massachusetts.  I was to assist her in planning the January freshman orientation program, as well as take on a “special project,” of which I knew very little.  My only knowledge at the time was that the project would need to be finished and ready to display by Martin Luther King, Jr. Day, 2009.

My task was to organize the most important dates in the timeline pages into a magnificent Excel spreadsheet.  Each sentence or paragraph described a defining moment in an American minority group’s history.  The spreadsheet of events would eventually be printed and pasted to black paper that measured almost 100 ft long, and hung along the wall in my campus’s student center.

This was the finished Human Rights timeline that hung in the campus student center at Wheaton College.

Although at first the job seemed more like an art project than anything else, within a few hours I was completely engrossed in the information I was sorting.  I learned more in a week about the social movements in our country than I had ever learned in a social studies class in high school or college.

As I sat on the floor of my campus center cutting and pasting the timeline information, professors and visitors on campus would ask me about my work.  I was excited and proud to explain my project to them.

I sorted, cut, and pasted over 300 pieces of information for my timeline project.  Each and every one of these events inspired me.  The progress that our country has made since its birth is astounding, although we still have an enormous amount of work to do in order to ensure equality for every single person in our country.

Martin Luther King, Jr. day now has special significance to me.

For every person who believes that violence is the way to make change, there are brilliant souls like Martin Luther King, Jr. who have proved them wrong.

The project that I completed in 2009 will always be a reminder to me that a small group of individuals can make an immense impact on our society, and inspires me to follow in their footsteps, because our work is not nearly finished.

Laura Peters, Corps Member CYSJ