Plans for Global Youth Service Day 2009 are in full swing:

You are a single mother with 3 children, a 3 year-old, 9 year-old and 13 year-old. Your gross annual pay at your minimum wage job is $10,700. You use public transportation. Your 3 year-old is in child care, some of which is subsidized, and your other children go to public school. You live in a small 2 bedroom apartment.

You have to budget for rent, electricity, cable, clothing, cell phone bill, school supplies, food, entertainment, and miscellaneous expenses.

What do you do?

Then your 13 year old daughter breaks her arm and needs medical attention. What now?

On Global Youth Service Day 2009, high school students will be discussing these questions and more at CKNU’s First Annual High School Leadership Conference. Joanna Racho, CKNU coordinator, hopes that through considering these questions, students will broaden their understanding of what poverty is and who is affected by it.

“I think it’s important for students to understand that hunger and living in poverty isn’t something that just happens far away in the city or in 3rd world countries. They should know that it occurs to some of their classmates in school or some of their neighbors in their own community,” said Joanna.

Six to eight local high schools will have the opportunity to send five of their students, who will be selected through an application process. Not only does Joanna plan to have them think and talk, but she’ll also guide them toward ways they can take action.

Specifically, she’s looking to recruit members for the Summer High School Leadership Team, which helps run CKNU’s Feeding our Futures program. When school is not in session, students enrolled in the National School Lunch Program are left without that source of food. CKNU’s program ensures that they have nutritious meals–they distributed nearly 20,000 last summer.

High school volunteers play an essential part in running CKNU’s summer operations, and Joanna is excited about the role they can play in stopping hunger.

“High school students have great resources at their disposal and can mobilize much more quickly than previous generations, so they are able to come together and make a greater impact to improve the lives of those living in poverty and need some assistance,” she said.

Combining knowledge and service, reflection and action is essential if GYSD is to become not just a day of service, but an event that inspires a new way of thinking and new modes of action.

Said Joanna: “I’m hoping that the students will understand that food insecurity and poverty occurs close to home and that they have the power to do something about it. I want them to know that not everyone is as fortunate as they are growing up in the suburbs of Chicago. There are many people – families, children, and seniors that struggle everyday to make ends meet.”

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Global Youth Service Day 2009 is coming up on April 24-26, so to get our CKP teams thinking and planning, we’re serving up a dose of inspiration from GYSD 2008: the Great Vegetable Run.

If YouthServe ran the world, every day would be Global Youth Service Day. This organization, which is based in Birmingham, Alabama, engages young people from ages 13 to 18 years old, in service projects that promote social change.

Here, they describe their work in their own words: “we do all kinds of projects: everything from creating community gardens to tutoring children to clearing vacant lots to building affordable housing to speaking out in support of public transportation to building community across neighborhoods to delivering fresh fruit and vegetables to the homebound. You name it, we have probably done it. And if we haven’t, let’s us know and we’ll put a project together!”

That final project, delivering fresh fruits and veggies to homebound seniors and low-income residents of Birmingham, is fast becoming a Global Youth Service Day tradition.

It all started at one of YouthServe’s  Urban Service Camp’s back in 2002. At a workshop on hunger, a staff member from a local food bank told the young attendees that people who rely on food banks have a hard time getting fresh fruits and vegetables in their diets because most food banks rely in nonperishable items. Inspired, the youth set about taking action.

“The youth heard about a problem and then set out to educate others and take action on the issue. The youth of YouthServe felt empowered by the leadership skills they learned and then felt passionate about a community issue, and they were moved to act,” says Aisha Holmes, YouthServe’s Executive Director.

This year they’ll do what they call the Great Vegetable Run for the seventh time. They’ve gone from delivering 60 bags in 2003 to over 200 in 2008. They’re planning for between 250 and 300 this year.

Their process is not unlike the process of putting together a meal for a Campus Kitchen: they collect donations from local grocers, vendors and growers, and on GYSD 2009, they expect about 120 volunteers to help assemble the bags of produce, which they’ll deliver to community residents in need, especially seniors and children. They identify recipients through partnerships with local social service agencies.

Want to do something similar this year at your school? Holmes advises: “Patience. Do not give up. Plan, plan, plan, and plan some more. Be flexible, as much as you plan SOMETHING will happen!”

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As we start looking forward to Global Youth Service Day 2009, coming up on April 24-26 we’ll be looking back at some of the awesomeness that was GYSD 2008, as well as some other planned projects around the country.

Reaching out, using existing resources, building community: these are the tools we use for the art of Campus Kitchens. So when the Campus Kitchen at Wake Forest created what became a Global Youth Service Week, they created a thing of beauty.

Through their outreach process, CKWFU was also able to connect with Volunteer Service Corps’ annual DESK event. They helped 12-ear-old Jose with painting a desk to use at home. “And paint we did!” said Jenn.

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