A City Year: On the Streets and in the Neighbourhoods with Twelve Young Community Volunteers / Edition 1

by Suzanne Goldsmith

Overview

In his inaugural address in 1993, President Clinton said: "I challenge a new generation of young Americans to a season of service to act on your idealism by helping troubled children, keeping company with those in need, reconnecting our torn communities." In the fall of 1990, Suzanne Goldsmith had signed on for her own "season of service" with City Year, the widely praised, Boston-based community service program frequently endorsed by political figures as a model for the nation. 'A City Year' is the story of Goldsmith's experience, an honest and gritty account of the triumphs and setbacks faced by an idealistic and experimental social program in its infancy. Together with a diverse team of young men and women--including a Burmese immigrant, a white prep-school graduate, a foster child, an ex-convict, and a black middle-class college student--Goldsmith helped renovate a building for the homeless, tutored school children, reclaimed a community garden from drug dealers, and organized a community street-cleaning day. The year Included backbreaking but gratifying work, the sense of family that comes from collaborative labor, and the potential strength of diversity. 'A City Year' is both the story of an uphill battle in urban America and an uplifting recipe for social change. As the AmeriCorps national service program dangles in the political wind on Capitol Hill, this book offers a true glimpse of what a "season of service" really means. It is a fascinating account for sociologists and all those with an interest in community service and youth.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9781560009078
Publisher:	Transaction Publishers
Publication date:	07/31/1997
Edition description:	New Edition
Pages:	306
Product dimensions:	6.00(w) x 9.00(h) x (d)

About the Author

Suzanne Goldsmith is a journalist and a former team leader in the New York City Volunteer Corps. She is currently director of the Community Service Project of the American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities in Washington, D.C.

Suzanne Goldsmith is a journalist and a former team leader in the New York City Volunteer Corps. She is currently director of the Community Service Project of the American Alliance for Rights and Responsibilities in Washington, D.C.

Table of Contents

Introduction to the Transaction Edition; ProIogue; Introduction; A City Year The Team; City Year: The Idea and the Prosram; The Garden; The Greenhouse; The School; Transition; Building; Cleanup; Ending; Epilogue

Editorial Reviews

"Suzanne Goldsmith gives us a minutely detailed record of a platoon of young men and women struggling through nine months of work in 1990-91 in a Boston youth service corps program, one of the best of the nearly 70 public service programs around the nation that served as models for the national plan. ... It is a tough, often moving, but ultimately painful and troubling story." —The New York Times Book Review

From the Publisher