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HUSSEY-SLONIKER: Welcome to the AmeriCorps Research and 

Evaluation Dialogue 2022. My name is Katy HusseySloniker and I’m the Learning Officer for the Office 

of Research and Evaluation. Before we begin our final 

Day 3 of the Convening, we’d like to cover a few 

housekeeping items. First, thank you all for your 

patience as we get started with Zoom events. If you 

have any questions or experience technical 

difficulties, please let us know using the chat box 

feature. 

This session will be recorded and posted on the 

AmeriCorps Impact Webinar page within two weeks of 

the close of the session. Each session will also be 

available on the AmeriCorps YouTube channel under the 

Research and Evaluation playlist. There is no dial-in 

phone line for our Zoom event today. All audio is 

broadcast over the internet using your computer 

speakers. All participants have been muted to avoid 

background noise and to allow for greater engagement. 

You will be in listen only mode throughout the 

session. You can ask questions at any time during the 
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presentation through the chat box. Select Everyone 

when submitting your questions. A member of our ORE 

team will be compiling the questions and reading them 

through the Q&A portion of the session. Finally, 

closed captioning is available. To activate captions 

please select the Live Transcript icon on the Zoom 

menu and select Show Subtitles. 

That takes care of our housekeeping items and now for 

today’s agenda. Today’s Dialogue session is focused 

on AmeriCorps foundational research on African 

American Youth and Civic Engagement. We’ll hear a 

brief welcome from Dr. Mary Hyde, Director of the 

Office of Research and Evaluation. We’ll watch a 

three-minute video discussing how AmeriCorps 

translates research into action, followed by 

introductions, and later facilitated discussions of 

the presentations by Dr. Andrea Robles and Shane 

Dermanjian. And finally, reflections from our senior 

leaders on applying and translating this research 

into practice. 
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As a reminder, this is our final day of speakers 

presenting their research to inform actionable and 

meaningful change through national service. Our 

office would like to encourage each participant in 

our Dialogue to discover the research and resources 

available by both the research grantees and 

AmeriCorps. We’ll place links in the chat box for you 

to page mark and look at and explore after the 

conclusion of today’s session. 

And now our Research Dialogue: Embracing the 

Diversity of Civic Engagement will start. Here to 

welcome us is Dr. Mary Hyde, Director of the 

AmeriCorps Office of Research and Evaluation. 

DR. HYDE: Thank you, Katy, and welcome everyone. Good 

afternoon or morning, depending on what time zone 

you’re sitting in at the moment. I really appreciate 

the fact that you’re taking a little bit of time out 

of your day to hear from a fabulous constellation of 

presenters we have on tap for today. You’re going to 

hear a lot about some research that I think is more 

timely than ever perhaps in this moment of our 
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country. And we are very grateful that they have 

spent so much time carefully producing this research, 

but more importantly, taking the time today to share 

it with all of you. 

As Katy mentioned, we are going to kick off today’s 

dialogue with a brief video that describes how our 

agency, AmeriCorps integrates evidence and data into 

its daily operation. It’s a little opportunity to 

prime your minds, if you will, to sort of get into 

the mindset of today’s conversation. I also want to 

thank briefly our colleagues at AmeriCorps who are 

going to be sharing their reflections on what they 

hear today about the research findings. And of course 

I am very grateful for our ORE team members who will 

be facilitating us through today’s dialogue as well 

as our fabulous tech team, ICF. 

So, with that, we’re going to dive right into the 

video and then into discussion. And I’ll be back to 

offer a few final remarks later in the day. Thank 

you. 
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[Video Plays] 

DR. HUDSON-FLEGE: My biggest takeaway is just how 

serious that AmeriCorps is about research and 

evaluation, how they want to know not only how their 

programs are working, but how volunteerism and civic 

engagement in general is working across the country 

and making sure that they’re on the frontline of 

furthering these goals. 

DR. ZIMMERMAN: No matter what part of the research 

spectrum you’re on, you’re always building 

opportunities to build evidence, to gain greater 

understanding. And when you do participatory research 

you’re not only building knowledge and understanding, 

but you’re creating connections with folks in the 

community who can not only benefit from that 

research, but as they become part of research they 

become empowered to address issues in their community 

as well. 

BULMAN: Without the research that we do in 

volunteerism, we aren’t going to be equipped to 
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leverage the workforce of volunteers. So we need to 

understand the trends in volunteerism, we need to 

understand the equity issues, we need to understand 

barriers to being engaged. 

DR. NUÑEZ-ALVAREZ: One of the things that makes 

research grants so critical in advancing our 

understanding of civic engagement, again, is that it 

is important to document what is actually happening 

on the ground. 

DR. FRAZIER: I think we’re in a time where evidence 

matters and we have limited funding and you have to 

prioritize, you got to think about like, what works 

and put your money towards that. And I think 

evaluation is the way that we figure out what works. 

DR. PAXTON: We all care about outcomes. We care about 

outcomes for our communities, we care about outcomes 

for the people that we work with in our nonprofits or 

in our government programs, whatever it is. 
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DR. HUDSON-FLEGE: AmeriCorps really cares about 

evaluations and rigorous external evaluations and 

research on their programs. They’re not just going to 

rest on their laurels of saying, you know, we serve 

our members and we think the program’s working. 

They’re inviting scholars in to do rigorous research 

to identify what is working, but also identify maybe 

what’s not working or where’s there room for 

improvement. 

DR. INTRATOR: There’s an intellectual renewal that goes 

on, that you go back jazzed up with new ideas, but at 

the same time there’s sort of, you know, kind of a 

renewal of conviction. You go back and you’re like, 

wow, people are doing tremendous work. I want to take 

that idea and see how that works in our project. 

DR. ROBLES: Hello, everyone. Thank you so much for 

attending today. And just as you saw in this video, 

these are our research grantees who are doing an 

array of different projects. And so, again, today 

we’re focusing on the specific topic of youth of 

color and research around that, and how do we think 
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about involving the civic engagement issues and how 

do we bring people together? And so our first speaker 

is Laura Wray-Lake, who is an Associate Professor of 

Social Welfare in the Luskin School of Public Affairs 

at UCLA. Her research centers on the development of 

youth civic engagement. And AmeriCorps funding has 

enabled her research to conduct innovative and timely 

research on civic engagement among urban youth of 

color and Black youth specifically, that centers 

youth voices and perspectives and advances academic 

and public knowledge of youth civic engagement. So I 

will pass it to Laura, thank you. 

DR. WRAY-LAKE: Thank you so much. I’m very happy to be 

here and have the opportunity to present this work. 

And of course I wanted to say how much I appreciate 

the AmeriCorps Office of Research and Evaluation both 

for funding this work and importantly, for 

prioritizing the experiences and the voices of Black 

youth through this research and holding this session. 

You can go to the next slide, please. 
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Okay. So actually, you can go to the next one as 

well. So our project is focused on Black youth who 

are – There we go, thank you. Our project is focused 

on Black youth who are highly civically engaged and 

it’s important for us to understand their journeys 

into civic engagement. So our project was really 

focused on what kinds of activities Black youth are 

engaged in, how and why they become engaged, and what 

helps them sustain their engagement. 

So as a White woman studying Black youth, it’s very 

important for me to not do this work alone and so I 

do this work in collaboration with a multiracial team 

which is inclusive of multiple Black scholars who 

have lived experiences and scholarly expertise to 

bring to this project. This is our team. So I do this 

with 11 other people which includes scholars, PhD 

students, masters students, as well as undergraduate 

students. Next slide, please. 

We’re very excited to share briefly that we are 

writing up our findings from our project as a book 

and it’s going to be entitled Young Black 
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Changemakers and the Road to Racial Justice. We’re 

very excited about this. It’s scheduled to come out 

in 2023 with Cambridge University Press. So please 

stay tuned. We’re working to gear this book toward a 

broad audience and really focus on the practical 

implications of the work. Next slide. 

Today I’d like to share some findings that appear in 

one chapter of the book, in particular, focused on 

the role of community-based organizations in 

sustaining young Black changemaking. Now when we say 

young Black changemaking and changemaking in general, 

we’re referring to the many different ways that Black 

youth can be civically engaged in their communities 

and in the larger society to create a better world. 

This takes many different forms and that’s part of 

what we wanted to understand. We also wanted to 

understand Black youth’s experiences in organizations 

that help them grow and sustain their civic 

engagement efforts and that has implications for best 

practices in these organizations for supporting Black 

youth. So I’ll focus on that as well. Next slide, 

please. 
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Just to tell you a bit about our study, our study 

consisted of qualitative interviews with 43 Black 

young people in Los Angeles who identified as highly 

civically engaged. So they were between the ages of 

13 to 18 years old and they came from all over Los 

Angeles, they came from 13 different organizations, 

and 37 different high schools. Data were collected 

from February to August of 2020. And the interviews 

included a lot of different questions about what they 

were engaged in terms of their civic actions, how 

they became engaged, how they stayed engaged, and 

other topics like their identity and their 

experiences of summer 2020, which unexpectedly became 

some themes in the data because they were living 

through the COVID-19 pandemic and the murder of 

George Floyd and others at the hands of police, and 

the resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement. 

So let me go into the findings. Next slide, please. 

And we had three main themes that I want to talk 

about and these three main themes really hit on what 

the role of the organizations and what happens in 
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organizations that help youth sustain their civic 

engagement. So one is that they were gaining 

expertise as changemakers. So they were gaining voice 

and skills and larger systems perspectives through 

their work with organizations. A second theme was 

that they were really sustained by supportive adults 

and connections with others in the community within 

the organization in the organizational space. And 

this was especially true when blackness was 

celebrated and I’ll explain each of these a bit more 

in a moment. And then the third theme was seeing the 

impact of their actions. So when Black youth could 

see the tangible impacts of their changemaking that 

really built their meaning and agency which helped 

them continue the work that they were doing. Next 

slide, please. 

