City-wide programs cross schools and agencies—their home base might be a Mayor’s Office, a city office, a nonprofit. They are bridging efforts. Two of our longest-standing partnerships include The City of West Hollywood and the Office of the Mayor—New York City Service.
Our collaboration with The City of West Hollywood began in 1994, with a request for assistance in expanding its nascent community service program for students. Over the course of the next several years, Cathryn Berger Kaye designed and led service learning initiatives across multiple schools for gardening, book writing and food-donation campaigns. She then turned to providing ongoing support and programming for The Children’s Roundtable, a collaboration between West Hollywood schools, organizations, and government agencies. She led focus groups and a Town Hall World Café as part of a city-wide needs assessment, designed a West Hollywood Book Festival, coached key staff, and facilitated an immersive professional development event for all city employees.
In 2015, the Mayor’s Office for NYC Service contacted CBK Associates to collaborate on designing a new, unique, citywide program of Youth Leadership Councils (YLC). The request was specific: to integrate our “Five Stages of Service Learning” into the framework for the new YLC’s. Now in all five boroughs, the program engages youth and adults in partnerships aimed at closing the “opportunity gap” in civic engagement among NYC high school age youth and contributing to a more fair, just, and inclusive city. Organizations, schools, and NYC government agencies—including the NY Housing Authority and almost every New York Police Department precinct—host these councils.
As part of this work, CBK Associates’ Chris Dadefumi, Maureen Connolly, Jonathan Davis, and Cathy Berger Kaye have created a Civic Action Guide, along with practical strategies that youth and their adult partners can tap to impact policy, practice, and advocacy. Chris leads a professional development team that targets bias awareness and micro aggression for all facilitators, including the New York City Police Department—illuminating the ways internalized bias and prejudices can fuel environments of persistent traumatic stress. When the pandemic began, we developed special participatory programming for the YLCs and NYC youth, including the Instagram-based Documentar for student voice and a video series to support NYC police officers in their interactions with youth.