Learn and Serve

Learn and Serve America is a program of the Corporation for National and Community Service that supports and encourages service-learning throughout the United States, and enables over one million students to make meaningful contributions to their community while building their academic and civic skills. By engaging America's young people in service-learning, Learn and Serve America instills an ethic of lifelong community service.

Learn and Serve America provides direct and indirect support to K-12 schools, community groups, and higher education institutions to facilitate service-learning projects by:

• Providing grant support for school-community partnerships and higher education institutions;
• Providing training and technical assistance resources to teachers, administrators, parents, schools and community groups; and
• Collecting and disseminating research, effective practices, curricula, and program models.

For more information on Learn and Serve America in K-12 schools in Massachusetts, please contact:

Kristen McKinnon
Community Service-Learning Specialist
Massachusetts Department of Elementary and Secondary Education
75 Pleasant Street
Malden, MA 02148
Phone: 781.338.6306
E-mail: kmckinnon@doe.mass.edu

For more information on Learn and Serve America, please click here.

In Massachusetts in the 2009-2010 school year, Learn and Serve America supported 54 school districts and nearly 22,000 students in service-learning activities such as:

• High school students from the Codman Academy Charter Public School interned in different departments at the Codman Square Health Center, where they learned about diabetes from many different perspectives - patient, doctor, public health worker, etc. They designed and created pill bottle labels that use universally recognizable images to assist illiterate patients in the community in properly taking their medication; for example, a label with a heart, a sandwich, and a moon icon was designed to indicate that the pills were heart medication to be taken at night with food.
• Brockton middle school students studied the geographical characteristics of North Africa and the hunger problem there. They then focused their concerns on their own city and did research to analyze the causes of hunger there. Based on their findings, they worked with a local food pantry, holding a food drive to fill the pantry's shelves and feed those in their own community.
• Second grade students in Spencer-East Brookfield studied plants and how plants grow, and then they grew their own plants in recycled egg cartons and yogurt containers. On Earth Day, they planted the plant in a garden at the front of the school and at the local Veterans center.

If your school currently hosts a CNCS-funded Learn and Serve program in MA and are interested in providing reasonable accommodations to your L & S participants, click here.

Some information adapted from the Corporation for National and Community Service, 11/23/10.