State Farm Intern Bryant Laiche talks about Service Learning
Bryant Laiche: Service Learning is a very great concept that State Farm believe a lot in, and it’s taking community service to another level. It’s doing service projects within your community, your school, but then taking those lessons and tying them back into the classroom. There are things like building a house for Habitat for Humanity and then coming back into your math class and learning about area and perimeter and then going to your social studies class and learning about how these types of social projects help the economy and society.
Bryant explains the WalkAbout
Bryant: I’ll give you a little background about the WalkAbout and State Farm kind of began as an idea. In the inaugural year of the State Farm Youth Advisory Board, we were given $5,000,000 to give out across the United States for Service Learning Initiatives. We, as an organization, sat down and we found organizations and projects that we wanted to fund but that just didn’t necessarily collectively equal $5,000,000, so we had some carryover money and that carryover money went toward this project called the Gulf Coast WalkAbout, which was a restoration effort and a Service Learning project across the Gulf Coast following Hurricane Katrina and Rita. We had sites in Texas, Louisiana and Mississippi that did the Gulf Coast WalkAbout Program. And what it was: elementary school students would go and literally walk about their community and see what needed to be changed. Whether it was a community center that needed to be cleaned up or a park that needed to be cleaned up, or if they saw there weren’t enough trash receptacles in their community, and people were just littering everywhere. They looked at these environmental issues and they looked on how to change them—through changing their environment. So once they did that, they would go back into their classroom and they would journal and they would write and they would work on their English skills that way and they would go in their science classes and learn about pollution planting plants and how that works with the environment. And so they were taking all of this service after a horrible natural disaster and turning it into a learning experience.
More on the WalkAbout
Bryant: State Farm hosted a celebration event for these students last summer in New Orleans. We had local media show up. We had local dignitaries. The students presented their experiences and what they got out of the WalkAbout, and then the teachers that worked with the program had an opportunity to share with everybody what they had gotten out of it.