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• 1 2018-03-06T05:45:29-05:00 Tatiana Patiño- The Story of Me 1 My story and how it relates to Keylatch Afterschool program image_header 2018-04-23T11:20:04-04:00

  
  First, an Introduction
  I am Tatiana Patiño, a sophomore at Harvard College studying English and looking to pursue a career in Secondary Education. I was born in Cali, Colombia, but my family moved to Atlanta, Georgia when I was four years old. As a first-generation Colombian-American and a first-generation, low-income college student, my identities have defined the roles I have chosen to take on at Harvard.
   
  My Time at Harvard
  In addition to my classes, I have focused my time at Harvard mostly in youth development, mentorship, and education-themed extracurricular activities. In high school, I came across the Hispanic Organization Promoting Education (HoPe), an organization based in Georgia with the mission to increase graduation rate among Hispanic high school students through leadership, education, and community service. With the help of some friends, we founded our school’s first HoPe chapter, which became the center for information, resources, and community for Hispanic students at my high school. Since graduating from high school, I have continued to volunteer with HoPe as a Graduation Coach and an Education Coordinator. In my roles, I mentor high school juniors and seniors through the college application process, and I create resources meant to guide students through high school and through the college application process. Additionally, I am a Peer Advising Fellow (PAF) for a group of 28 freshmen in the Holworthy Freshman Dorm. In this role, I plan and lead weekly study breaks meant to provide students with a stress-free activity once a week and to foster a sense of community in the entryway. Additionally, I meet individually with 9 of those students every month to check in on their semester and provide mentorship and guidance. I am also the director of Keylatch Afterschool Program, which is an afterschool program in Boston's South End. For this project, I will be focusing on this role as one of the two directors of Keylatch.
  
  
  My Role With Keylatch

  As one of the directors of the program, I am in charge of taking care of all of the logistics that allow the program to run. My co-director and I communicate with the two elementary schools that we serve, send out and review participant applications to elementary school students in the program, and we participate in training sessions and monthly cabinet meetings. We also recruit, coordinate, and manage our volunteers, and we meet once a week to plan the following week’s activities.  In addition to the logistical work, I go to the South End Library twice a week to actually work with the kids. This involves picking up the students from school in a PBHA van, driving them to the South End Library, helping them with their homework, providing enriching recreational activities for the students, and driving them each to their homes.

  A Typical Day
  The highlight of my Tuesdays and Thursdays is going to spend time with my kids at Keylatch. I pick up the keys to my big, red van from PBHA at 2:00 and walk with my Harvard volunteers to the garage behind Northwest labs. I then drive thirty minutes into the South End of Boston. This was stressful when my classes ended at 2:30, but now that I have plenty of time to get to the South End to pick up the kids, it is a great way for me to bond with my volunteers. It is on the commute that I have been able to build a relationship with my volunteers because when we are at the site, we are not able to talk to each other very much.
  
  We then pick up students at the Blackstone School at 3:00 and at the Hurley K-8 at 3:15, and we drive straight to the South End Library. There, we are greeted by Margaret, the librarian. Margaret has been working with Keylatch since it started 30 years ago, and she knows all of the students and their parents since they were little. She has come up to me and said, “you know, I knew Jessy’s mom since she was Jessy’s age, and I met Jessy when he was just a baby.” It is moments like those, which remind me that I am a part of a tradition much bigger than myself.
  
  After we arrive at the library, we spend the first 15 minutes of program eating snack and catching up with the kids. This is usually when the kids share the highs and lows of their days, and where they tell the tutors all the drama in their lives. It has been nice seeing how they have come to trust us more and more with what is going on in their lives. We then spend an hour helping students with their homework and making sure that they read for 15 minutes. When the students are done with homework, we do team building activities, play educational games, or go outside to play tag. This is where tutors are really able to bond with the students outside of their tutor role. To end the day, we get in the van and jam out to some music as we drop off each of the students in their homes. I then drive the Wellesley volunteers to MIT where they are able to take the shuttle back to campus, and I drive back to Harvard campus with the Harvard volunteers.
  
  Why I do What I Do
  I began my role as co-director of Keylatch last semester in the fall of my sophomore year. I knew I wanted to work with a PBHA afterschool program because I enjoy working with kids, and because I like to take advantage of any opportunity I can get to create and teach my own curriculum. The summer before my sophomore year, I worked in a PBHA summer enrichment camp with elementary school students, and I realized that I wanted to make working with kids an integral part of my college experience. However, the reason I chose Keylatch specifically, instead of one of the other twelve afterschool programs, is that I learned that the communities that Keylatch works with are primarily Latinx. My desire to serve a community like mine and to work with students that I could relate to, and who could relate to me as a Latina, played a major role in my decision to work with students in the South End instead of the more conveniently located Cambridge Afterschool Program. Additionally, the program was struggling to find a second director. When the current director for Keylatch reached out to me asking me if I would be willing to help, I decided to take up the challenge.
  
