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State of the Field: Youth Community Service in the USA

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Handbook of Child Well-Being

Abstract

In recent decades in the United States, the field of youth community service has burgeoned. In K-12 schools and on college campuses, community service programs are now commonplace and many classrooms use service-learning as an academic intervention. On the national level, federal programs and nonprofit organizations lead large-scale initiatives to engage youth in volunteerism. And in recent years, full-time service programs for recent high school and college graduates are seeing record numbers of applications and enrollments. Given this infrastructure and the willingness of young people to get involved if asked to do so, it is not surprising that today’s youth are serving at historically high rates. Despite the promise, youth community service has yet to reach its potential. Researchers and practitioners have highlighted a gap between what are known to be the key elements for effective service – and how programs are actually carried out. On a national policy level, the field has not gained traction in mainstream education circles, partially because findings from rigorous research studies of national service programs have yielded inconsistent or null results. This chapter in the Handbook of Child Well-Being provides an overview of, and describes the current landscape for, youth community service in the United States.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. US Department of Education, Institute of Education Sciences, 555 New Jersey Avenue, NW, Suite 608D, Washington, DC, 20208, USA

    Dr. Edward Metz

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  1. Dr. Edward Metz
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Correspondence to Edward Metz .

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Editors and Affiliations

  1. Paul Baerwald School of Social Work and The Hebrew University of Jerusalem, Jerusalem, Israel

    Asher Ben-Arieh

  2. Research Institute of Quality of Life, University of Girona, Girona, Spain

    Ferran Casas

  3. Department of Sociology and Human Geography, University of Oslo, Oslo, Norway

    Ivar Frønes

  4. Department of Anthropology, Case Western Reserve University, Cleveland, Ohio, USA

    Jill E. Korbin

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Metz, E. (2014). State of the Field: Youth Community Service in the USA. In: Ben-Arieh, A., Casas, F., Frønes, I., Korbin, J. (eds) Handbook of Child Well-Being. Springer, Dordrecht. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9063-8_34

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-90-481-9063-8_34

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