Family Service Learning
By working collaboratively on community initiatives, families and educators improve their schools and communities and build strong relationships.
What It Is
Family service learning builds on the model of service learning for students, in which they master how to apply classroom concepts through direct service in public or nonprofit community-based organizations. Family service learning is an approach for whole families — including children, parents, grandparents, and others — to give back to their community while spending quality time with one another.¹ In the process of designing and carrying out this work, teachers and community educators also deepen their understanding of the families they serve. They learn about communities while also helping to strengthen them.
How It Works
Family service learning generally has six steps:
- Investigation: Parents and children investigate community problems that they might potentially address. Investigation involves research and a community mapping activity.
- Planning and preparation: Parents, children, community members, and teachers learn about and plan the service activities. This step includes acquiring content knowledge and addressing the administrative issues needed for a successful project.
- Action (implementing the service activity): Parents, children, community members, and teachers carry out and complete the family service-learning project.
- Reflection: Parents and children debrief and reflect on the service-learning experience. Activities include thinking about the project implementation, the meaning and connection between parents’ work and the community, and what children have learned in school.
- Demonstration of results and celebration: Families, program staff, community participants, and others publicly share what they have achieved and learned.
- Sustainability: Parents and program staff plan how to make their project or family service learning an ongoing endeavor.
What Changes
Organizations that use family service learning demonstrate their commitment to trying out programs that are co-created with families. The approach acknowledges parents’ assets and brings families and the community together through hands-on activities. Families drive programming at every step: conceptualizing and planning the events, recruiting donors and volunteers, carrying out the plan of action, and reflecting on what went well and what can be improved.
Families who engage in service learning have increased their social capital, expanded their confidence and self-efficacy, and increased their knowledge and skills.²
Approach In Action
The San Mateo County Libraries (California) run Toyota Family Learning, an intergenerational program from the National Center for Families Learning. The model offers a variety of opportunities for parents to work together on a variety of topics, whether it’s building computer literacy or learning how to gain confidence in helping their children with schoolwork. The family service-learning component brings families and children together to design projects that give back to the community.
Two service-learning examples include families organizing a community-wide cleanup and working with local food shelters to decrease food insecurity, pressing community needs that families felt strongly about solving. Families are paired with one another to serve as mentors who can share information and foster one another’s self-sufficiency. As a result of their participation, families increase their confidence and social networks and develop important work-based skills. Librarians also come to see families differently and have more positive impressions of their strengths.³
Learn More
Endnotes
¹ Cramer, J., & Toso, B. W. (2015). Family service learning brief. Louisville, KY: National Center for Families Learning.
² Cramer & Toso. (2015).
³ Weiss, H. B., Caspe, M., Lopez, M. E., & McWilliams, L. (2016). IDEABOOK: Libraries for families. Cambridge, MA: Harvard Family Research Project.