  My journey with Keylatch has not always been smooth sailing. This year, we have had issues with volunteer recruitment and retention, which has made it difficult to provide our students with individualized attention and has caused us to cancel program on the days that our few volunteers cannot make it. Additionally, becoming a director involved about twenty hours of trainings and certifications, which felt overwhelming as I tried to balance them with the new position and with my academics. Lastly, I learned that working with kids is often a thankless endeavor. At times, it can be frustrating when I have deadlines for my classes, and I make the effort to commute to the South End, only to be met with my kids acting rowdy or expressing that they don’t want to go to Keylatch.
  
  
  What has kept me involved in the program, however, are the relationships that I have been able to build with my students. There are days when the kids scream out “Taty!” and run to give me a hug or they interrogate me on my reasons for not coming to program or they are sad when I tell them that Keylatch will not be running due to a holiday. It is in those moments that I feel that I am adding something to Keylatch. Better yet, the moments when I spend a whole day of program working on a homework assignment with a student and see them finally grasp the concept by the end, or when one of the students that I have struggled to connect to opens up to me, I am reminded of the role I am playing in my students’ lives as a tutor, a mentor, and a role model.
  
  How Keylatch has Shaped Me
  Keylatch has added a sense of purpose to my time here at Harvard. It has allowed me to see beyond the Harvard bubble and to be reminded of the world that exists beyond the privilege secured inside the Harvard gates. I am so impressed by the way my students are able to deal with some of the challenges they have to face, and my own difficulties are immediately put into perspective. This role has made me feel a sense of agency within the University that I have not felt anywhere else. The fact that I am able to shape the program however I believe to be most fit, and that the adults in PBHA trust me and support me through that process makes me believe in my own abilities as a leader. I have felt that through this role, I have been able to put some of what I have learned in my classes, especially in my education-themed classes, to practical use. This role has also shaped the way I view my own adulthood. Before this role, I considered myself a student—somewhere in-between kid and adult. Here, however, I am the adult responsible for eight children. This has allowed me to mature and to see myself as more capable of taking on that title of “adult” than I thought possible. I often joke on campus about not being a “real adult,” but outside of campus, I am a real adult, and I must deal with all of the responsibilities of that title.
  
  The main way in which Keylatch has shaped me, however, is that working with children has made me take myself less seriously—in the best way possible. The kids do not care about what my GPA is or where I am interning this summer or what my views on Bitcoin are. Instead, they care about whether I remember that girl that is flirting with the guy they like or whether I have listened to their favorite song or whether I am willing to read NO David! For the twentieth time. It has been an experience that has helped me stay humble among all of the privilege of a Harvard education.
  
  My role working with kids, especially with kids that often struggle with school, has made me question my desire to continue to concentrate in English. While my peers are discussing the use of the word “civil” by Juliet in the balcony scene in Romeo and Juliet, I am wondering how this discussion is having any practical impact. I am bothered by the privilege I feel as I discuss Shakespeare knowing that my kids are struggling to even read and that without someone to motivate them to like reading, they may never end up reading anything by Shakespeare. At the same time, I have been led to think about how I can use my privilege to impact my students and students like the ones I work with.
  
  This role has helped me be confident in my decision to become a teacher because it has shown me where my passions lie. It has caused me to spend a lot of time thinking how I can make lessons relevant and how I can help them believe that they can achieve things like going to Harvard. It has also made me realize that I want to take classes at the Harvard School of Education in order to feel as though my classes are relevant to what I will be doing in the future. I have spent a lot of time since arriving on campus thinking about the quote on Deter gate that says “Enter to grow in wisdom” and “depart to serve better thy country and thy kind.” This role has been my way of using the wisdom I am learning at Harvard to serve my country and my community.”
  
• 1 2018-03-23T13:16:24-04:00 Tatiana Patino- Action Research 1 image_header 2018-04-23T13:32:44-04:00 Literature Review
  
  Though I have not found any research on the involvement of college students in afterschool programs specifically, I have found literature on what motivates students to become involved in volunteer work more broadly. I believe the literature I have chosen to focus on will provide me with general themes regarding what motivates students to join service-based organizations and what factors prevent students from joining or from continuing to participate in service-based organizations. Using the concepts from this literature, I will be able to analyze how prevalent these themes are within Keylatch Afterschool’s volunteers and whether Keylatch volunteers follow general trends regarding what motivates them to serve.
  
