High school students in Big Brothers Big Sisters of the Capital Region's (BBBSCR) Beyond School Walls program are implementing community service projects to benefit the Harrisburg community.
The Beyond School Walls program, in partnership with Capital BlueCross, is a curriculum-based program that provides one-to-one mentoring for students focused on professional development. The program launched during the spring of the 2016-17 school year. Since then, 20 employees have built bonds with their high school mentees.
The program provides students with opportunities to strengthen and explore skills necessary for the workplace. The curriculum began with activities focused on addressing the students' individual social and emotional competencies. Topics that were addressed included goal setting, time management, healthy relationships, financial literacy and wellness in the workplace. Additional activities gave students the opportunity to strengthen interpersonal skills such as effective communication, teamwork and interviewing skills.
During the 2018-19 school year, while focusing on the phases of project management, the Beyond School Walls program challenged the students and mentors to create and implement community service projects. The students had the opportunity to practice skillsets they had learned throughout the previous year's curriculum.
There are four project teams, with each team assigned to creating a project to benefit the community. As they collaborate with their team, the students continue to develop skills as they set project goals, consider expenses, present their ideas to their key collaborators, develop a plan and implement their community project.
The first project team to complete its project came together on May 8 to highlight its efforts to benefit Bethesda Mission. The project team led a drive to collect dental supplies, a need the team identified during a tour of the facility earlier in the year. Cindy Mallow, director of development at Bethesda Mission, received nearly 100 dental kits assembled from various locations.
On May 17, two of the project teams completed their community projects at Ben Franklin Elementary School. The first team hosted a health and wellness day in collaboration with Capital BlueCross experts. The high school students and their mentors set up learning stations and guided fourth-grade students through various activities. The stations included making healthy smoothies and granola yogurt parfaits, making stress balls, taking part in interactive fitness games and participating in creative arts.
The second team featured on May 17 collaborated with the health and wellness day project and focused on matching the Beyond School Walls high school mentees with the fourth-grade students. The high school students acted as "Bigs for a Day," mentoring elementary students as they went through the various health and wellness activities.
The final project team created a sustainable peer-to-peer mentoring program within Harrisburg SciTech School. BBBSCR plans to provide oversight as the new program launches in the 2019-20 school year. This new program will bring leadership opportunities to upperclassmen as they act as mentors to incoming freshman students.
For more information, readers may visit http://www.capbigs.org.
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