Inspired to Serve: Year 2 Internal Evaluation Report

INSPIRED TO SERVE: YOUTH-LED INTERFAITH ACTION is a three-year pilot project to enhance the capacity of America's 350,000 churches, mosques, synagogues, temples, and other faith-based organizations to engage young people in effective service-learning that increases interfaith cooperation and contributes to young people's healthy development. The approach combines Interfaith Youth Core's (IFYC's) innovative model of interfaith service-learning with Search Institute's (SI's) framework of Developmental Assets and its asset-based approach to community and social change. The project focuses on building the will and capacity of faith-based organizations to strengthen their programs and impact in the following four critical-shift areas: toward effective service-learning, toward interfaith engagement, toward asset-building approaches with youth, and toward city-wide movements. The project includes both an internal evaluation and an external confirmatory evaluation, in order to track project activities and impact on young people, participating faith-based organizations, and the broader community. In terms of participating young people, the project is examining the relationship between service-learning practices and youth outcomes within a faith-based content. The four sites participating in this pilot project are St. Paul, Chicago, Philadelphia, and New Orleans. The project's major strength is also an interesting challenge: the uniqueness of each of the four pilot sites. Their individuality brings great richness to the team's endeavors, and requires a good measure of creativity from the leadership team to leverage the sites' strengths and help them achieve the project outcomes in their particular contexts. (authors)