So I want to start with the theme of gaining practice 

and gaining this expertise in using voice and gaining 

civic skills. Young people developed leadership and 

organizational skills through their works with 

organizations, and like I mentioned, they were able 

to start thinking about larger systems and structures 
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as they worked to try to make change in their 

communities. And I want to give an example from 

Camille, who was highly engaged in the service 

organization for Black youth and families, and she 

said, “It’s like our job to organize it ourselves. So 

as I’ve gotten older in the organization, I’ve really 

gotten more of an appreciation for doing civic 

engagement and organizing it myself based on what I 

care about. Because when I’m younger, it’s like, oh, 

let’s make lunches for homeless people. But now that 

I’m older, it’s a lot more in my hands. And I’ve take 

that into account more. I’ve taken that experience 

into a lot more areas of my life... I’ve learned to 

advocate not only for myself, but like, for people 

who don’t have voices and stand up for everybody.” 

So this example really illustrates how organizations 

can provide developmentally appropriate opportunities 

for civic engagement by offering young people more 

chances to make decisions, to develop and show 

leadership, and to speak out about what really 

matters to them. Next slide, please. 
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A second theme that become really important was 

finding supportive communities within organizations. 

And when young people were able to do this, it helped 

them sustain their civic engagement, and this support 

could come from peers or from adults. I want to give 

you an example of Cory who’s involved in a socially 

justice focused organization that does education and 

participatory action research with young of people 

color. And Cory shares how adult leaders supported 

him when he was speaking his mind at a meeting. 

He says, “It was like the gut feeling I got from 

being in there, because everybody there we just had a 

good energy and they really wanted to just help 

people. They really uplift you. It just felt like a 

family in those spaces. It felt more like I wanted to 

be there with those people. The adults, they would 

just be like, so cool. They would support you in any 

way. I was at this meeting last week, I talked, I 

gave an answer. And then the adults, they were just 

like clapping, they’ll give you encouragement. 

They’ll have so much positive energy that it’s like, 

really good.” 
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So for Cory and other young people in our study, the 

organizational space can create a sense of community 

like a family where young people feel welcome and 

supported. And these organizations are especially 

welcome and safe spaces for Black youth when 

blackness is celebrated. So I want to give you an 

example of that next. Next slide, please. 

This example comes from Quinn, who was engaged in a 

community organizing nonprofit in a majority Black 

community. And she shares, “I have people at my 

school and people at the organization, it’s like, 

it’s so you know, it’s not a bad thing to be Black, 

it’s beautiful to be Black. All these problems, these 

things happening right now. It’s doesn’t mean it’s 

bad to be Black. And that’s basically what I’m 

learning. That’s what I’m getting from people.” 

So these kinds of welcoming spaces and messages that 

Black youth can receive, in the organizations that 

they spend time in, can show them that they’re valued 

and offer them a sense of safety and belonging to 
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find connection, especially when young people are 

engaging in racial justice work, it can be very 

difficult and Black youth encounter quite a bit of 

racism and oppression, and we have lots examples of 

that in our study as well. But, having these positive 

safe spaces can be very sustaining during the 

challenging work that they’re engaged in. Next slide, 

please. 

The final theme involves young people having 

opportunities to see the impact of their civic 

actions through work with organizations. And I want 

to give an example of NA. By the way, young people 

choose their own pseudonyms for this project. But, NA 

is engaged in an organization that does volunteer 

work and she really sees the impact through helping 

others. She also highlights, again, this theme of 

community. 

She says, “Oh, what keeps me going? Just like, 

knowing I’m supported because a lot of times, it 

wouldn’t just be me there. It would be my classmates 

and a few teachers would also be there with me and 
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other volunteers, so knowing that I was like, helping 

those people and then thanking me and me feeling good 

that I helped them, and then also other people being 

by my side through the whole thing and believing we 

could really these people and help them survive, so 

yeah, those two things really helped me to keep going 

and stay passionate about it.” 

So, again, she’s picking up on the theme of 

community, of having shared space with others who are 

doing the work together, and supporting her, but 

also, she’s seeing the direct impact of the ways her 

helping makes other people’s lives better and that 

gives her the motivation and passion to continue what 

she’s doing. Next slide, please. 

Other types of changemaking also allow young people 

young people to see their impact and I want to give 

you another example where Unique describes her 

experience with community organizing and she 

successfully organized a phone bank around an 

important issue in her community. And she shares, “I 

felt empowered. I felt like I could move the world. 
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Because we actually got it to happen, that’s the 

crazy part. Like it’s one thing when you want 

something to happen, and then you’re just speaking on 

it, but when you’re really acting on it, that’s 

something different. So when that happened, I was 

like, ‘Oh, we can really do this, like we’re really 

out there. So yeah, I felt empowered. Like, I felt 

unstoppable, I was like ‘Okay, Unique, you better go 

girl.” 

So these opportunities to see the real tangible 

impacts of their civic engagement, whether it’s small 

or large, whether it’s helping or political action, 

it really helps young people build a sense of meaning 

and build a sense of agency or empowerment which 

sustains their future engagement. So next slide, 

please. 

I just want to end on a few implications of this work 

for community-based organizations and think about 

what are some actions that organizations can really 

take to help support young Black changemaking. One is 

providing opportunities for young people to take 
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ownership of their activities. So allowing young 

people to have a voice to lead activities and develop 

other skills in the process like speaking out, 

advocating, organizing events. This really requires 

adults to step back sometimes from our own agendas 

and let young people take the wheel, and that seems 

really important and meaningful for young people as 

they’re continuing their civic engagement. 

A second takeaway is that supporting and mentoring 

youth through new challenges can really support their 

engagement. So young people need to be encouraged and 

uplifted during their civic work and it’s these 

moments that are really memorable to them in making a 

lasting impact. So this just reiterates what we 

probably all know, that relationships do really 

matter and they’re so key in civic engagement work. 

Celebrating Black culture and identity is especially 

important for Black youth to feel safe and to feel 

welcome in organizations. So organizations that work 

with Black young people should definitely be thinking 

about ways to do this. 
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 And finally, offering opportunities for young people 

to see the impact of their actions and then 

emphasizing, as adults, emphasizing the positive 

impact of young people’s actions can be empowering 

and can help young people continue this work of 

making positive changes in their communities. So I 

will stop there. Thank you very much. 

DR. ROBLES: Thank you, Laura. I think your work is always 

wonderful, but I think this is particularly important 

in AmeriCorps, right, because we fund organizations, 

we fund nonprofits to have members, right, and 

volunteers. And so I think these lessons learned 

could really play a role in what it means like, the 

meaning that you’re mentioning and being able to 

really see what your impact of doing that work. So 

thank you very much. And I’ll be curious to hear from 

our program leadership in a bit. 

So our next presenter, or presenters, Maren King, who 

is an Associate Professor in Landscape Architecture 

at SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry 

and Director of the ESF Center for Community Design 
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Research. Through her work she builds university 

community partnerships such as with their 

collaboration with the Syracuse Peacemaking Center, 

of which you’ll hear more about. Christina Limpert is 

an Assistant Professor of Environmental Studies at 

SUNY College of Environmental Science and Forestry in 

Syracuse as well. And Dr. Limpert’s research focuses 

on community engagement with youth and gender 

dimensions of the environment and popular culture. 

 Their recent community design project, such as the 

one funded by the AmeriCorps research grant, has led 

to continued research on developing partnerships to 

utilize youth-oriented community-based research and 

placemaking to address the crime, and violence, and 

degraded physical conditions, or environmental 

violence that plague many low income neighborhoods. 

So for their work, they were just given an award, 

which they’ll maybe talk about, but from the New York 

Upstate Chapter of the American Society of Landscape 

Architects. And so Maren and Christina, I will pass 

this on to you. Thank you. 
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KING: Alright, thank you everyone. I can start my video, 

there we go. thank you. It’s great to be here today. 

And I want to acknowledge that both Dr. Limpert and 

myself are here to present findings from our project 

that was funded as part of the AmeriCorps Community 

Conversations Grant which began in 2018. And to thank 

AmeriCorps for the opportunity to advance the 

research collaboration between our institution and 

local neighborhoods, and the important engagement 

with community members, and I would say the different 

types of support we’ve received over the last four 

years. 

I also want to acknowledge that both of us are on the 

ancestral lands of the Onondaga Nation of the 

Haudenosaunee Confederacy. Now in terms of where we 

are in our project, we’re finishing up our process 

and project evaluation. I guess you could start our 

presentation, if you could go to the next slide. 

Thank you. 

So we’re finishing up our process and project 

evaluation. We’re writing about our findings and 
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outcomes, and we’re staying in touch with the 

activities of our community partner, who is the 

Syracuse Peacemaking Project. And the Peacemaking 

Center is located in Syracuse, New York in the 

Westside neighborhood, in a low income community with 

a diversity of races and cultures. And the 

neighborhood has many assets including close family 

relationships, supportive institutions and services, 

but it’s challenged by poverty, low education and 

employment rates, unhealthy living conditions, and 

high rates of crime and violence. 

And those of you who are familiar with the 2018 

grants, a major requirement of those grants was 

collaboration between an academic institution and a 

community partner, which had already started 

strategic goals at the time of the grant that the 

grant could help accomplish. And the other 

requirement was that the research process had to 

engage community members through a community-based 

participatory research process. Could you go to the 

next slide? 
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And so in discussion with the Peacemaking Center 

about their activities and goals, we learned that 

they had been really successful in involving families 

with young children as well as older adults in their 

healthy living and community building activities, 

they were not as successful in engaging teenagers and 

young adults. And had established a goal of creating 

a youth impact team that could work alongside their 

existing adult community impact team. So together, as 

we were developing the proposal, we decided that our 

process would engage teenagers, ages 13 through 19, 

as core members of our research team, and we refer to 

them, of course, as a youth participatory action 

research team. Could you go to the next slide? 

