This year, a federally-funded research project at the Jandon Center for Community Engagement will launch a number of community-based initiatives to support young adults in Springfield. The Springfield Participatory Action Research Crew, also known as Project SPARC, will use data collected from interviews to address the most pressing barriers to success in adult life.
Project SPARC is a co-led research project that investigates the challenges and obstacles that emerging adults face as they leave compulsory education. Researchers from Smith, Project Coach, New North Citizens Council, and other community organizations work together to understand structural barriers and create community-based solutions.
Throughout 2020, the project will pilot mentoring programs, a digital information hub, and “Adulting 101” classes aimed at high school students. A newly-assembled advocacy cohort will work on a broader policy level to campaign for fairer funding for under-resourced schools, while pop-up events on soft skills and financial literacy will happen on the ground in Springfield.
The advocacy cohort will investigate how local, state and national policy can allocate resources to those who need it most. Current educational and economic policy distributes funding for public schools based on its academic performance, meaning that areas starting out with more resources stay ahead. Paired with the underfunding of public universities and predatory loan schemes that target disadvantaged students, policies like these fuel the “dropout crisis” in both college and high school. This part of the research team aims to understand these structural obstacles in depth and support policy initiatives that will best serve young people.
In the meantime, a mentoring program will fill the need for role models that have had the same experiences and struggles as those coming of age in areas like Springfield. Project SPARC researchers identified a need for mentors outside of the high school environment, where teachers, coaches, and counsellors help students to succeed within the school system.
Research from the project’s first year highlights the barriers that young people face as they become adults. Their findings, based on interviews with 22 young adults in Springfield show that a lack of practical information about adult life hinders young people on a structural level: without access to knowledge and support, they have difficulty knowing how to make the best choices for themselves. Interviews also showed that the transition from the structure of the school environment to independent adults life contributes to loneliness and stress.
Leslie Abraham, a Project SPARC Research Fellow and Smith College alumna, believes that programs promoting financial literacy and well-being are examples of immediate, on-the-ground community solutions for young people.
“One of the hardest experiences that young people face is both not being able to navigate and understand the complexity of finances.” she said. “This is a major area where we are failing to support young adults.”
“In my community organizing work, I have learned that community-based solutions are the best way to try to address community issues because people have real stakes in those issues, and then act to change things.”
Ultimately, Project SPARC’s goal is to continue the work that Project Coach does to support high school students academically and personally. While 100% of Project Coach mentees graduate from high school, only 4.8% of young people in Springfield graduate from college with a bachelor’s degree, even if 52% intend to do so. The Corporation for National and Community Service Semi-Annual Report on the project reads that “Youth who excelled in Project Coach and graduated high school with plans and momentum, would start college or a job but then face a myriad of challenges that would upend their progress.”
“In high school the message they received was to go to college, but they described feeling woefully underprepared to choose the right place, what they wanted to study, or how to finance college,” the report continues.
The Project SPARC team hopes that other universities will take part in similar research in the future. They currently use Instagram and other digital storytelling methods to create an online archive of their work that local communities can access easily. In the next year, the project hopes to publish their research, present at conferences, and hold screenings of short video documentaries about research participants in order to widen their audience.
