Augustino-Wilke, Bridgett, and Katherine Delgado. 2013. “The Volunteer State Community College, Student-Supported 2-1-1 Tennessee Project: An Ongoing Service-Learning Course Design for Sustaining a Statewide, Public Service Database.” A Collaboration of The Volunteer State Community College and Family & Children’s Service of Nashville. Supported by the United Way of Metropolitan Nashville.

Target Course(s):
Sociology, Social Problems Community Psychology, Human Services, Social Work, Research Methods, Program Evaluation, Web Design, Special Advocacy, or other social issues and database management-type courses.
Professor: Bridgett Augustino

Names of Community Partners:

Volunteer State Community College in support of 2-1-1 Tennessee that is collectively managed and operated by United Way of Metropolitan Nashville and Family & Children’s Service.

2-1-1 Tennessee Project description:

Over the past decade United Way’s social services referral line, also known as 2-1-1, has greatly expanded access to care across our nation, and in particular to this project, access to care for persons in the Middle and East Tennessee regions by investing in phone-based referral services. The 2-1-1 social services referral line is a free service that operates 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, providing instant access to thousands of resources statewide. 2-1-1 Information and Referral Specialists can quickly determine the needs of a caller and connect callers to available resources in the community such as food, housing, healthcare, employment assistance, legal help, and disaster aid with instant access to information on more than 5,700 social services and other community resources. More than 160,000 Tennesseans are helped each year with phone-based referral services in Middle and East Tennessee.

Information and Referral Specialists who are employed with 2-1-1 make possible for callers (of any income level, language, or cultural background) to find out about their community and social services. Furthermore, 2-1-1 improves lives in the communities served by discovering and reporting service gaps. Service gap information is shared with major funding agencies such as the United Way, government agencies including the Department of Health, the Department of Human Services, and the U.S. Department of Agriculture, collaborative agencies including the Area Agency on Aging and the U.S. Department of Urban Housing, legislators, social workers and community educators to raise awareness, encourage funding increases, provide advocacy, and reassure success of outreach efforts.

Student Prerequisites for course enrollment:

Required technology competencies include sending and receiving email, attaching documents, using browser software to access websites, downloading materials, online data entry (this is reviewed in class), and using basic features of word processing.

Student Learning Goal:

To bridge the gap between conceptual anchoring and critical thinking skills through faculty-coached and context-rich problem-solving methods. Students learn to diagnose and trouble-shoot problems encountered with the verification of public services using a rule-induction eligibility approach that links those services to community needs; skills-building with database management and data entry decisions through peer-mentoring relationships; strengthen interpersonal skills encountered as they solve dilemmas faced in interviewing non-profit and other state/local organizational representatives; setting and maintaining professional goals and deadlines; and recognizing the value in developing ethical and accountability characteristics useful in competing for jobs in their desired field. This process allows students to learn to solve problems that often do not have “right” answers and to begin thinking of/authenticating themselves as an employee in a career role rather than a student. Goals include measurable objectives aimed to describe, unambiguously the worth, merit, or value of the work accomplished by the student; the aim to improve the capacity of students to identify good work and to improve their self-evaluation and self-discrimination skills with respect to work submitted; to stimulate and encourage good work by students; to communicate the Professor’s judgment of the student’s progress (using a scaffolded process); to inform the teacher about what students have and haven’t learned; and to recognize outstanding students for rewards (i.e., student participation at professional conference presentations, shared journal authorship, formal employment referrals, internship placement, and/or continued educational scholarship

Elements of Service-Learning addressed:

Preparation
Student Voice
Diversity
Collaboration
Curriculum Integration/ Links to Standards
Service
Reflection
Assessment
Evaluation
Professional Development

What is the project’s over-all goal?

The goal of this project is to prepare students to collect qualitative public service profile data through telephone-based interviews with agencies and organizations in the State of Tennessee, data entry, and database management in support of the 2-1-1 Tennessee Project through the applied learning (critical thinking skills applied through process of acceptance, modification, and/or rejection) of college students. Students are allowed an opportunity to attain knowledge of the extensive systems of public resources available to people in their State who are experiencing a wide arc of social, psychological, and health problems. Through training, students can apply disciplinary knowledge to measurable skills-building and increased valuation of civic engagement attitudes that are useful to understanding and applying the subject of their academic course and garner much-needed workplace experience, while providing core support for a help-based initiative.

What student service activities does this project include?

Student service activities include the identification, verification, documentation, and reporting of incorrect data about community-based non-profit services and resources within Tennessee that are currently listed as “active” in the 2-1-1 database. Specific service tasks are aligned with the six major social problem categories of focus in the course (following an in-depth learning period regarding patterns of burden experienced by disadvantaged groups, and research methods, including ethics). These tasks are then individually assigned to students for them to identify, contact, verify and supplement new agency/organization public service listings detailing necessary service information for dissemination to the 160,000 annual 2-1-1 information and referral call requests for assistance or the 150,000 annual website visitors which consists of an 80% new visitor average each month.