So I’ve learned a significant amount about 

collaborating with youth and Laura has talked about 

that as well, and the importance and value of the 

teens personally, as well as to their neighborhood 

and broader community when they’re creatively 

engaged. In contrary to what we read and hear in 

local and national media, where youth are seen as 
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problems and troublemakers, we see them as assets and 

leaders. 

 And now what’s shown in this image, at a community 

event in the summer of 2019, while they came to this 

event with serious intentions as researchers, they 

also tapped into their fun-loving and joyful side. 

And when given the opportunities and support, they 

have the capacity to make really significant positive 

contributions and change as partners, amplifiers, and 

community builders. And our presentation will 

illustrate these themes. Could I have the next slide, 

please? 

This chart shows the stages of the process, and 

where, and the extent to which different individuals 

and groups were involved. So you see we had a fair 

number of groups, individuals as part of our process. 

And as was the original intent, our teen team members 

were involved in all stages of the research process, 

except for really the proposal development and the 

Institutional Review Board application, although, 

they actually benefitted from that process. And as 
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you know, partnerships don’t just happen, they 

require shared goals, trust, follow through, 

commitment, and the desire to collaborate and work 

together. And partnerships change and evolve over 

time, and we had a good amount of time for this whole 

process to develop. 

Our adult and teen memberships took time, but began 

to really emerge initially when the teens started to 

feel confident in the skills and knowledge that they 

were actually bringing to the project, in addition to 

what they were learning through the project. And a 

major shift occurred during this stage when they 

identified potential issues or problems and framed 

the research project. Can we have the next slide, 

please? 

So while the adult team members provided them with a 

framework to work through the process, working in 

pairs and then as a group, they were very capable of 

identifying the possibilities, discussing and 

considering the pros and cons of the options of 

research, and then coming to an agreement on the 
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questions that they wanted to explore with other 

community members. In choosing to investigate how 

crime and violence were affecting the lives of people 

in the neighborhood, they were seeking to understand 

and bring attention to a problem that was affecting 

their own lives, with the intention of communicating 

those results to those with the power and influence 

who could influence and who could figure out ways to 

help address them. Next slide. 

And I have to admit that this was not a topic I 

personally had much experience with, although we had 

done some crime prevention through environmental 

design activities within the neighborhood, but, upon 

reflection, it actually turned out to be a really 

good thing, because our team learned about the topic 

and its impacts on the neighborhood together and in 

that way we were all teaching and learning from each 

other and from other people who we brought into the 

process. And this action really shifted the power and 

balance, and put us on more equal footing as team 

members and partners. Next slide, please. 
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So with basic mentoring from adult team members, as 

well as contributing ideas that they had used in 

school, the teens determined the research questions 

and developed the methods to ask them. Together we 

brainstormed the possible groups and individuals we 

would invite as research participants. After some 

practice sessions with our advisory committee 

members, the teens became the primary facilitators 

and the data collectors for seven different focus 

sessions. And while not all of them were totally 

confident in all of the roles, they worked as a team 

and really supported each other, and they were 

definitely encouraged and supported by those who were 

research participants. 

And the adults especially were impressed by their 

confidence and poise, and really proud of them. So 

I’d like to turn the rest of the presentation or the 

next portion of the presentation over to my 

colleague, Christina Limpert. 

DR. LIMPERT: Next slide, please. So this next set of 

slides illustrates a central question for the team 
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which was, what are the strengths and assets that we 

can build upon? So this project created opportunities 

for power sharing, as Maren mentioned. And this is 

especially important when urban youth are positioned 

as objects of public conversations about wicked 

problems like crime, violence, and safety. So this 

type of research allowed youth to engage as active 

participants in civic issues that affect their lives 

and community. The more opportunities youth have to 

use their social-emotional insight to understand new 

landscapes, the more promising their transition to 

adulthood would be. 

And so we did our research on the Near Westside of 

Syracuse. And the Near Westside is often framed by 

others outside of the neighborhood as dangerous and 

undesirable. And even though the teens were 

highlighting challenges faced in their neighborhood, 

their aim was to focus on strength and assets when 

addressing and framing the issues. And here you see 

the research team walking the neighborhood and 

discovering everyday signs of care like gardens and 

places to hangout. Next slide, please. 
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Here you see the research team at their first public 

outing as a team wearing their teen t-shirts and 

conducting research at a well-attended annual 

neighborhood festival. Their focus here was to gather 

neighbor’s understandings of both the concerns and 

strengths of the community, and you can see that 

illustrated on the poster there, the question, “What 

do you love about the Near Westside?” is framed as a 

way to amplify assets, and they got a lot of data in 

that particular poster in particular. 

We argue that having teens as lead researchers, who 

interact with a broader spectrum of people in the 

neighborhood, amplifies the teens themselves as 

assets. In other words, the notion that youth as a 

neighborhood asset is made public by their 

participation and leadership. Next slide, please. 

This picture on the right is one of the various focus 

group workshops the teens conducted. Their engagement 

with neighborhood stakeholders took seriously the 

information and responses that were shared by people. 
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In addition to the stories that were told, many 

participants were pointing out the challenges and how 

their lives were affected by criminal activity, but 

also what came out of these conversations were the 

community strengths and assets including, for 

example, the Muddy Branch Library and other various 

organizations and institutions that you can see 

represented on the left side of the slide. Next 

slide, please. 

This is a set of posters the teens developed to 

communicate their process and findings and action 

project. They were designed with graduate students 

and undergraduate students in landscape architecture 

to communicate the process in a way that would be 

interesting and understandable to other people in the 

community, but also, and more importantly, reflected 

the design ideas of the teens. These posters were 

distributed to our community partners at Muddy Branch 

Library at the Syracuse Peacemaking Center, and to 

various service providers, to the mayor’s office, and 

other stakeholders in the city. Concurrently, the 

teens created a narrated PowerPoint which they 
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presented to community organizations via Zoom. And as 

Maren mentioned, the service provider’s network 

really loved hearing directly from the teens. Next 

slide, please. 

Here you see the teens interacting with elders in the 

neighborhood. And we know that cross-generational 

partnerships enrich youth’s connection to place which 

strengthens their understanding of community assets, 

as well as strengthening the community’s notion that 

teens are an asset. Next slide, please. 

So this next theme of youth as community builders. We 

have already established that youth are amplifiers 

and assets. And as the team sort of progressed 

through their action projects, we began to see ways 

in which these youth were also community builders. 

And here you see them working on the Gathering 

Garden, which was a project of placemaking and 

improving place together, alongside of other people 

from the community with the same aims. In other 

words, this project built capacity to address the 
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wicked problems and issues facing their community. 

Next slide, please. 

And these last two slides pictures illustrate the 

bridge building and community connections made 

through youth leadership. The picture on the left was 

taken after the team interviewed a neighborhood 

officer from the Syracuse Police Department, who is 

pictured third from the right there in that slide. As 

our research showed, there was tension between the 

police and people in this community, so the teens 

felt it was important to interview police. In fact, 

the officer confirmed some of our findings, which was 

really exciting for the team. 

The picture on the right shows the team presenting 

their research in an open community event where they 

provided dinner and details about the project. This 

was a celebration of the first year of their work. It 

was also a demonstration of the team’s sustained 

commitment to addressing neighborhood issues in their 

capacity as civic leaders. Here we see youth as 

present representatives of the neighborhoods and as 
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the future which is the same message that’s 

represented on their t-shirts that says, “We are 

next. We are now.” Maren? 

KING: Okay, next slide, thanks, Tina. So COVID had a 

significant impact on our project process and the 

ability of the teens to maintain consistent 

involvement in the project. In addition, as you know, 

teens also grow older, and that’s great for them, and 

they move on to other opportunities, and so that’s 

kind of the curse of time, right. They are moving on 

and that’s been terrific. However, the teen research 

process and its outcomes did provide the foundation 

for the Peacemaking Center to actually form the Youth 

Impact Team which was a major goal of our project. 

That started last summer and is continuing now. 

 And building on the strengths and outcomes of the 

teen research project, the Peacemaking Center has 

been able to hire a youth program coordinator and the 

teens from middle school through high school are 

meeting twice a week, and their activities are 

focused on learning and applying the skills of 
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peacemaking, which is a big focus of the center, and 

placemaking, which now has become a focus of the 

center, in addition to what ESF has brought into the 

community. Next slide, please. 

And so we’ve come to realize that YPAR is a practice 

and methodology that provides youth with ways to 

learn more about and to serve their community. YPAR 

taps into their innate curiosity and ability to ask 

questions and they get to know, or got to know the 

people and place, and it helps them understand the 

things that can and should be changed, and the roles 

that they have now and way into the future. We also 

realized the value of partnerships of adults and 

youth in understanding and addressing the issues and 

wicked problems, like the ones that the teens 

identified. And that the diversity of ages, skills, 

experiences, and perspectives can contribute to 

creating equitable, adaptable, and resilient 

solutions. 
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 So thank you very much for listening to our 

presentation and we look forward to questions and 

discussion. 

DR. ROBLES: Thank you, Maren and Christina. That is 

fantastic work. I hope you are putting together a 

manual or a guide that you can share. There’s I just 

think so many organizations and groups that could use 

the process and knowledge that you and the youth have 

gained through this work. So it’s fantastic, thank 

you. So if any of you have tuned in the last few 

days, you will see that a lot of the work that’s been 

done it’s team-based and it’s academics, it’s 

community members, it’s students, other community 

partners working together. 

