National Youth Leadership Council

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

The National Youth Leadership Council, or NYLC, is a national nonprofit organization that promotes service-learning in schools and communities across the United States. Founded in 1983, NYLC is led by Dr. James Kielsmeier, and is the host of the annual National Service Learning Conference.

NYLC's mission is to: "Build vital, just communities with young people through service-learning." NYLC has led the primary national training activity for service-learning on contract with the Corporation for National Service since 1993, which currently operates as a network of five Regional Centers and 400 peer mentors.

Since 1989 NYLC has sponsored the annual National Service Learning Conference, drawing 3000 participants per year representing every state and several countries. NYLC led a student news team to the Presidents' Summit in 1997 and cosponsored the subsequent 2000 National Youth Summit in Orlando. NYLC programs have included partnerships with schools, colleges, major corporations, government, faith-based organizations and other nonprofits.

NYLC publishes an annual research publication, Growing to Greatness that seeks to document the scope, scale, and impacts of service-learning. Five full editions are now in print, published every year since 2004. Each edition features a series of topical research articles from leading scholars in the field as well as qualitative profiles of several U.S. states and territories and, increasingly, state-by-state data on service-learning and positive youth contributions.

In 2008, NYLC released the K-12 Service-Learning Standards for Quality Practice that detail the eight standards of quality service-learning, with three to five accompanying indicators for each standard. The standards are the result of a national review process that began with research from teh field and vetted the previously-published Essential Elements of Service-Learning through a series of reactor panels to arrive at the final document.