Eager to Learn and to Give
The gains of integrating altruism and academics have played out in Full-Circle Learning communities and documented in research studies. These early learners at Rancho Sespe practiced the habits-of-heart in a summer school class last summer. Families there are urgently waiting for a year-round Full-Circle Learning preschool in a vacated Head Start facility. The parents work in the citrus industry nearby. With the help of donors and supporters, the school plans to open in 2014, but more start-up funds are needed.
Helping Students Strive
Nine year-old orphan Josepha lives with an unemployed uncle who had no means of support that would allow him to attend school. Similarly, Patience stays with an aunt who has no money for school fees and uniform. Nine year-old Simon lives with his brother. He fetches heavy jugs of water 10 times a day from the public hand pump to earn money for his food. Satta lost her parents at age 4. Her aunt sells groundnuts on the corner to put food in the house. Emmanuel, at age 13, lives only with his friends and has no adults to turn to for help.Patience came to the Full-Circle Learning director in Liberia every day, offering to do odd jobs in exchange for school feels. She now waters the flowers at the front of our office every evening. Emmanuel and Simon volunteered to clean the windows and slash the compound's bushy grasses on regular basis. Thanks to a small emergency fund, these four students now receive needs-based scholarships from Full-Circle Learning. With the extra you give, we can continue to help them improve their chances to make meaningful contributions to their community.
Patience wrote, “I am studying to become a nurse so I can help sick women and children in my community.”
Emmanuel added: “When I grow up, I want to become a farmer, so that I can grow food to feed my country…I will never achieve my dream of becoming a good farmer without academic knowledge.” These five orphans pictured below, Satta, Simon, Josepha, Emmanuel and Patience, have received scholarships through this semester. Thanks for the contributions that help deserving children such as these strive for the goal of meaningful contribution to the communities in which they live. We appreciate your continuing help to ensure their future education.
December – A Month of International Exchange Visits
Community Impact: Teachers Tell How They Transform Communities
Young change agents do have a voice in Liberia, with the help of classroom teachers. At a gathering in December 2013, Liberian teachers said that they have begun to connect respect with science. They have also constructed projects that help students better learn, understand and apply their content knowledge. Through real-world altruistic action, they have challenged students to clean the community, to understand the complexities of agricultural projects and to learn about global economics. In this post-war country, they have helped students choose patience and forgiveness as a way of life.
These were some of the many messages the teachers shared with board member Fariba Mahjoor at the Full-Circle Learning (FCL) Teachers’ Forum. They praised FCL African program director Davidson Efetobore and implored him to take FCL teacher education training to all the rural schools, saying, “This is what our country needs.”
Fariba traveled to Monrovia Liberia as a board representative, to study the community impact of integrated education at the 26 collaborating schools whose teachers had been trained in Full-Circle Learning strategies. The educators commented that while the Minister of Education has a program to open schools, they have seen a different kind of impact now that the students have learned respect. This impact depends on professional development in specialized curriculum design and support strategies for teachers. They told Fariba, “You may know your subject well but may not be managing your class well. As you and they learn about habits-of-heart, you will manage the class better.”
Fariba also visited a gathering of the Girls United Clubs from several schools. (FCL formed the Liberian chapters in response to the UN Millennial goal for Liberia to eradicate childhood marriage.) The meeting agenda included the girls’ upcoming poetry anthology. The book’s themes will encourage other girls to stay in school and will be offered as a gift to local libraries and schools, where books by local authors are in short supply. “This is such an important place for the girls to be,” said Fariba, after hearing them share their experiences in the clubs. “They can support each other here and create an alternative peer culture for girls.”
During the community impact visit, Fariba also attended the FCL field trips pictured in this article. She visited schools and made a wisdom exchange presentation on behalf of the Tarzana Full-Circle Learning Habits-of-Heart Club, where students had made pillow case flags to represent the oneness of the human family during their unit on Universal Connectedness and global health. Fariba challenged students to maintain their humanitarian goals, telling the inspirational story of her husband Fasha, whose separation science company makes cures available to benefit global health. He had won many humanitarian awards, and coincidentally, the Mahjoors had just come from receiving an honor from the prince on her way to Liberia.