And so in this next presentation we have a group of 

people from Drexel and the Writers Room. We have Dr. 

Ayana Allen-Handy, who is an Assistant Professor of 

Urban Education and the Founder-Director of the 

Justice-oriented Youth Education Lab at Drexel 

University School of Education. She’s a native 

Philadelphian and former elementary school teacher 
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and high school counselor. She has dedicated her 

career to social justice and urban education. 

Rachel Wenrick is a Founding Director of the Writers 

Room, a university community literacy arts program at 

Drexel University. Dr. Wenrick works to connect 

collaborators across sectors to develop innovative 

arts programming and transformative learning 

experience. They are committed to building capacity 

through collaborative research that benefits the 

community and promotes their abilities to develop, 

implement, and sustain their own solutions to 

gentrification and displacement. 

Carol Richardson McCullough is a Founding Member of 

the Writers Room who has been an integral part of 

each stage of the program’s growth, from its regular 

programming, to the NEA funded festival celebrating 

the life and work of Zora Neal Hurston, to Tripod, an 

intergenerational photo essay project. Her work as a 

cultural liaison has helped forge partnerships with 

institutions including the Free Library of 

Philadelphia and Mural Arts Philadelphia. 
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Devin Welsh is currently an Artist Year Fellow. He is 

originally from Lansdale, Pennsylvania and a graduate 

from Drexel University with a bachelor’s degree in 

English and a minor in writing. He has had a passion 

for telling stories since he could hold a pencil. He 

is a creative writer and photographer who uses 

creative nonfiction and photography to explore his 

sense of self and his community. So I’ll turn it over 

to Ayana. 

DR. ALLEN-HANDY: Good afternoon, everyone. Next slide, 

please. So our presentation is talking about our 

project. It’s a community-led project, Antidisplacement: The Untapped Potential of University 

Community Cooperative Living. And I’m going to turn 

it over to Carol to get us started. 

McCULLOUGH: So our CPAR study, our community-led 

participatory action research study investigates the 

effects of gentrification on residential displacement 

and affordable housing options in West Philadelphia. 

Gentrification is something that has been going on at 
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an increasing rate throughout the country and we 

certainly have felt it in our community, sometimes 

even within our own selves. So we are attempting to 

look into this and find a way that we can do 

something to help the situation. 

The program that we are implementing calls upon 

different voices in the community. The lived 

experiences of residents, community members, as well 

as the youth at different levels. And it is 

intergenerational, which we find is one of the 

strengths, because it’s best when everyone can learn 

from each other, everyone has a gift, and if it 

isrecognized and utilized then the end result might 

be something beautiful. So we have people from all 

walks of life, ages 18 to 80. 

Paul Robeson High School, which is African American 

youth, then we have a group that is Youth Build 

Philly, which calls upon like green building 

construction. And we have Drexel students, as well as 

Mantua, Powelton neighborhoods that border and touch 

upon the Drexel community. Our program is also 
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interdisciplinary. We use a wide range of techniques 

involving creative writing, photography through the 

Tripod group, and we have architecture, design, 

music, and as I mentioned before, green building 

construction. 

DR. ALLEN-HANDY: Next slide, please. Thank you, Carol. 

McCULLOUGH: Sure. 

DR. ALLEN-HANDY: So I want to talk a little bit about our 

study design. And so it’s a community-led PAR 

project, as Carol shared. Community-led PAR work is 

dynamic, it involves community-generated and executed 

problem identification, research and plan 

development, collection and analysis of evidence, 

reflection on the findings, sharing of those results, 

and taking action to address the problem. 

 Our study design has evolved over the last three 

years. And so after we kind of thought about all of 

the ways in which we collected and analyzed data, our 

project is really kind of a multimodal research 
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design. So we’ve collected data through interviews 

with community residents and our civic leaders. We’ve 

conducted focus groups. We’ve done more kind of 

quantitative census and GIS data analysis. We’ve 

incorporated some photovoice and narrative analysis 

as well as document analysis. And also we’ve engaged 

in this very collaborative data analysis process, so 

you’ll see on the right-hand side some of our kind of 

co-constructed data analysis processes where we’ve 

gone into our focus groups, gone into some of our 

narrative data, and as a collective team of, as Carol 

mentioned, 18 to 80 year old residents, students at 

Drexel, graduate students, faculty, staff, just a 

really dynamic team of youth, again, from Robeson, 

and we’ve collectively coded and done our data 

analysis together. Next slide, please. 

So our findings, and I’ll be brief so that we can get 

to really talking about how we’ve empowered and 

engaged African American youth in this work. The 

findings from our first research question which was 

really looking at the landscape of gentrification and 

displacement in our neighborhood, Mantua and 
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Powelton, which again, are neighborhoods that are 

adjacent to Drexel. And so our first finding was what 

we found to be this sandwich effect, which is this 

active gentrification and displacement of Black 

residents in particular, really happening at 

expeditious rates from the north and from the south, 

kind of resulting in this squeezing remaining 

residents into the center of our neighborhoods. 

And this was kind of conducted through some of our 

GIS census data analysis to really see what were 

these patterns of gentrification and displacement 

that were happening. And in some of the census blocks 

we’ve seen evidence of up to 200% displacement of 

African American residents on some of the census 

designated block groups. Our second finding is that 

Mantua residents in particular are particularly cost 

burdened where housing costs are more than 30% of 

income and even 50% of some neighboring census 

blocks. 

And so one of the things our kind of second research 

question was really looking at, what are the 
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affordable housing options that are available to 

residents and how well are those options understood 

by residents in need? And so we really see this high 

percentage of neighbors that are really cost burdened 

and especially from the onslaught of gentrification. 

We see, you know, where new residents are able to 

take advantage of tax abatements for up to ten years 

not paying taxes when existing residents are having 

to kind of foot the bill of the taxes in the 

neighborhood. 

And then our final finding is what we’ll focus on 

really is not so much problem generated but solution 

generated. And so in this kind of research question 

we’re finding, number three, we’re looking at, what 

are the prospects of cooperative living at the 

intersection of the university and the community as 

an anti-displacement strategy? And so our findings 

thus far in this work is that we are currently 

examining housing typologies for aging in place, 

that’s a critical component of our work. And findings 

show that the community is excited about cooperative 

living and co-living as an anti-displacement 
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strategy, including new partnerships with Lomax Real 

Estate Group and Village Square on Haverford 

Affordable Housing Project, which my colleague Rachel 

will talk to you a little bit more about. 

But on the right-hand side you’ll see we have a team 

that includes architects and incredible interior 

designers who have been conducting case studies with 

some of our existing residents around how we can take 

their homes and redesign them and rebuild and do some 

development and construction so that they can age in 

place and perhaps we can really execute this 

cooperative living model. And next slide, please, and 

I’ll turn it over to Rachel. 

DR. WENRICK: Hi, everyone. I’m so happy to be with 

everyone today. Okay, so I’m talking about some of 

the action. So the Second Story Collective is the 

partnership that has grown out of our CPAR work and 

our arts programming. It’s a cross-discipline, crosssector partner network that has its roots in creative 

placemaking and placekeeping. And that is work that 

integrates arts and culture and design into efforts 
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that strengthen communities. That is kind of the 

story so far in the work that we’ve done so far is 

through our arts programming and through the CPAR 

work we have been able to forge this partnership 

network, which is neighborhood and university public 

and private stakeholders. 

The story from this point forward, that we’re really 

excited to share, is this partnership with Charles 

Lomax and Lomax Real Estate with the development on 

Village Square on Haverford, which is a two city 

block development. It’s the largest parcel of 

undeveloped land in our neighborhood. And that’s a 

local family that has been awarded that parcel and 

has been working in partnership with our civic 

partners to develop the kind of housing and mixed use 

development that our neighbors would like to see. 

And what we are working on together, as Second Story 

Collective, is a partnership to transition 18 

families from public housing rentals to home 

ownership through our art-centered model of coliving. And what we hope to do is contribute an 
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alternative anti-displacement aging in place strategy 

in a community that very much needs all of the 

strategies. Thank you. 

WELSH: Hi, everybody. So I’m going to tell you a little 

bit about what this work brings us to as far as 

engaging African American youth. And when I think of 

engaging some of the folks that I’ve been fortunate 

enough to work with, I think of this young person 

down in the bottom right-hand corner. Their name is 

Keish. I first met Keish at our home symposium in 

October of 2018, where we really started to engage 

neighborhood voices and tell the story of the 

neighborhood so that everyone was on the same page as 

we started to think about what issues faced this 

community and what solutions everyone wanted to see. 

And the former President of the Mantua Civic 

Association and then Secretary was sort of talking 

about these issues and explaining how it didn’t seem 

as though the youth were particularly interested in 

the solution. And I was helping to photograph and 

document, and I see this hand raise out of the crowd, 
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and I hadn’t yet met this young person, but that was 

Keish. And this room was full of all of our partners, 

so that means it’s full of residents, it’s full of 

scholars and experts, and Keish, who was then a high 

school student at Paul Robeson, they were with their 

Artist Year Fellow at the time, Jasmine, and Keish 

set the record straight and explained very clearly 

that they were interested in being a part of the 

solution. 

And it’s that kind of – that empowerment that we see, 

the sharing of the expert hat, you know, that 

everyone in this space is an expert and that really 

facilitates a lot of the exchange of knowledge from a 

high school student to a long time resident of the 

community. It’s not a one-way street and it’s back 

and forth. And so much so, that in this bottom right 

photo, this is actually a symposium from this year, 

2022, where Keish has since graduated and is about to 

get their associates at CCP. They’ve taken some of 

the skills that Carol led us through, as we were 

doing this research in interview training, and 

they’ve taken off. 
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And so they’ve been building their own practice as an 

interviewer and a storyteller. And so Keish had the 

opportunity to interview the keynote speaker for the 

symposium, Kia Weatherspoon. And so going from a 

participant in the crowd, shakily raising a hand, to 

being at the front and center really telling the 

story of this work is what we see as part of our 

everyday as Writers Room and in the work that we’re 

doing. And really co-constructing knowledge across 

difference and all of these intersecting identities 

from Paul Robeson High School students to Drexel 

students and our neighbors. 

