Residents of Mayfield Living Learning Lodge, a service learning dorm at Vanderbilt, are spending this year interacting with teenage girls living in Wallace Girls Home at Youth Villages.

by Jessica Howard
Reading magazines, baking cookies and painting each other’s fingernails sound like typical teenage girl activities. For tenants at Youth Village’s Wallace Girls Home, these interactions are more than just routine gab-fests — they’re making a positive difference in the young women’s lives.

A group of 10 female students living in the Mayfield Living Learning Lodge, a service-learning dorm at Vanderbilt, spends a few hours each week building friendships and gaining the trust of the 13- to 18-year-olds living in the Wallace Girls Home.

Residents will live in the group home until they turn 18, a foster parent can be identified or their parent(s) have successfully completed in-home counseling. Interacting with Vanderbilt students is just the kind of distraction the girls need to maintain a sense of normalcy, according to Patti Bryan, Youth Villages’ development director and 1996 Vanderbilt Arts and Science alumnae.

“ The Mayfield volunteers are friends, teachers, advisers, encouragers and role models for the girls in the group home — relationships they have rarely experienced in their young lives,” said Bryan. “The weekly visits from the Vanderbilt students give the girls something to look forward to, being with friends who care about them and can be counted on.”

The group home is one of many programs provided by Youth Villages, a non-profit organization based in Tennessee to help serve the state’s most troubled and at-risk youth. The organization also provides in-home counseling, foster care and helps facilitate adoptions. Serving more than 2,000 troubled children and their families, Youth Villages is the Mid-South’s largest provider of services to this demographic. Some 500 receive care in Middle Tennessee each year.

For the entire 2002-03 academic year, students living in Mayfield House visit the Wallace Home in groups of five on alternating weeks.

“ We thought we were going to be tutoring [the girls in Wallace], but we basically mentor them by baking with them a lot, talking with them and telling them about our lives at the University,” said Sarah Bateman, junior studying international policy. Bateman hopes to get a group of the youth home residents together this spring to tour Vanderbilt.

“ It really opened our eyes to our own home lives and how lucky we are,” she said. “They don’t have the same hopes of the future that we have. College may not be an option.”

Since the spring of 2001, several other partnerships between Vanderbilt and Youth Villages have existed beyond the Mayfield House service-learning project. As part of the “Principles of Civic Engagement” course taught at Peabody, many undergraduate students in past semesters have chosen Youth Villages as the organization to which they would contribute 40 hours of community service. The service-learning course taught students to identify needs within the community, and to learn from those needs, said Professor of the Practice of Health Promotion and Education Sharon L. Shields.

“ The students are becoming more engaged in the community and how to see the community as a learning environment,” she said. “These efforts are yet another example of how Vanderbilt is trying to live out its covenant to the community.”

Bryan agrees.

“ [Volunteers] realize the important role of community volunteers and supporters in helping meet these needs,” she said. “They can also feel a personal satisfaction in giving of themselves to make a positive difference in the life of a child.”

Ten Vanderbilt graduates from the Class of 2002 are working as staff members at Youth Villages, and several other alumni are working in other capacities within the organization. In November, a group of students coordinated the annual Kissam Quad’s Penny Wars. The challenge raised $3,000 for Youth Village’s Transitional Living Program. The program, which teaches independent living skills to young people who have spent years in state custody, receives no state funding.

In the past, the Department of Human and Organizational Development has placed students in internships at Youth Villages. Interns tutored troubled young men in the organization’s Community-Based Program in two group homes. Tutors worked with the young men once a week.

“ Vanderbilt volunteers and interns consistently demonstrate an enthusiasm and eagerness to invest themselves in the lives of our children and to help them learn the skills to lead productive lives,” said Bryan. “Their commitment continues to send a powerful message to these children and youth that people do care about them and want them to succeed. That is what Youth Villages is all about — helping children and families succeed.”

Posted 3/03/03 at 10 a.m.