Mission Hill Program Teaches Local Youth

Managing a room full of rowdy children—all between 9 and 11 years old—on a hot Thursday afternoon may seem like the work of a trained professional, but as Mission Hill After School Program volunteer E. Jordan Taylor ’12 steps into the classroom on the Wentworth Institute of Technology campus, she transforms from student to disciplinarian without missing a beat.

Taylor has been a volunteer with the all-student-run MHASP since her freshman year, and her confidence in directing the restless students shows.

“I need everyone’s eye contact right now,” Taylor announces, raising her right hand. “I’m going to wait until I have 100 percent attention.”

Climbing atop tables and screaming at each other, Taylor’s students refuse to attend to her lesson plan for the day.

One of the students even talks back to Taylor, accusing her of not being “nice” while marching around the classroom with her hand raised in mockery.

“There are days like this, and days when they are complete angels,” Taylor says of her students’ raucous behavior.

DIVIDE AND CONQUER

Of the Phillips Brooks House Association’s 17 after school programs, MHASP is the oldest and largest, founded in 1983 and currently comprised of 180 volunteers.

The program provides three-and-a-half hours of after school activities and tutoring for 63 elementary and middle school students from two of Boston’s housing developments, Mission Main and Alice Taylor.

Based on the WIT campus, the Mission Hill program is run mainly by students from Harvard and Wellesley, with a few volunteers from other Boston-area colleges.

The program runs four days a week, with college volunteers alternating on the different school days.

“If you don’t come to the program, you just stay at home and play games. If you come to the program, you have fun and do homework like this,” one elementary school-aged Mission Hill participant says, snapping his fingers to indicate how efficiently he could complete work at MHASP.

A large part of Mission Hill’s success and longevity is a result of the large-scale coordination between hundreds of college volunteers and kids from the neighboring communities and the program’s well-established schedule of daily activities.

Each Mission Hill child is paired with a college volunteer who assists them with homework, reads aloud to them, and plays games with them.

MHASP itself is headed by four student directors, each responsible for a different aspect of curriculum planning and program management.

The sheer number of volunteers—MHASP strives for a one-on-one ratio between college volunteers and Mission Hill kids for every day—has contributed to the program’s longevity and continued strong presence in the world of after school volunteer programs.

TAKING A LOOK BACK

Despite being around for nearly three decades, MHASP has faced difficulties evaluating the efficacy and progress of its after school programs.

“Evaluation of the program is a really big challenge in terms of who does that and finding people who are experienced in that area,” says Mission Hill School Principal Ayla Gavins, whose students participate in MHASP. “It is a huge amount of coordination and communication.”

Over the past few years, PBHA has been trying to conduct evaluations of its programs through the Survey of After-School Youth Outcomes assessment forms, which are distributed to programs at the beginning and end of each year to trace annual progress.

The SAYO forms—part of a federally funded evaluation program—are meant to touch upon homework progress, engagement in learning, and relationships with peers in each student who participates in an after school program like Mission Hill.

Because the final evaluations compiled by the PBHA lump together eight after school programs, it is impossible to single out individual programs’ results.

“We didn’t really do data collection [before]; we’ve always had anecdotal data,” PBHA Student Development Coordinator Ariel B. Harms ’04 says. “We agree that hard data makes it easier to make changes, [but] it’s not something we’ve been doing.”

Stacey Guerrero ’10, one of the program’s two administrative directors, adds that Mission Hill has had trouble following its progress just on paper surveys.

“We need a more systematic way of doing follow-up,” she says.

As for now, verbal feedback and informal volunteer reports indicate that kids involved in the program seem to be showing improvement, Guerrero says.

AN ADDICTION, SOME ATTRITION

While other students find community in final clubs, sororities, or even study groups, Katherine E. Varney ’10 and her roommates became engrossed in public service, particularly Mission Hill.

“You get into the program because you inevitably know someone who is doing it, and once you meet the kids, it’s hard not to come back,” says Varney, whose roommate recommended the program. By her senior year, four out of the eight members of her blocking group had signed on as MHASP volunteers.

“With that comes this culture of ‘we do service because we love it and we think it is fantastic,’” Guererro says. “Everyone we hire is super dedicated, and that trickles down.”

But because MHASP is run entirely by college students, it still struggles with the pitfalls of rapid volunteer and leadership turnover.

The name recognition of Mission Hill helps draw in a consistent and sufficient number of volunteers each year, overcoming the attrition problems facing many other volunteer organizations. But the rapid transitions of volunteers and leadership runs the risk of blurring the institutional history of the program.

Eric M. Sefton ’10, a Mission Hill administrative director last year, has recently begun to contact Harvard graduates who volunteered with MHASP, with the intent of developing a database of survey results and contact information to use in the future.

“Graduates have a lot to contribute to the program and the experience of current volunteers,” he says. “It’s also always nice to see who comes before you and see what resources they can bring to the table.”

COLLABORATION, COMMUNITY

MHASP helps maintain the size of its program through collaboration with other established public service programs at Harvard, but also through extensive recruitment of volunteers outside of Harvard.

Out of 180 MHASP volunteers, 75 come from other universities in the Boston area, such as Boston University and Northeastern.

The program has also reached out to other PBHA-affiliated programs to make sure its kids do not lose all mentoring opportunities either over the summer or when they outgrow the program.

MHASP maintains particularly strong relationships with Mission Hill Summer and Mission Mentor programs. According to MHASP Clientele Director Max R. Selver ’11, many MHASP volunteers choose to also work for Mission Hill Summer, and, consequently, many kids participate in both programs.

Many of the children too old for MHASP often move on to Mission Mentor.

“We are very institutionalized,” Selver says. “People understand our legitimacy.”

The involvement of the parents of kids participating in MHASP keeps the program deeply ingrained in the Boston community.

According to Selver, parents meet with the coordinators at the beginning of the school year to discuss goals for their children, and progress reports for each child are sent home in the middle of the semester.

More fun-oriented Mission Hill traditions, such as a final party and a sleepover at Harvard, exemplify the high level of trust bestowed upon MHASP by the community.

—Staff writer Rediet T. Abebe can be reached at rtesfaye@college.harvard.edu.

—Staff writer Linda Zhang can be reached at zhang53@fas.harvard.edu.