So seeing – My apologies. Seeing the development of 

young people like Keish, after graduating through 

Robeson and really taking this work onto their own, 

has been really special to see. Ms. Carol, did you 

want to add anything as far as the work that we’ve 

been doing on Tripod? You’re muted. 

McCULLOUGH: Okay. I was just going to mention, I said 

before, one of the strengths of the program I think 
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is the intergenerational quality of it, because if it 

were not for that, I’m getting to the point where I 

might have been pushed over to a corner or set in a 

little box somewhere off to the side, but thankfully 

we’ve established an environment where everyone, we 

recognize that everyone has something to contribute, 

particularly the youth, because they keep us, they 

keep our eyes on the future and they give us a fresh 

outlook to things, and provide a perspective. 

So Tripod photography component is setup with a high 

school student, a student from Youth Build 

Philadelphia, a Drexel student, and an older 

community member. Each of the groups have people from 

different ages and stages and places in life. And we 

all come together and document our community. The 

youth have a voice and their voice is heard, and 

their voice often influences us, you know. 

Particularly academics and older people, you know, 

they think that they have all the answers, and often 

we do, but surprisingly, well not surprisingly, youth 

can add another perspective and often times open our 

eyes to consider part of a solution that we may not 
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have even have seen or may not have even known was 

coming up. So there are a lot of little Keish’s 

running around doing big things. 

DR. ALLEN-HANDY: And thank you. That concludes our 

presentation. We’re looking forward to the 

forthcoming discussion. Thank you. 

DR. ROBLES: Thank you, all. That was amazing. And you 

really do see the ripple effects from this work, 

right, that shows that, number one, research isn’t 

linear and neither is community development and all 

these efforts. So thank you. I am going to pass this 

over to Shane Dermanjian. Shane, are you there? 

DERMANJIAN: Hi, everybody. So my name is Shane Dermanjian. 

I’m a Research Assistant here at the Office of 

Research and Evaluation. And as it all fits into 

research and evaluation, we of course not only value 

meaningful research, but also how that research and 

any findings associated with it can be utilized. So 

with that in mind, we’re thrilled to have Meg Ansara, 

the Director of VISTA, Billie Udofia, the Senior 
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Advisor for Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion here at 

AmeriCorps, and Jackie Dulude, who is the Recruitment 

and Outreach Manager at AmeriCorps. So we’ve asked 

them to give some reflections on what we’ve heard 

today from our wonderful speakers. And with that, we 

can start with you Meg. 

ANSARA: Thank you so much, Shane. And thank you 

everyone for such incredible work. I have so many 

thoughts. It’s hard to figure out kind of where to 

focus. So the program that I run, AmeriCorps VISTA, 

is over 50 years old and is focused on capacity 

building in low income communities to alleviate the 

effects of poverty. And I think one of the things 

that really struck me across all of these 

conversations, or presentations I should say, was the 

emphasis on an importance of community. 

That relationships, that work without mutual and 

reciprocal relationships just is not sustainable, and 

I think about that quite a bit in terms of the 

AmeriCorps VISTA experience because we have members 

who serve 12 months of full-time service, and often 
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we have conversations around, should we explore 

different terms of service? You know, many of the 

other programs at AmeriCorps have different terms of 

service, but one of the things that you get from 12 

months of full-time service is the time and space to 

build relationships. Now over 70% of VISTAs serve in 

their own community, so, you know, they’re bringing 

relationships and knowledge and expertise from the 

beginning, but I think we often hear that people do 

gain different relationships and perspective and that 

just takes time, and that’s not even factoring in 

things like a worldwide pandemic. And so I think that 

is one thing that really kind of stands out to me. 

 I think the second is just the power of youth as 

changemakers, as translators, and interpreters, 

right, and we saw that in the storytelling, we saw 

that in terms of amplifying in the Syracuse project, 

and we saw that in the quotes that were in the first 

presentation around just how they can create bridges 

across communities and constituencies as these 

powerful translators and interpreters, as well as 
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being leaders, and that I think is very much affirmed 

in my observations of AmeriCorps VISTA projects. 

With AmeriCorps VISTA, we have members who are 18 

years and older, and we have VISTAs who are 18 and we 

have VISTAs who are in their 80s, and everyone inbetween. But, about 65% of VISTAs are between 20 and 

26. And so, you know, on the younger side of the 

spectrum and I think their voice is so powerful in 

terms of being able to translate, and especially when 

we talk about kind of cross-cultural and crossgenerational work. And I think it’s just an 

incredible thing to see, in particular Black youth, 

you know, kind of not being able to be a part of the 

solution, and being able to really drive the change. 

And that was I think sort of another thing that 

really struck me and obviously it’s at the core of 

all of this, you know, this style of research which 

is that the importance of kind of partnership and 

creating change with rather than on behalf or for. 

And I think that’s particularly important when we 

come to issues of economic justice, racial justice, 
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and I think hearing the voices talk about the 

importance of community and the value of community as 

a part of the change work I think is a good reminder 

for me, in terms of how to think about how we 

structure that through the AmeriCorps VISTA program. 

We have 7,000 individuals who give a year of service 

across the country, every state and territory. Often 

they are serving in smaller settings and by 

themselves, and so how can we foster that sense of 

community and also celebration? I was particularly 

struck in the first presentation about the importance 

of celebration, and in this context, celebration of 

blackness, and that as we engage in these very 

serious often life or death issues, that joy and 

celebration of racial, cultural, and just personal 

individual identity is so important. 

And I think it’d be easy to overlook if you’re not 

centering the experience, centering the work really 

on people with lived experience, in this case and, 

you know, in many cases Black youth. So lots for me 

to process in terms of, you know, I think how we 
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think about incorporating much of this finding. You 

know, sort of concrete things. You know, we provide a 

modest living allowance and just the impact for our 

own VISTAs, not to mention the people they serve on 

what are soaring costs of housing, and what used to 

be 30% of their living allowance or stipend is now 

closer to 50% and in some places even higher. 

So I have practical thoughts around how to address 

that, as well as I think the more conceptual thoughts 

around how to really think about all of these 

different kind of modes that young people can play, 

and particularly Black youth, in terms of being 

changemakers, designers, architects, translators, 

interpreters, strategists, storytellers. I think the 

more that we think about change and in that 

multifaceted way, the more human-centered it is, and 

we see the evidence of that in terms of incredible 

work and sustained activism and engagement and, you 

know, civic engagement throughout a lifetime. 

So really, really appreciate the time to listen and 

to learn, and so grateful for the work that everyone 
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is doing. I’m very eager to incorporate it into 

AmeriCorps VISTA. 

DERMANJIAN: Thank you, Meg. Next we can go to Billie for 

your reflections. 

LOUIS: Thank you. And I just want to start off by saying 

thank you to my colleagues in ORE for creating this 

platform for us to learn more about this research and 

to our partners for the research that you have done 

and the information you shared with us today. I had a 

couple of reflection points, even in my own career 

here at AmeriCorps. I ditto everything Meg said, so 

I’ll try not to be redundant and add something a 

little bit different to the table. 

But, you know, one of the things that I think about 

or that first hit me as I was listening, even within 

the first presentation that became a trend, you know, 

our major output is grantmaking. That’s how we foster 

civic engagement is through grantmaking. And a great 

deal of conversations that I’ve had with both 

internal and external stakeholders when we talk about 
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promoting equitable grantmaking is the lack of BIPOC 

led organizations or the lack of Black-led 

organizations, not just within our portfolio but it’s 

a nationwide concern. 

We’ve had conversations with many of our grantmaking 

partners, we’ve had presentations from grantmaking 

partners working in this space who talked about this 

concern, and so when we talk about the theme, one of 

the main themes that I saw stretch across all three 

presentations, seeing youth as assets, seeing them as 

leaders, changemakers. In the first presentation 

there was something about giving youth a system’s 

perspectives. You are much more than what happens on 

the ground floor. That really resonated with me 

because when we talk about leadership, we are talking 

about the macro activity that happens in the 

nonprofit, in the public sector. And we are talking 

about the lack of representation, particularly of 

Black Americans in those sectors. 

And so if we’re focused on empowering our youth now, 

if we’re focused on letting our know youth know that 
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they have a voice and they can take action now, we 

have an opportunity to change the dynamics and what 

the landscape looks like both within the federal 

sector and the nonprofit sector. So that really hit 

home for me because I saw that as being a long-term 

solution for how we create change and we create 

solutions in communities that are developed by those 

being impacted by the issues in those very 

communities as well. 

The other thing that really resonated with me, and 

Meg touched on this as well, is youth seeing 

themselves as positive and seeing their surroundings 

as positive. A lot of times, and I can speak to this 

too as a former Black youth, just feeling like things 

were happening at you and there was nothing you could 

really do about it, you know. You don’t really have 

much choice, you don’t have much decision, you don’t 

have much power. So I really appreciated the 

conversations about the roles that adults play in 

power sharing, and modeling, and passing the baton, 

because that I know is a conversation I’ve had with 
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youth that I’ve mentored, at least in this 

generation, that they feel isn’t happening, right. 

