The Mona Foundation empowers youth through education, partnering with grassroots organizations to "educate children, empower women and girls, and foster ethics and service to develop change agents who uplift themselves, their families, and their communities" (Mona Foundation, n.d.). With a 25-year focus on community-led initiatives, the Foundation has decided to add a Youth Ambassador program to inspire youth to make an impact. The “Think Globally, Act Locally” (TGAL) program teaches Mona’s development theories, youth activism, and leadership through service projects, emphasizing sustainable community impact via partnership and collaboration. The program aims to inspire students to become community leaders and attract those interested in community impact, education, and leadership. Targeting high school and early-college students in the U.S., TGAL includes virtual workshops, homework, 1:1 mentor meetings, journal reflections, and community engagement over the spring semester. Students can choose their level of engagement as Youth Ambassadors and complete a service project if they wish. The design proposal assumes the students complete the entire program, including the service project.
This group of learners will have varying gender, racial, and religious identities, but there may be a strong representation of Bahai students due to the foundation’s alignment with Bahai organizations. Most dialogue will be adhering to U.S. and Western cultural norms, but there will be stories and case studies pulled from Mona’s partner organizations in different countries. TGAL will take place in home or school settings where learners do their online homework, with English as the primary language. Socioeconomic status will vary among students, but they will primarily come from middle to upper-middle income households. The setting will be virtual, so successful participation requires internet access and a laptop. Students may seek support from parents, teachers, peers, or existing clubs such as a Mona Global Citizens club in their schools. While working independently, students can enlist friends or club members to complete their projects.
We concluded a pilot cohort of 5 students who participated in TGAL from March through June 2024 and issued a survey before and after. We learned that students are generally familiar with the Mona Foundation and its work and have some knowledge of philanthropy and youth activism. We expect future cohort members to also have some familiarity with the Mona Foundation and its work after participating in parts one and two of the Youth Ambassador program. In the survey, we also found their familiarity with social causes in their community varies, and they are not yet familiar with research methods for social problems or writing problem statements for social impact. They do have experience in giving presentations and reporting on their work, and varying levels of familiarity with virtual programs and workshops. Known motivators for these students include identifying as service-oriented individuals who have not yet put this identity into meaningful action. The students shared that they are motivated by the desire to identify problems in their community and develop tangible solutions. They also seek to build leadership skills and make an impact. Working with a mentor provides significant motivation, as mentors help hold them accountable and leverage their unique strengths to overcome obstacles. However, students face several challenges, such as time constraints due to school and other obligations, financial constraints for completing some projects, and logistical challenges in organizing efforts. Motivation can also wane when there is a lack of support from peers or adults in their network. In terms of attitudes and preferences, students prefer having templates and resources to assist in their project planning. They also value calls with mentors to answer questions and hold them accountable for their work (Winocur & Kalegi, 2024).
From this analysis and context, I found that the students will be intrinsically motivated because of their desire to make an impact in their community and identify as a leader. They will have access to support and resources to be able to progress through the course and complete their project without significant intervention. Understanding this, I feel it is important for the content to follow the Universal Design for Learning (UDL) Guidelines because with multiple means of engagement, representation, and action and expression, students will be able to choose a social cause they are passionate about and apply the TGAL program within their communities regardless of their backgrounds, interests areas, learning differences, disciplines, or age (CAST, 2018). I also felt it would important for instruction to utilize culturally responsive and relevant education” (CRRE) so that students can understand their roles as activists or leaders within the context of their community, and Mona staff and mentors can build on students’ cultural backgrounds and help them navigate the power systems and inequities that may have led to the social cause they chose for their project that affects their community (Knight-Manuel, M., & Marciano, J. E., 2018).
One goal of the TGAL experience is for students to learn sustainable and critical approaches to development to become service leaders within their communities. To achieve this goal, students will apply Mona’s approach to philanthropy in designing and implementing their own community service initiative, conduct quantitative research to identify 3 statistics about the problem they hope to address in their communities and qualitative research to interview 3 community members about their experience with this problem, reflect on their learnings in weekly journal entries and bi-weekly mentor meetings, and finally present their findings, project implementation, and learning outcomes in a final presentation. This goal was chosen because as students learn about Mona’s approach to development, research social problems in their communities, and apply the principles to their own service project, students will be able to develop their identities as leaders and youth ambassadors for the Mona Foundation.
