Extension Highlights

Boston 4-H Clubs Get Insider's Tour of UMass Amherst

Looking west from Dorchester or Roxbury, you can’t exactly see the towering high-rise dormitories of UMass Amherst’s Southwest Residential Area.

For 32 teens affiliated with UMass Extension’s 4-H youth programs in Boston, however, the road to the Amherst campus seemed a little shorter after spending a day recently with UMass student volunteers on campus.

From the Malcolm X Cultural Center to the Isenberg School of Management, the whirlwind spring-break tour was part of a 4-H initiative focusing on workforce preparedness for urban youth and funded by a five-year grant from the USDA’s Children, Youth and Families at Risk (CYFAR) program.

The trip’s aim was to give the youngsters a wide-ranging, if brief, glimpse into college life and to "help motivate them about higher education," according to Julia Grimaldi, who coordinated the CYFAR program with 4-H clubs in Boston and joined the students on their journey west. The campus visit, along with tutoring for SATs, is the college awareness component of the program that has paid inner-city high school students to learn workplace and leadership skills by working in local organizations and businesses, neighborhood community centers and YMCAs.

"These are real jobs for them," says Karen Barshefsky, project director for the CYFAR grant. "They have responsibilities and duties and it's better for their résumé than a typical part-time job that a teen might be able to get.”

Several members from Student Bridges, a one-year-old organization of about 60 UMass student volunteers who tutor and mentor youth in Holyoke and Springfield, led the group on a meandering trip through campus.

Beginning in Southwest, called the "urban" section of campus with its high-rise dorms and dense population by guide Sam Levy, they visited the Malcolm X and Latin American cultural centers, the Hampden dining commons and Levy's tiny dorm room. On to the main campus, they stopped in at a classroom in the Isenberg School of Management, ate lunch at the Hatch, visited the studios of WMUA and UVC-TV where they made their own recordings, and created buttons in the Student Union Crafts Center before boarding the bus home.

Clevanne Julce, a junior at the John D. O'Brien School in Roxbury and a member of the Castle Square Tenants Organization 4-H club, was on her first trip to UMass.

"It's big," she said. "It's like a town." But Julce, who says she wants to be a pediatrician, was impressed by the myriad of activities available to students, especially minorities.

Najauna Muschetta of Dorchester hopes to study management and business administration as a freshman next year and has been accepted at UMass. Although she hasn't decided where she will attend college yet, she was also impressed by the diversity of campus programs and activities.

"I really liked seeing the Malcolm X Center," she said after hearing the center's director Doris Clemons outline its mentoring program, and she agreed that kind of resource would make the transition to college life easier and less stressful.

Muschetta is a member of the Robert F. Kennedy Children's Action Corps' Youth Leadership Program for Girls (YLPG), one of the programs that 4-H partners with in Boston. She said her experience in YLPG has encouraged her to think more broadly about her future.

According to Barshefsky, that is the very goal of 4-H's work in communities across the state: to give youth a larger outlook and to help make modest goals like a college education and effective workplace skills within reach.

"This was more than just a nice trip out to see some farmland," Barshefsky said. "We wanted them to see what college life is like and to connect UMass Amherst with these young people in Boston."

Barshefsky has been project director for two consecutive CYFAR grants awarded to the UMass Extension 4-H program, which targets an urban neighborhood as well as a western Massachusetts community. The most recent funding, which ended this spring, also helped improve workforce skills for teens on probation in North Adams.