On the last day of the community impact study, our board member watched the teachers from the many partner schools embrace the Regional Program Director, tell how they would miss him, and say goodbye to their co-mentors at partner schools before the holiday break. She was deeply moved. The school leaders’ creative practices and common vision had helped them inspire one another as they deepened their sense of purpose in the community transformation process. Fariba’s email message to the board said simply, “You would be crying if you were here right now.”
Esther advocates for peace and tells a gathering crowd about alternatives to gender-based violence on a field trip of the Deborah K. Moore School. In the photo above the headline, her classmate David stirs the crowd with his speech about the need for peace and positive character traits. Fariba Mahjoor is shown in the background.
Representatives of three Girls United Clubs meet to discuss the impact this Full-Circle Learning program has had on their lives.
Students from Kingdom Foundation International set out to clean their community as a culminating unit project. Neighbors came out to pay them and could not believe that their goal was to create more sanitary conditions and to set an example for others.
A teacher introduces the “Heroes” class at the New Hope Foundation School, a recent collaborator.
Students prepare to take their message to the community.
Gambian Girls’ Project Leader Comes to California
The audience sat spellbound for two hours as Yassin Sarr-Fox, one of Full-Circle Learning’s Gambian collaborators, made a presentation about her organization in Northern California on December 17, 2013. Starfish Founder Yassin spoke to guests about the challenges faced by girls growing up in West Africa. She shared her own plight and her decision, as a child, to one day give girls the tools for intellectual and economic independence and decision making, in order to benefit their families and society. She would dedicate her life to helping girls gain a sense their own nobility and act on that knowledge each day. That is exactly what she is doing.Yassin’s presentation at the Purple Moon, in Nevada City, California, featured the work of her high-school aged students as they’ve built and continuously operate a community library, tend a garden, conduct entrepreneurial projects to raise funds for their school fees, and engage in educational enrichment classes. Her audience was so inspired that each one either sponsored a girl or planned to go to The Gambia as a volunteer to teach the girls professional skills in art, geographic information systems or other specialties.
Yassin and her husband, David Fox, had started an afterschool program based on the Full-Circle Learning model for 60 children while in the US completing their masters degrees. This experience helped prepare them to launch their life-changing nonprofit organization, Starfish International, five years ago in The Gambia. Yassin is now completing a doctoral degree and came to the US to collaborate and conduct research for her dissertation. We expect the best of these articulate and caring young women she mentors, for they have a wonderful role model to follow.
Please click here for the Union article and photos of Starfish International.
Yassin Sarr-Fox
Tarzana Students Tell Adults What to Model
Annual Mastery Ceremonies at each Full-Circle Learning program offer the chance for students to honor their parents for positive habits and qualities. Sometimes, planners take the concept farther, to help students identify practices, professions and sincere actions that exemplify the personal qualities the students seek to master.
The Habit-of-Heart Club at Tarzana Elementary School was one of the earliest Full-Circle Learning projects in Southern California, operating at a school where many languages are spoken and where families come together seeking common goals for their children.
Over the 2013 school year, students focused their learning units on acknowledging adults in the community who practice the habits-of-heart. When they studied advocacy, they held a ceremony for caregivers and parents of preemies at the local hospital in Tarzana, prompting written letters and accolades from the neonatal nursing staff. When they visited adopted grandparents at the senior center during a unit on Dedication, they presented certificates to the elders for dedication to family and community at a special program. When they considered ways to practice the habit of Farsightedness, their service learning field trip took them to a new wetlands park, to honor the civic leaders who saw fit to create policies that consider the future wellbeing of living things. More good works are in the planning stages for 2014, but to experience their environmental park service-learning field trip, click here.
Please click here to see pictures and to the read the story in the Malibu Times article.
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