Hey Folks!
When not immersed in planning an Ohio-themed Bike! Bike! fundraiser dance party (!!!), I'm actually doing other for real work. Including the exploration of formats, documentation, and reporting for our youth volunteering and Earn-a-Bike programs.
Here in British Columbia, high school students are required to complete something like 30 hours of work experience (ie free labour) to graduate, and we get a lot of youth completing this requirement at our shops. We also run pretty informal Earn-a-Bike programs for youth who are in unconventional education settings, accessing social services, in alternative programs, or can't access our in-school programming for any variety of reasons. Lots of these kids are really focused on getting a job, but we can rarely accommodate that.
I'm in the process of creating a checklist/worksheet of mechanical and interpersonal skills acquired by youth as they volunteer in our spaces. The idea is that it would include gradients of skill, becoming increasingly more complex as time goes on. It would be used to guide their time in the shop, and also document what they've learned. It would be the youth's responsibility to fill the checklist out over time and have staff sign off on it, and when it's completed, we would write them a letter of recommendation to be used in applying for jobs, school, whateva.
So....do yall have anything like this in place? Or any other relevant Earn-a-Bike or alternative youth programming materials I can creep and reap?
SEND THEM TO ME!
Thanks buddiez!
Lauren @ OCB