This goal and its outcomes are aligned with the theory of constructivism because students apply their learnings by solving real-world problems and building on existing knowledge of social change, activism, and development. The project also encourages reflection to constantly question their strategies on their own, with peers, and with their mentors. These are all central elements to constructivist pedagogy. (WNET Education, n.d.). Additionally, allowing students to research and then engage with a social cause they care about affecting a community they identify with, they are more engaged because they are learning authentically, which contextualizes what they’ve learned in their lives (HPL, M2, Unit 2.3.3). Because this is an extracurricular program where the students are leaders for their own service project, they have the opportunity to “play the whole game at a junior level,” which creates a sense of “purpose and vitality” and ties together two concepts that are valuable for sustained learning: “passion” because students have chosen a cause they care about, and “precision” because they are given feedback, have opportunities to learn from mistakes, and measure the outcomes of their impact (Mehta, J., & Fine, S., 2017). The Mona Foundation aims to empower youth globally to become service-minded leaders, and this program serves as a method to achieve that broader mission.
The assessment plan for the TGAL experience includes both formative and summative assessments. One formative assessment includes students completing journals throughout the project to document their research and thinking. Mentors will review these journals bi-weekly with the student to answer any questions, prompt discussion around their findings, and challenge their thinking. The journals help guide students through their thinking, bringing in case studies, readings, frameworks, and prompts. This helps students achieve the goal of becoming service leaders by taking them through each step of the service project, from research, to design, to implementation. The journal, in connection with the mentor feedback and peer feedback, acts as scaffolding for the students, bridging any learning gaps the students may have depending on their familiarity with research and project implementation, and building confidence throughout the process (The Glossary of Education Reform, 2013).
The summative assessment involves a final presentation where students showcase what they learned from their research, how they developed their project plan using Mona’s approach to development, the implementation of their project, how they plan to measure the impact of the project, and how they plan to sustain that impact. This relates to the goal of the program by giving students the opportunity to demonstrate work they’ve accomplished to accomplish their service project. Before the students present to the Mona leadership team and their peers, they will have the opportunity to reflect on their own approach, consider challenges they’ve faced and how they’ve used their strengths to overcome them, and how they may adjust their approach and strategy going forward. This metacognitive practice allows them to reflect on, and even adjust their approach, as they continue to make an impact beyond the program's scope. Integrating metacognition encourages students to think of themselves as leaders “above the subject matter” and in the real world (Chick, N., 2013). By reflecting on the measurable impact they have made, students will be able to identify as leaders, recognizing their growth and the tangible difference they have contributed to their communities. Feedback will be provided by peers through a form during the presentations, by teachers with written feedback using the rubric provided for the final presentation, and by mentors after a draft is submitted ahead of the final presentation.
One key learning activity in the TGAL experience will be interviewing at least 3 members of the communities the students wish to serve through their project. This accomplishes the learning outcome of conducting qualitative research, but it also connects to the overall goal of the program because these conversations will inform a community-driven approach to development. Prior to conducting the interviews, students will learn how to ask open-ended and unbiased questions to uncover the root of the problem. They’ll learn frameworks to help inform their questions and receive feedback on their questions prior to interviewing. In addition to being open to having their assumptions challenged, students will also need to be culturally sensitive, and they will have to practice social-emotional learning (SEL) skills such as communication, reading social ques, social-perspective taking, and cognitive flexibility (HPL, M4, Unit 4.4.1, 2024). These interviews will provide valuable insight to the students and will help them identify partners who they can work with to design an approach and implement their project. I plan to use the “Holly Dilemma” from Unit 1.2.2 to explain to our students that people of all ages have difficulty understanding how others think, we can’t assume we know what others will do when faced with challenges in their own lives (HPL, M1, Unit 1.2.2, 2024). Therefore, we must know how to ask the right kinds of questions to truly understand a problem. The interviews also provide opportunities for students to read between the lines. Vygotsky argued that all learning is mediated by language and “the nuances of meaning with which we imbue particular words” (HPL, M2, 2.4.4, 2024). I’d contend that students can learn more from these interviews than from any amount of reading or researching their chosen social cause.
A second learning activity is writing a statement of purpose. This requires research, an understanding of the social cause they hope to address, an understanding of the community they hope to serve, the impact they hope to make, and how they’ll measure that impact. The statement of purpose can be presented in many ways but will need to encompass those key elements. This activity will accomplish the learning outcome of conducting quantitative and qualitative research as they will need to back up their problem with statistics and first-hand accounts. By completing this statement of purpose, students will develop critical consciousness. Critical consciousness is the “ability to recognize and analyze systems of inequality and the commitment to take action against these systems” (El-Amin, A. et.al., 2017). While TGAL as a whole will help students develop critical consciousness, the statement of purpose specifically will prompt students to be clear and articulate in identifying the inequities leading to the social cause they care about and committing to make a difference in their own communities through their project. As El-Amin et.al. discovered, this critical consciousness will motivate students to take action and, ideally, complete their TGAL projects (2017).
CAST (2018). Universal design for learning guidelines version 2.2 [graphic organizer]. Wakefield, MA: Author.