And so when Andrea, my colleague from ORE, said there 

needs to be a guide on how we work with youth, how we 

empower youth to be changemakers, that’s true. I 

mean, that’s absolutely what we need because a lot of 

our grantees, particularly for AmeriCorps, work 

directly with the youth. And I think it is important 

for anyone working with youth to help understand how 

to move the needle of power, how to do the exchange 

of power between the elders, between adults within 

communities to the youth. 

And so a lot of the conversations around 

intergenerationalism, particularly because of our 

many streams of service, really resonated with me 

because I do think that is something that’s lacking 

and I do think it also speaks to where we are today 

when we talk about the leadership in the nonprofit 

and public sector portfolio, and the lack of 

diversity within that leadership. 
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 But, I definitely also want to go back to the 

conversation about youth seeing themselves as 

positive and being able to identify their strengths, 

but more so being able to identify the strengths of 

their own community. Another thing I saw a connection 

with, particularly with the last presentation, when I 

think about urban neighborhoods there’s this flight, 

right. There’s, ‘I got to get out of here. I got to 

make it out of here one day. This place is not for 

me.’ And so seeing that exercise of having youth walk 

through their neighborhood and identify what’s right 

and less focus on what’s wrong, also was a really big 

moment for me in terms of, you know, what it means to 

build community, what it means to appreciate 

community, but more importantly what it means to lead 

a community. 

And so I thought that was a very visual perspective 

of, not only how we empower our youth, but also how 

we save our neighborhoods through our youth. So I 

really appreciated that as well. Lots of great 

themes. And like I said, I think in terms of, from 

this level and where I’m sitting at, and thinking 
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about, where do we go now, where do we go next, where 

do we need to go in the future? I definitely agree 

that this needs to be a model or that these trends, 

empowering our youth, the focus on 

intergenerationalism, the focus on identifying 

strengths, not just within self and seeing youth 

seeing themselves as positive, but also seeing the 

positives of their own communities is going to be 

critical in moving the needle. 

So I thank you again for these findings and I hope 

that we can share them broadly. 

DERMANJIAN: Thank you, Billie. And then next, Jackie, we 

can go to you for your reflections. 

DULUDE: Thank you, Shane. I also just want to echo 

that thanks to our colleagues at Office of Research 

and Evaluation for allowing us to be a part of these 

conversations. I’ve had the privilege of being 

present on each of the three days for this dialogue 

so far and all of the presentations have been 

fantastic, wonderful. So shout out to everybody who 
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presented again today about this research. It’s 

hugely important and super fascinating. 

And I would just like to say it was so encouraging I 

think to hear how positive the experiences were for 

all of your research participants, just to echo what 

Meg and Billie have said. When you put Black youth in 

the driver’s seat, I think this theme was kind of 

echoed throughout, but our SUNY presenters said it in 

a really clear way of, you know, if we make them the 

protagonist and give them that ability to lead the 

solution and use that asset-based model, what can 

happen, what are the possibilities in just opening up 

that world? 

So that certainly was a piece that resonated for me. 

And how does this connect all to our recruitment 

priorities? I think there’s probably three different 

ways that I would probably want to touch on here. 

Those are project development, recruitment – 

generally -, and retention. So kind of looking at the 

full lifecycle of recruitment and how we can apply 
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your research to our activities and the centralized 

recruitment unit that we’re building for the agency. 

So to start that first project development piece, 

right, what I was hearing was that Black youth are 

interested in types of projects that are going to be 

a benefit to their community and we have this local 

focus within the recruitment realm that we’ve been 

kind of bringing to the forefront. So how do we build 

projects that are going to peak their interest, get 

them inspired, and excited to serve with us? 

The intergenerational piece that Billie touched on, I 

love as well. We have our AmeriCorps Seniors project 

or our AmeriCorps Seniors programs that often times 

do have an intergenerational model, but getting our 

elders involved in advancing some of these solutions 

so that they can benefit is wonderful. So definitely 

love that aspect of the Drexel project. 

With regard to recruitment. So it is clear to me that 

all of your youth research participants would make 

amazing AmeriCorps members or AmeriCorps volunteers, 
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AmeriCorps seniors volunteers in their older days. 

They are clearly highly qualified, they have a love 

of community, they’re already civically engaged and 

maybe service oriented already, and they’re building 

those skills, right. So it’s super clear that these 

audiences are the folks that we want to bring into 

our program and strengthen our programs. So how do we 

speak with them? How do we get them engaged again and 

bring them into the process so that we’re building 

projects and building a place where they can come and 

learn as AmeriCorps members and then go back out into 

their communities and apply the skills that they 

continue to learn? 

And then the third piece around retention, right. I 

heard, I think in all three of the presentations, 

especially in the first one around that fostering 

this sense of community, celebrating our diversity 

among the corps, and especially celebrating blackness 

specifically, creating structures of mentorship, so 

how do we engage our grantees and ensure that there 

are inclusive systems in place so that when our 

AmeriCorps members come in, no matter where they’re 
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from, whether they’re serving in their community or 

if they’re leaving their hometown to serve in a 

different area, that they feel welcome, that they 

have that sense of community, and then they can 

connect with the folks that they’re serving with, 

whether it be on the organizational level or with 

their fellow AmeriCorps members. 

And that kind of might just go back to the project 

development piece around the grantmaking side that 

really was referencing, right, we need to make sure 

that we have good representation so that it is a 

fully inclusive model. So those are kind of the three 

pieces there that I wanted to mention. I think these 

projects in particular touch on, like I said, every 

kind of stage of the recruitment cycle from project 

development, to bringing folks in the door, to 

retaining them, and making sure that they have a 

positive experience. 

And so, again, just want to thank you all for your 

wonderful, thoughtful presentations, and for allowing 

me to be a part of it, thank you. 
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DERMANJIAN: Great, thank you very much. So now that Meg, 

Billie, and Jackie have given their reflections, 

thank you again, we can start our Q&A section of 

today. So feel free to drop a question in the chat 

box so we can get to it. It could be for anybody 

who’s talked today. But just to start, I have a 

question for our researchers, and it kinds ties 

together in the idea of recruiting for AmeriCorps, 

but in thinking about from when the youth that 

participate in these programs first started towards 

either the end of when they were participating or 

just a year later, however much later, have they 

demonstrated any change in what they want to do with 

their future plans, whether it be going to school for 

something related to social justice, pursuing a 

career in social justice, something related to what 

the program was about? Was there any sort of pre, 

post-examination going on with that? And that’s for 

everybody who has presented, so whoever wants it. 

DR. WRAY-LAKE: I can just briefly jump in. We didn’t 

have a pre, post-design because we just really 
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interviewed young people about their journeys to 

civic engagement like, how they got involved, and so 

what it’s looked like for them over time. But, 

definitely I think all of the Black youth we 

interviewed were very future oriented, so they were 

thinking about what they were doing now, and 

connecting that to what visions they had for the 

world and also how they saw themselves engaging in 

that later. So definitely they’re figuring that out 

and actively thinking about it. 

And many of them did talk about moments in their 

civic engagement where they recognized that they 

wanted to do a specific thing in their career, so 

whether it be like, they were talking to an elected 

official and realized they wanted to go into 

politics, or they were doing service, and I remember 

one young person talked about how she wanted to be a 

doctor and give back in ways that sort of promote 

health equity for the people that she was meeting. 

And so definitely those wheels are turning and they 

are thinking about the future, and civic work is a 

really big part of what they’re thinking of. 
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DERMANJIAN: Thank you. And I guess to call you out, Devin, 

have you seen anything of that sort of from when you 

started working with youth towards months later, if 

there’s been any sort of changes in attitudes or 

beliefs or commitment to being civically engaged? 

WELSH: Totally, 100%. So the young person I was talking 

about, Keish, so I had met them when I was an 

undergrad at Drexel and they were a high school 

student. Fortunately, they’ve stuck around and 

continued to work with us. So I’ve seen as they, just 

been out of high school, started engaging in some of 

these projects towards social justice whether it’s 

social media campaigns, or leading a rally, or 

speaking at rallies. And now has designed sort of an 

entire project around kind of gathering these experts 

in social justice and changemaking. 

Just recently they had almost a symposium of sorts of 

their own where they invited these panelists in the 

work that they were interested in and to talk and 

share their story. So it was really interesting for 
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me knowing them as the high school student and seeing 

them kind of be nervous, but in the end kind of 

deliver on the vision that they had set out for 

themselves. 

 And last year, so this is my second year as an Artist 

Year Fellow, last year we were all virtual working 

with Paul Robeson High School, and one of the Tripod 

members, we met every Friday with the whole group, 

actually decided to study at Drexel, and that is 

Lyric and she was on the slide, and we were kind of 

talking about with Keish as well. And so seeing kind 

of that passion and know that like this community is 

still going to be there for me when I get there on 

campus, which is exactly what you want to see. 

DERMANJIAN: That’s great to hear. Does anybody else from 

Drexel or from SUNY, any ideas or comments along 

these lines? 

DR. ALLEN-HANDY: I can share just because I think Devin 

has highlighted some of our youth, but I think he is 

a prime example of a student who was a part of our 
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project that now is in the AmeriCorps family as an 

Artist Year Fellow so I just wanted to shout him out 

for being just an incredible advocate and 

representative of not only our project, but the work 

that you all are engaging in AmeriCorps. 

KING: Yeah. And this is Maren. I would say that the 

connection, youth to youth, is really important. So 

we can tell ourselves we’re mature adults and that 

relationships between the college students who were 

working the youth and helping to mentor them, and 

especially those that were landscape architecture 

students, the teens were very interested in place and 

placemaking, and being able to work with people who 

are just a few years older than them was 

inspirational for them and it was fun for them. 

