PeerTakes
Students go back to their former schools and share lived experience with the students coming behind them. It's one way to contribute back to the communities that helped raise them. Not recruiting. Not selling.
Learn moreEducation & Workforce Development Leaders
Help More Young People Stay Connected to the Community That Helped Raise Them
Students don't have to move home to stay connected. Their hometown can remain part of their professional Practice Field while they're away at college.
Students can stay in relationship with local leaders, help younger students, learn about community needs, contribute from a distance, and take on increasingly meaningful responsibility when the fit is right.
When that contribution becomes substantive work, students can capture what they actually did while the community stays connected to talent it helped develop.
Out of sight isn't out of reach.
Why This Matters
Communities often lose touch with young people just as they start building experience.
Students leave for college at exactly the moment they start building experience, relationships, and a professional story. That growth happens somewhere else, with other people, and the hometown connection quietly fades.
Waiting until graduation can mean trying to rebuild a community connection that has had years to weaken.
Community connection can start long before graduation.
A student's professional network doesn't have to develop entirely away from home just because college does. Communities can remain part of students' development through:
- Relationships with local leaders
- Hometown alumni
- Former teachers and schools
- Community organizations
- Local businesses
- Civic organizations
- Nonprofits
- Community foundations
- Service
- Mentoring
- Community contribution
- Real local needs students may be able to help address
Education & Workforce Development Leaders include
- Chamber executives
- Workforce leaders
- Economic development leaders
- Community foundations
- Alumni leaders
- School district alumni programs
- Civic coalitions
- Mayors
- Community ambassadors
How a Community Can Become Part of the Practice Field
Students may begin with simple ways to reconnect or stay connected:
- Reaching back out to someone in the community
- Introducing themselves to a local leader
- Asking questions
- Learning what's happening at home
- Participating in a hometown conversation
- Helping a younger student
- Participating in PeerTakes
- Offering help
- Maintaining a relationship
- Joining an appropriate community activity from a distance
Students who are ready can increase the stakes through:
- Mentoring
- Stakeholder outreach
- Collaboration
- Community contribution
- Helping coordinate an initiative
- Working on a real local need
- Leading or contributing to substantive work
Students start where they need to. Staying connected doesn't require every student to take on a hometown project.
When the work is real, capture it and make it visible.
The Practice Field provides the broader environment. Hometown relationships, PeerTakes, local stakeholders, and appropriate community needs can become part of that environment when students choose to engage.
Over time, meaningful work can contribute to Experience, Proof, Relationships, and Visibility. A student's home community can be one place that meaningful work happens.
Three Ways Communities Can Participate
1. Keep the Connection Alive
Give students appropriate ways to remain connected to people and organizations in the community while they're away. This might include:
- Introductions
- Conversations
- Alumni connections
- Former schools
- Community events
- Local leaders
- Professional questions
- Invitations to appropriate community activities
The goal is continued relationship, not recruitment pressure.
2. Give Young People Real Ways to Contribute From Wherever They Are
Students don't necessarily need to return physically to contribute. Appropriate opportunities might include:
- PeerTakes
- Helping younger students
- Research
- Outreach
- Resource development
- Stakeholder conversations
- Remote collaboration
- Community projects
- Sharing knowledge or experience
- Helping with a genuine local need
The need should be real. The contribution should be real. The student should choose whether to participate.
3. Create Pathways to Increasing Responsibility
Some students may begin with one conversation. Others may eventually:
- Mentor
- Facilitate
- Coordinate
- Collaborate with community organizations
- Work with stakeholders
- Lead part of an initiative
- Contribute to substantive local work
The Practice Field allows students to increase the stakes as they're ready.
How Communities Stay Connected
Ambassadors
A local connector can help make introductions, surface appropriate opportunities, and keep communication moving where the model calls for it.
Learn moreChapters
As participation develops, communities may choose to organize around a hometown, school district, alumni network, or region.
Communities can also organize through College Town, one Academy implementation model. It's one way to organize, not a requirement.
Staying Connected Isn't Only About Bringing Talent Back
A student can create value for the community while living somewhere else. Students may:
- Support younger students
- Share knowledge
- Contribute remotely
- Connect people
- Help organizations
- Make introductions
- Participate in local conversations
- Maintain professional relationships
- Bring outside learning and experience back into community work
A student's relationship with home can remain active even when the student's address changes.
What We Would Want to Learn
Useful early questions could include:
- Will students voluntarily stay connected with hometown leaders while away?
- What prompts students to participate?
- What makes students return to those relationships?
- Which kinds of hometown connections feel useful to students?
- Which don't?
- Do students contribute remotely?
- Does PeerTakes create repeat hometown engagement?
- Which local leaders and organizations respond to students?
- What community needs appear appropriate for student contribution?
- Do students gradually take on greater responsibility?
- Can students identify people in their hometown who genuinely know their work?
- Which students want hometown engagement and which don't?
- Does hometown engagement continue after graduation?
- What forms of contribution create enough mutual value to continue?
- When substantive work occurs, what can be appropriately documented?
We shouldn't define success only by whether a student moves home.
Connection, contribution, and continued relationship are valuable questions to examine in their own right.
Start With One Connection
Introduce one student to one person, organization, conversation, or community need that genuinely fits.
Other possible starting points
- Invite one student to an appropriate community or professional gathering.
- Host one PeerTakes conversation.
- Connect one student to one real local need.
- Introduce one student to a community organization or local leader.
- Explore one Ambassador connection where appropriate.
Start small. Learn what students and communities actually use. Expand what proves valuable.
Have a project or need students could help with? See Community Partners.