Country: United States

Organization: Youth Re:Action Corps

Idea: The mission of Youth Re:Action Corps is to revolutionize the way youth understand and respond to a world in need of assistance by providing an internationally based and change- agent focused curriculum to school districts across the country. The mission of Youth Re:Action Corps is to educate, empower and invest in young people that want to create effective change in their world.

How do you do it: 1.Educate: A curriculum designed to take a core group of students through a year long course that educates them about issues that are happening in the world, and whets the studentsý appetite for personally committing to working towards effective solutions. 2. Empower: Participating students are required to identify an issue of importance facing their world and develop a project to tackle the issue. The studentýs project plan must be a full proposal with timelines, a budget and details for implementation. Each student team is to make a public presentation of their proposal at an annual conference. 3. Invest: A community panel reviews each application and invests financially and in-kind to projects of young visionaries.

Innovation: In today's global marketplace, knowledge of a foreign language, international experience, and cross-cultural understanding are highly sought-after assets in many sectors of our increasingly global economy. Additionally, around the world, there are thousands of small communities plagued by social issues, but because of their size, lack of social influence, or any number of other problems, they are not aided. As our society becomes ever-more global, it is crucial that a revolutionary action take place. To date, there is no program implemented in the public school system that takes on these issues in a systematic way to encourage the youth of our nation to understand and respond to a world in need of assistance.

Impact: 1. Students involved in the program operate as change agents in their community. They enter collegiate and professional careers with an awareness that there is a global community in need of assistance and that they can do something about it. 2. Students engage their peers in the work they are doing as Youth Re:Action Corps members, so that an increased awareness of our global community may spread through the energy, interaction and curiosity of young people. 3. Students create solid project proposals; garner the support for their project, and work towards solving an identified problem. 4. Students enter college and careers with experience in writing business plans. 5.Local businesses engage and invest in the work of young people.

Ethical Action: Alex Cohen, a focus group sophomore, envisioned how the program would impact her if offered at her school. "I would have the idea that there are people all over the world that struggle with things just like we do or at a much higher level. It would be exciting to learn about their culture, to experience the way they cook their food, to read stories about their village and to see video footage of how they play. I think it would totally change the way I saw my own town and I would be so excited to help people in another country and learn more about them and then tell other people about it. It would be like [a community] helping another village because of me and my knowledge about it."

Replication: Replication and expansion is key to the success of the program. School districts from across the nation would have access to become a partner with Youth Re:Action Corps in delivering the program to their students. The program curriculum has two versions. One for an after-school program, the other for a full course where students are in the classroom five days per week and receive credit for the course. In Arizona, Mesa Public Schools has picked up the inagural program for the nation and it will launch in Fall of 2005. Five additional school districts in Arizona and two in Colorado have already expressed interest in hosting the program at their site next year. All of this has come without a formalized request for additional sites.

Sustainability: The future expansion and funding model of Youth Re:Action Corps is to partner with school districts, independent charter schools, and community based youth organizations. As the program develops out of its pilot program year, such entities may opt to utilize the philanthropic education provided by Youth Re:Action Corps and pay a membership fee for the provision of its services. These entities will implement the Youth Re:Action Corps program and absorb the costs associated with running the program at their site. Relying on the support of college students in each state to serve as mentors and receive internship credit from the organization will also help to offset expansion costs.

Position in the Ethics Mosaic of Solutions:

Factor: Otherness

Principle: Building ability to care, uphold values, and make