There was this relationship that they could build and 

the other aspect of it was that much of that 

interaction, especially from the development of the 

posters, actually took place online, and they were 

able to communicate using Google Slides and that 

whole process of the teens actually saying, here’s 
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what are results were or are, how do we express 

those? And having those conversations back and forth 

were really quite amazing that they were able to do 

that, not necessarily in-person, but using a tool 

that they were able to then develop designs through 

essentially. 

DERMANJIAN: Great, thank you. So we can hop to the next 

question. I see Meg, you put in the chat, the reality 

of mental health right now – Okay, so thinking of the 

reality of mental health right now and how it is 

impacting activists and changemakers, thinking that 

what was stressed was so optimistic, so how has there 

been any changes in mental health amongst the youth 

which you worked? Or Meg, you can ask the question as 

well. 

ANSARA: Thanks, Shane. You know me, I always have all 

the questions. I was so struck by the optimism that 

was shared and the power particularly for young 

people and young people of color to engage in 

activism early in their lives. And just in addition 

to doing good works, it felt good. And there’s a lot 
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of energy for the solutions, right, we heard that in 

terms of energy and excitement about co-living 

situations, the power of being in a community. And 

the quote from NA from Laura’s presentation really 

struck me in terms of having people by my side. 

And so much of what was stressed throughout the 

researchers’ presentations was incredibly optimistic 

and we definitely see that, I see that every day in 

terms of AmeriCorps VISTA. I also see just very 

escalating issues of depression and very real mental 

health needs. I see it in my own life as a parent, I 

see it in my work being the Director of AmeriCorps 

VISTA. And this isn’t about apathy at all, actually, 

I don’t see that, but there’s very real 

discouragement and it is hard to be a human these 

days. So I’m just interested from the researchers, in 

terms of how to be honest and realistic about where 

we are as a world, as a society, what are some 

incredibly difficult things and balancing that with 

what is an incredible spirit of optimism that’s 

clearly cultivated through these projects. 
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KING: Hi, this is Maren again. And I have been working 

with some other organizations and did a series of 

interviews with, what are the issues that communities 

are addressing right now or trying to deal with right 

now? And I heard a lot about trauma, I heard about 

survival mode, and that many of the neighborhoods in 

Syracuse and the people who are living there are 

really challenged right now. And what seems very 

positive to me are the organizations that are 

embedded in those neighborhoods and the people who 

are working with them. 

And we experienced that during our project and during 

COVID, and now afterwards that our community partner 

is really able to build on the findings and the work 

from our project, and get additional funding to 

continue the work that was started. The idea that, 

yeah, things are really tough for the teenagers in 

their families, in school that – once somebody said 

to me, the schools are not operating essentially, I 

mean, they’re there but they’re not working. 
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And so the idea that there are places and people that 

can provide alternative options for kids right now is 

really important. 

DERMANJIAN: Thank you. Laura, I see your hand up. 

DR. WRAY-LAKE: Yeah, thank you, Meg, for this question 

because I think it’s so important to think about this 

other side of activism and civic engagement for Black 

young people in terms of the emotional burdens of 

racism that they experience on a daily basis. So in 

our study we have – In the book we’re writing we have 

a couple of other chapters that really dive into this 

in a lot more depth than what I presented, but in 

schools young people, Black young people are 

experiencing racism from their peers and from 

administration that happens on a regular basis. 

When you look at the national context, the murder of 

George Floyd that happened during our study was a 

time of incredible emotional difficulty for Black 

young people as they have to process and deal with 

anti-blackness, and even, you can imagine, what just 
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happened in Buffalo with the racist shooting and how 

much that affects Black young people across America 

to have to witness and process those experiences and 

acts of hate. 

And so that’s definitely a piece of what’s happening 

with Black young people that we can’t ignore. I think 

some of our work, you know, with showing that 

organizational spaces can be these positive and 

joyful communities for Black youth specifically, 

especially when blackness is centered and celebrated, 

they can be healing spaces. And a lot of 

organizational partners that we have in this study, 

we’ve been talking with them about that and their 

working and thinking through how can we create these 

healing spaces because it’s so important for Black 

youth to have that. 

DERMANJIAN: Thank you. Anybody from Drexel care to comment 

on mental health and your programs? No? Okay. And 

let’s see, Tina, I see your hand is up. 
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DR. LIMPERT: Yeah. I just wanted to quickly add something 

about trauma-informed approaches and having the team 

be at the ready to kind of address these issues. I 

think it was Ayana who’s also a former school 

counselor, sometimes you have to bring your skills 

and whatever skills you have to address these issues. 

There was one point at which there was a shooting, 

actually several shootings where at least one of our 

team members knew somebody who had been murdered. And 

it was a heavy weekend and we were having a meeting, 

and it was going to be an online meeting, and there 

was some challenges for our team, they were exhausted 

being online between school and the research project. 

And Maren and I made a decision to just be present 

and listen, and open up a space for the teens to 

talk, and we were also really sort of emotional as 

well with them. We were human, right. We acknowledged 

our own place in White supremacy and these other 

kinds of systems of power and oppression, but it was 

really an important meeting for us, and it was 

emotional, and I don’t want to say it was a team 
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builder, but it was an opportunity for them to see us 

in a different light, so. 

DERMANJIAN: Great, thank you. And then Billie, did you 

have a question? 

LOUIS: Yeah, absolutely. This conversation and the 

information that’s shared today, just again, allowed 

me to do a lot of my own self-reflection as a Black 

youth. And I’m really interested in learning more. 

There was something that was said in the first 

presentation, and I loved it, “we are next, we are 

now.” And I think about the “we are next” in the 

grooming and the support, the power sharing that 

takes place through intergenerationalism. 

But, I want to hear more, or if there are any stories 

more so about the “we are now.” I’m thinking about 

the examples and the models that a lot of the youth, 

you all worked with and interviewed, and the impact 

that they had on their peers. And what the peer-topeer impacts may have been throughout these different 

processes and studies and what now. I would love to 
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hear about any successes or challenges that they 

faced when trying to bring some of their peers along 

this same journey. 

DERMANJIAN: Maren, you can go ahead. 

KING: Can I go? 

DERMANJIAN: Yeah, you’re good. 

KING: Yeah, just real quick. So in terms of the 

challenges in terms of our research project, was 

really they were challenged by engaging teenagers, 

other teenagers. And part of that had to do with the 

IRB, the Institutional Review Board requirements with 

engaging other teens because they had to get, not 

only the teen’s assent, they had to get the parent’s 

consent, right. And so that as a research project and 

following ethical standards, they had a really hard 

time engaging people of their own age, which was 

problematic for us in terms of realizing that like, 

wow, do we have time to even go back now and see if 

we can change that? And we didn’t. 
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But, one of the things that we found was supportive 

of the teens being involved in this process actually 

was a middle school program in the city of Syracuse 

that was an expeditionary learning program where kids 

were actually in a public school encouraged to do 

hands-on learning and questioning learning. And so 

thinking about how public schools or other schools 

can encourage this type of engagement and really more 

experience-based learning, which I think this 

participatory research actually encourages. So I 

don’t know, Tina, if you wanted to add something to 

that. 

But, engaging other teens within our process was 

hard. Now the Peacemaking Center does not have those 

conditions and so they are carrying on what was 

started in our process. 

DERMANJIAN: Christina, did you want to add anything? Or 

otherwise we can go to Laura. Okay, Laura. 
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DR. WRAY-LAKE: I just wanted to speak Billie’s question 

about the peer-to-peer impact piece. And one of the 

things that really impressed me about the Black youth 

stories that we interviewed was that they are doing a 

lot of peer-to-peer education and sort of motivation 

to get them engaged in civic work on a day-to-day 

basis, and partly, as we probably can guess, they’re 

doing this on social media. This is just like part of 

the day-to-day of being a young Black changemaker 

that we found in our study is that, you know, in 

addition to a lot of the on the ground organizing or 

volunteer work they’re doing, they’re talking to 

peers, they’re getting them plugged into 

opportunities, they’re trying to raise awareness 

about issues. And that’s just a day in, day out 

activity that they’re doing. 

And some of them are doing this with White youth or 

non-Black youth around racial justice. And so it’s 

challenging work, often, that they talk about doing 

about, you know, bringing non-Black youth along in 

this, you know, and becoming anti-racist. And so 
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there’s a lot of challenges to it, but it’s something 

that they’re committed to on a daily basis. 

LOUIS: Thank you for that, Laura. That’s pretty 

enlightening. As I know that these conversations, I 

work with a lot of youth, and I don’t see a lot of 

spaces for them, I think it’s been said earlier, to 

have these conversations, and to talk about what’s 

happening, and to get education around what’s 

happening, but that peer-to-peer context is 

definitely critical. Because they see each other 

every day, they’re engaging in ways that we don’t 

engage with them, so definitely insightful. Thank you 

both. 

DERMANJIAN: Great, thanks. I’m going to hand it back to 

Andrea. 

DR. ROBLES: Thank you, Shane. And so since this is a 

dialogue and we have both people from national 

service and our research grantees, one of the things 

that we talk about quite a bit is look at all the 

volunteering and civic engagement that’s happening 
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both informally and in organizations across the 

country, right. But, we have formal national service 

and volunteering, and so the question comes up, and I 

think I’ll hand it Meg, how do we work with the youth 

that you’re working with? What is it of interest? How 

do we connect all their great work that they’re doing 

to be part of national service? It has benefits in 

terms of educational awards and some stipends, and 

how does that happen? So I’m just going to pass it 

over to Meg to maybe say it more articulately and see 

what our research grantees have to say since they 

work in lots of these communities and with all these 

wonderful young people. 