  I am basing my study on three articles that present various explanations for the most important factors in a volunteer’s decision to do service work and one article that describes the importance of mattering for retention in an organization. The articles titled “College Students' Volunteering: Factors Related to Current Volunteering,” “The Motivation To Volunteer,” and “Attributes Influencing College Students’ Participation in Volunteering: A conjoint analysis” all discussed the roles of student volunteers in service organizations and the factors that encourage students to volunteer. The article “Marginality and Mattering: Key Issues in Building Community” emphasized the importance of making sure volunteers feel like they matter in order to increase retention in an organization. This literature has provided me with language with which to identify and categorize my volunteers’ motivations to participate in Keylatch and suggestions on ways to fight the high rates of attrition.
  
  Moore et al’s study divided motivations into values, understanding (new learning experience), social, career, protective (“protect oneself from guilt over being more fortunate than others”), and enhancement (“to experience positive affect”) (Moore et al 388). Armed with this language, I was able to analyze my volunteers’ responses to the survey question “Why did you join Keylatch?” through this lens. The responses to the survey questioned showed repeated mention of wanting to give back to the community and to connect with other college students, which leads to the conclusion Harvard and Wellesley students are driven mainly by social and enhancement motivators. Fifty percent of respondents mentioned an interest in pursuing education. This could make preparing for their career a possible motivation. However, no respondent was explicit in citing “career goals” as a motivation for their participation in Keylatch.
  
  I looked to Gage and Thapa’s “Volunteer Motivations and Constraints Among College Students” to understand Keylatches’ high turnover rate. Gage and Thapa discussed in their article how “as the respondent perceives more structural constraints (lack of time, money, transportation, etc.), they are less motivated by values and understanding” (Gage and Thapa 424). They continued this thought by writing “values and understanding motives may not be enough on their own to overcome certain structural constraints” (Gage and Thapa 425). This explanation is congruent with the responses former Keylatch volunteers gave for why they stopped participating in the program. The former Keylatch tutors that responded to the survey cited the “hefty commute” and “conflicting times” as the reason they stopped volunteering with Keylatch.
  
  Gage and Thapa did, however, provide a solution to the problem of volunteers dropping out. Their study shows that “students who perceive a higher level of intrapersonal constraints may rely on the support of the people around them to volunteer” (Gage and Thapa 425). This means that students who feel like they are a part of a community and like their service work is also a social experience are more likely to stay in their role. Gage and Thapa’s advice is that “programs should highlight the importance of the program and offer awards or recognition to the volunteers” in order to “serve the need for peer support... and other social benefits” (Gage and Thapa 425). This advice is a crucial framework for my action research as I am presenting the importance of fostering a sense of community within Keylatch as the main way for me to encourage volunteer retention.
  
  Schlossberg’s research supports the idea that creating a feeling of community is essential in order to increase retention. In his article, Schlossberg focuses on the importance of making sure that students feel like they matter. He writes that “joining a campus student organization can evoke feelings of marginality. It can take time for students to feel central to a group” (Schlossberg 8). Due to the fact that Keylatch has a high turnover rate, most volunteers at any given time are first-time tutors. This means that volunteers are constantly wondering “are we a part of things; do we belong; are we central or marginal? Do we make a difference” (Schlossberg 7). Though Schlossberg was looking at college campuses rather than at service organizations, his observations are constructive for the plan of action necessary to increase volunteer retention. Schlossberg writes, “Institutions that focus on mattering... will be more successful in creating campuses where students are motivated to learn, where their retention is high, and ultimately, where their institutional loyalty for the short and long-term is ensured.” (Schlossberg 14). This article has led me to believe that in order to effectively build community, I have to ensure that volunteers feel like they belong in Keylatch and like their time and efforts are integral to the success of the program.
  
  Unlike the other three studies, Lee and Won in their study found that “an organization’s mission is the most important determinant of their participation, followed by travel distance, reference groups, flexibility, and task types” (Lee and Won 149). Their findings also suggest that “the marketing strategies that are targeted to students who live within 5 miles from the volunteering cite and that use existing volunteers as recruiters for future volunteers will be useful in attracting college students. (Lee Won 159). I will be using this information as I develop my recruiting strategy in my action research. 
  
  An analysis of the readings on my topic has provided me with a language and a framework that I have been able to use throughout my own study of what motivates Harvard and Wellesley volunteers to join Keylatch and of what factors cause these students to stop volunteering with the program. The combination of the motivators discussed in these four readings led me to break down my blueprint for action into five different parts: recruitment, fighting restraints, community building, you matter, and perks.
  
  For the recruitment strategies, I chose to take advantage of Lee and Won’s theory of mission as the main motivator for service to focus my outreach on Latinx and Black students in order to emphasize the need for role models who look like the kids we are serving. The history of the program is grounded on identity and for that reason would benefit from students who share the kids’ identity. I also used Moore et al’s breakdown of motivations, specifically the career motivation, to create an emphasis on the opportunity to gain experience working with children and to be a part of a strong alumni network when recruiting.
  