ANSARA: Yeah. Thank you. Thank you for asking what is 

very much a $64,000 question for me as the Director 

of AmeriCorps VISTA. But, you know, there is – and 

your research points to it – there’s such incredibly 

impactful work that’s happening in formal settings, 

but also, to Laura’s last point, in informal 

settings, right. And at such young ages, I just put 

in the chat, but middle school students. I mean, it’s 

so incredibly inspiring. What more can we do as an 
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agency and through our programs to connect with more 

people so that they do they know that the support 

exists, that there are so many different 

opportunities if they are looking for something and 

benefits that go along with it, whether it’s the 

living allowance that comes through VISTA, the 

stipend and awards, or the Education Award which can 

be put towards past or future educational costs. How 

can we better connect and also help young people see 

themselves in the work of AmeriCorps? 

DR. WRAY-LAKE: I’m sure others will have more developed 

answers than me, but just thinking about the findings 

from our research, I think it just shows that Black 

youth are looking for opportunities in the future 

that are meaningful and that really help them address 

issues that their community is facing. So I think 

making that link to like, local, you know, the local 

issues and how AmeriCorps does that. I know you do do 

that, so I think making that pitch to young people 

that this could be an avenue to address local issues 

is one thing. 
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And then the second thing I’ll say is that going back 

to wanting to be in organizations that are welcoming 

spaces for Black youth. I think they want to see 

themselves in the organization. And I think it was 

Billie who talked about representation of Black-led 

organizations in AmeriCorps or Black leaders in 

organizations. And I think Black youth want to see 

and feel that they’re going to be welcomed, they’re 

going to be valued, and that they’re not the only 

ones in the organization because that can be 

uncomfortable, it can be challenging to navigate, and 

so feeling that sense of acceptance and that there’s 

representation of other people like you in the 

organization I think would be important. 

DERMANJIAN: Great, thank you. So at this time I’d like to 

hand it back to the Director of the Office of 

Research and Evaluation, Dr. Mary Hyde. 

DR. HYDE: Thank you, Shane. I just wanted to share three 

or four reflections after listening to everyone 

today, but also over the last three days that I hope 

people walk away with and continue to ponder and 
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continue to discuss, quite frankly, beyond today’s 

dialogue. And first and foremost, what has struck me 

is that community-led and action-oriented research is 

a form of civic engagement. I think we heard that 

loud and clear, not only today, but also over the 

last two days. 

It is a form of engaging in social justice and it is 

a way in which individuals and organizations can 

foster agency empowerment skills and knowledge 

development. So, you know, again, it’s worth 

repeating, creating these types of opportunities is 

one that allows people to become civic leaders and 

that it creates space for all people to become civic 

leaders. On day one we talked about older Americans. 

We talked about residents of rural communities. 

Yesterday we heard from our researchers who talk 

about refugee communities and immigrant communities. 

Today we heard about young populations, people of 

color, young people of color. 

Creating these spaces and opportunities for everyone, 

even groups who tend not to have these opportunities 
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is critical for strengthening our civil society, it 

will lead to better community solutions. Every 

individual and community has assets that can 

contribute to addressing whatever issues they’re 

facing. 

 I think also what really struck me, particularly 

today as we heard from the different teams and the 

work that they’re doing, we can all be bridge 

builders. These teams demonstrate and reflect the 

diversity that national service programs are trying 

to promote in their project teams across the country. 

Everyone has something to contribute. We heard about 

intergenerational teams, we heard about crosssectional teams, we heard about cross-cultural teams, 

we heard about interdisciplinary teams, this is the 

model that we’re trying to strive for in all of our 

national service work and this is illustrated in the 

work that we’ve heard about today. 

And last but not least, I really just want to 

reemphasize I think what several of you have said 

today, we have through this research identified 
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people who very much want to contribute to the change 

in their community, they are civically engaged, they 

have learned incredibly important community 

leadership skills as a result of participating in 

these projects. How do we harness that? How do we 

encourage them to come and join in another type of 

way to contribute and build civic participation in 

more formal programs through national service? 

So I would ask all of us to continue bridging those 

kind of relationships so that all of these folks, who 

are so actively engaged and already contributing in 

important ways to their community, continue to think 

about doing that through more formal opportunities. 

And I’ll just leave it there. So thank you. 

DR. ROBLES: Thank you, Mary. So in these last few minutes 

I just want to give people an opportunity, our 

presenters to just comment or last concluding remarks 

on something you’ve heard, something you didn’t get 

to say. In response to Meg, we could always follow-up 

after the Convening. But, I will start with, I’ll 

start with Laura. 
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DR. WRAY-LAKE: I learned so much from all of the other 

presentations and also really appreciated all of the 

AmeriCorps staff, you know, speaking to all of these 

issues. I think for me a big takeaway across this 

whole conversation is that Black youth have so much 

power to create positive change. And that with all of 

these questions about how to recruit them, how to 

support their health and wellbeing, I think we need 

to bring them to the table. So that’s kind of one 

thought percolating is like, let’s ask them, let’s 

see them as true partners in this work. 

DR. ROBLES: Thank you very much. And we will take that. 

Next, I’ll have Tina and Maren. 

KING: What do you think, Tina? You want to go first? 

DR. LIMPERT: I would say thanks to everybody. And just 

in this small cohort I see so many connections. What 

resonated with me was Carol’s comment about the 

importance of intergenerational work, as a lot of 

people mentioned, but also community partnerships and 
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having established community partnerships. And as an 

academic not to be afraid to be part of the 

community, get out of your bubble and get into the 

community, it’s really important. Thank you. Thanks 

for this opportunity. 

KING: Yeah. And I would echo that, definitely. And also 

the idea that youth really need to see people who 

look like them and live in their same neighborhoods 

to provide leadership and the example of yes, this is 

how we should be working. And at the same time, I 

think we also heard a lot about asset-based processes 

and thinking. We heard so much about needs and the 

idea that there are strengths, and recognizing those, 

and being proud of those, and using those will be a 

big step up for a number of neighborhoods that we’re 

working with. 

DR. ROBLES: Thank you. Okay. So the Drexel group: Devin, 

Carol, Rachel, and Ayana. 

McCULLOUGH: I guess I could maybe say a little tiny bit 

here. But, the thing that stood out to me in this 
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session, and the beautiful thing, was the idea of 

seeing youth as positive. Often times they get such a 

bad rap and they’re all grouped together, you know, 

and there’s so much potential there. Sometimes they 

may not know what all is out there, what all is 

available. So it was good to hear the discussion on 

ways to sort of bring them into the fold and let them 

know what is available. 

They have such power and such – Gosh, just such a 

shining light that sometimes may not get a chance to 

shine because they might not even know that it’s 

within them. So seeing the youth as positive and 

letting them see the good that is within themselves. 

DR. ROBLES: Thanks, Carol. Rachel, Ayana, and Devin? 

DR. ALLEN-HANDY: I would just say a lot of times we come 

from a perspective that youth have to be empowered 

when actually, in actuality they’re already 

empowered. There’s those assets inside of them that 

are already driving them in different directions. And 

one of the things that I think our team, which makes 
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it so special, is how we really employ kind of the 

cultural wealth of familial capital. We are like a 

family and so you can’t get away from your family 

even if you have different iterations in your life, 

you know. 

We do life together. And even thinking about the four 

years that we’ve been on this project, many of our 

students stick around. We find other ways for them to 

be engaged in the work. For example, myself, Keish, 

Carol, and one of my grad assistants we meet every 

single week to continue the work in kind of a smaller 

group and it turns out being about family, right, 

Carol? But, I think that’s a great way to think about 

engagement like, you can’t get away from your family, 

they’re always going to be there, no matter what. 

DR. ROBLES: Thank you. Rachel and then I’ll end with 

Devin. 

DR. WENRICK: Apologies, I had to step away for a 

second because I had a community member at the door. 

I mean, that’s the thing is like the work never stops 
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and that’s a really wonderful thing. I do think, and 

just echoing what everyone has said, is this work 

goes in all directions, right. So it’s our youth who 

are empowering us, reminding us, keeping our feet to 

the fire, and we’re seeing things in each other and 

highlighting and amplifying things in each other, and 

I think that’s something that once you experience it, 

you really can’t walk away from it. 

DR. ROBLES: Thanks. Devin, you have the final word. 

WELSH: Echoing that point, I think that’s been central in 

these last four years is I’ve seen, you know, in a 

pivotal point in my own life, I’ve been incredibly 

inspired by all of these young people that I’ve had 

the privilege to work with and they’ve really shaped 

the direction that my life is taking. And so I’m very 

grateful for them and I’m grateful to know that there 

are other programs where they can be, where similar 

students and similar young people can inspire others 

and continue to effect that change. So I’m just 

grateful to be a part of it. 
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DR. ROBLES: Thank you. And thank you all for participating 

today. So I will hand this over to Katy and have a 

great day. 

HUSSEY-SLONIKER: Thank you very for attending today’s 

session. We want to thank our speakers for their 

presentations and reflections as well to our audience 

today for a great discussion. Our dialogue objectives 

will have been met if the presentations and 

discussions stimulated ideas, collaboration, and 

partnership for the betterment of communities through 

meaningful, equitable, and actionable change. As a 

reminder, all three sessions of the 2022 AmeriCorps 

Office of Research and Evaluation Dialogue were 

recorded. The recordings will be available in two 

weeks on the AmeriCorps our Impact Webinar page. You 

may also find them on the AmeriCorps YouTube channel 

under the Research and Evaluation playlist. 

 We cannot forget to thank our webinar facilitation 

team, ICF Next. Their staff: Larisa Crewalk, 

Alexandra Owens, and Jenelle Azore, and their 

colleagues for their technical support and 
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coordination. Thank you and have a wonderful rest of 

your day. 

DR. LIMPERT: Thanks everybody. Good to see you. 

DR. ALLEN-HANDY: Thank you. 

DR. ROBLES: Thank you. I will follow-up with everyone. 

Bye, thanks. 

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