  For countering constraints, I focused on Gage and Thapa’s explanations of what causes volunteers to step away from their roles. Their emphasis on making service accessible and easy aligned with the feedback from our volunteers. I then used this information to design ways in which Keylatch could make the commute and the commitment easier for the volunteers.
  
  Lastly, when designing the sections on community and belonging, I looked at the studies by Moore et al and Schlossberg, which both emphasized the importance of making volunteers feel essential to the program and of making Keylatch a social and not just an altruistic experience. Schlossberg reminded me of what it feels like to be new to an organization that has been running for decades, the way Keylatch has. Especially on the days that the kids are acting up, there is not much that persuades a new volunteer to come back. For that reason, I plan on planning outings that will allow volunteers to build friendship, and I will place a greater emphasis on showing our volunteers how much we appreciate them.
  
  MISSION HILL AFTERSCHOOL AS A MODEL
  
  Recruitment
  • Active recruitment at Harvard, Wellesley, Northeastern, and other schools in the area
    • Forming relationships with service organizations at other schools and finding out which schools offer credit for community service work
  • Separate recruitment team at Wellesley
    • Emphasis on name recognition
    • Host bonding events
    • Host forums with speakers on education
  • Intensive Recruitment at Harvard
    • Posters across campus
    • Email blasts across different email lists
    • Changing Facebook profile picture
    • Table at Annenberg
    • Pairs of tutors knock on every freshman’s door to discuss the program
    • Individualized “you have been recommended email
    • Emphasis on students of color
  Retention
  • Bonding events
  • 2 parties every semester
  • One social event that is not a party per semester
  • Thank you texts to volunteers
    • This is also used to provide feedback
  • New Counselor check-ins ever three weeks
  • Returning counselor check-ins twice per semester
  • End of the semester thank you cards
  • End of the semester survey
  • End of the semester reflection
  
  
  
  Research Design
  
  I am looking to understand what motivates Harvard and Wellesley students to participate in afterschool programs despite the significant time commitment. Though it is easy to assume that altruistic reasons are at the core of what motivates Harvard and Wellesley students to join afterschool programs like Keylatch, I would like to understand what keeps these students volunteering even on the days where the kids in the program are difficult and a simple cost-benefit analysis makes it seems as though the “good” that is being achieved through the service work is not worth the significant time investment.
  
  I want to focus on this study because Keylatch Afterschool is having difficulty with volunteer recruitment and volunteer retention. The shortage of volunteers is affecting the quality of our program as we are not able to provide our students with individualized attention. Having a better understanding of what motivates students to volunteer their time, especially to a program that requires consistency and a significant time commitment, will allow me to approach next year’s recruitment process in a way that is more methodical and that is more effective at attracting volunteers.
  
  Unlike other forms of volunteering, afterschool programs can be disheartening at times because the students are very fickle. One day they might tell you how much they love coming to afterschool and the next day they tell you that they hate afterschool and that they never want to come back. For this reason, it is not always easy to feel as though your work in afterschool is actually constructive. I am interested not only in what factors influence a volunteer’s initial decision to join an afterschool program but also in what motivates volunteers to continue volunteering throughout multiple semesters.
  
  Overall, the goal is to find out what motivates Harvard and Wellesley students to volunteer in afterschool programs like Keylatch. As well as to find out what factors play a part in a volunteer choosing to remain a part of the program for multiple semesters. Lastly, I would like to find out what factors are influencing volunteer’s decisions to quit the program and whether there is anything the organization can do to prevent the volunteers from quitting. Together, the answers to these questions will allow me to better meet the needs of my volunteers and to approach the recruitment process in a way that appeals to more Harvard and Wellesley students.
  
  In my action research, I will be interviewing the directors of Mission Hill Afterschool, which is a PBHA afterschool program with successful volunteer recruitment, to understand what approaches they are using to encourage college students to sign up to volunteer with the program. Furthermore, I will be taking note of what strategies they are using to foster a sense of community within their organization. In addition to these interviews, I will be interviewing my co-director who has been a director of Keylatch for the last seven semesters. Her input on what methods have been effective throughout the years will be helpful for me understand how to best move forward with volunteer recruitment and retention. Lastly, I will be analyzing a survey sent out to current and former volunteers on their motivations for participating in Keylatch.
  
  The results of this study will be helpful not only for my own program but also for volunteer-based programs across Harvard campus. Right now, service-based organizations are struggling to recruit volunteers because many students often prefer to join organizations that are either more prestigious or that will help them when applying to competitive post-graduate programs. An understanding of what motivates Harvard students to do service can help organizations cater to the needs of Harvard students and in that way increase involvement in service-based organizations.