Tasks range from identification of needed updates to the 5,700 listed public service profiles to data collection (using scripts), to verification of “active” services, data coding and data cleaning, to data entry following a formatted and accredited process of service verification that includes documented communication with service program staff and/or administration. Student service identification for making contact with program staff consists of conducting web-based searches for locating the services and contact information as well as identifying and adding newly implemented agencies that are eligible for inclusion in the 2-1-1 Tennessee database. Students are provided training for all tasks and assigned to work on tasks that are within their array of abilities.

What are the core curricular areas you have drawn learning objectives for the project from?

The components of the Service Learning Project will be completed through a series of six (6) critical thinking & problem solving assignments that are employed throughout the course of the semester. The six assignments are repetitive in task but focused on different areas of curricular content and are based on the overarching sets of social problems defined in particular text chapters. The assignments are meant to provide students with problems to solve such as the diagnosis of errors in service listings, trouble-shooting the updated profile data of the agencies using data inclusion rules, and facing dilemmas with gathering agency compliance for sharing the service profile data. Each student represents a precise geographic or organizational subset of Tennessee (county) in order to methodically sustain the integrity of the 2-1-1 Tennessee databank listings of services. In addition, the subsets of data needs (N=average of 50 service profiles per student, per course) are decided upon based on standards set by the Alliance of Information & Referral Systems and the statewide affiliate, TNAIRS. A conceptual understanding of the specific tasks associated with each assignment can be found in a Logic Model/Rubrics for Service Learning Project in Social Problems (Augustino, 2010), Step 4 (attached). Each social problem/assignment addressed has a 3-part set of questions to guide students in critically thinking about the problem. Individual students provide face-to-face end-of-term grade negotiation contracts with the Professor (attached). Student-generated data from tasks aimed at verification of updated service profile data are digitally submitted directly into the 2-1-1 Tennessee public website using tracked student accounts. The 2-1-1 Tennessee Project Administrator then accepts or rejects data entries upon submission and returns the rejected entries to students for further validation. Students who are assessed with capacity in database management and data entry (earning an A for the course), and who have interest in extended learning, are offered the opportunity to intern the following academic semester directly at the 2-1-1 and Crisis Call Center site for up to six (3) credit hours of coursework. Overall, the course is structured using best practices of problem-solving research that includes the opportunity for students to solve problems more independently in terms of decreasing faculty-coaching through the semester. These problems are authentic and challenging but have built-in ways of checking student progress to prevent attrition and include opportunities to solve issues and integrate those skills as habits.

Learning objectives of the course:

At the completion of this course students have successfully demonstrated the capacity to:

1. Articulate working definitions of various social problems
2. Identify systemic causes of various social problems
3. Describe how systemic causes play out at the local level
4. Reflect on the effects of various social problems on individual lives
5. Identify local actions and policies enacted to address various social problems in the State of Tennessee
6. Articulate how groups and individuals can benefit from specific initiatives, programs, strategies and policies designed to meet their targeted needs

Further, students can successfully:

7. Understand philanthropy, volunteerism, state and local government service systems, and nonprofit organizations and the role of these sectors in our society and economy;
8. Explore the relationships among government, business, and nonprofit organizations,
9. Identify trends, challenges, and opportunities in the nonprofit sector.
10. Learn how to effectively communicate both orally and in writing

Students are provided a rubric for attaining high achievement for their service to the 2-1-1 Tennessee Project with over half of their (60%) course grade derived from their cumulative submissions of documented work in support of the 2-1-1 Tennessee Project. The remaining 40% of the course grade is divided equally between a preparatory examination to assess student’s learned knowledge regarding Learning Objectives 1-4 (above) and understanding the intersectionality of race, gender, social class and sexual orientation as independent variables often associated with prevalence of social problems.

Replication and Dissemination:

This project and its intent to provide usable data for the 2-1-1 Tennessee callers could be greatly enhanced by training other faculty across the State of Tennessee – and other states, to implement the project in their geographic regions for quicker turn-a-round time for verification and annual updating such that callers may have immediate access for crisis and referral information. The cost-savings to this one area alone, multiplied by any additional student services across the nation, could save millions of dollars to non-profit funding systems. It is ideal that students may be taught curricular content while learning advantageous job skills while serving our nation’s population who call into the 2-1-1 systems with critical, immediate need.

How did you arrive at the community need(s) your project will address?

This course-based Service-Learning Project began as an initiative to provide students at Volunteer State Community College the knowledge, skills, and abilities to identify, qualify, and document local initiatives in our school’s twelve-county service area. Students in the first cohort were able to identify 1067 community-based government and non-profit public resources that provide services to people in that geographic area. The Professor, a non-native of Tennessee, became aware of 2-1-1 Tennessee and recognized the near identical products the separate projects developed. Soon after, a meeting with Family & Children’s Service yielded detailed information regarding the comparable difference to the data collection and documentation efforts of the student groups. This partnership meeting detected a number of methodological issues that existed within the 2-1-1 database (and other State 2-1-1 Initiatives) as well as a sorely underfunded budget and one full-time employee and two part-time employees who are responsible for the entire 5,700 annual data collection efforts to verify and sustain service listings. Thus, a need for having a mechanism in place to continually verify, report and sustain the integrity of the data in the 2-1-1 Tennessee database became apparent. Students in these courses are able to provide that service while learning and acquiring new skills useful to their future workplace orientation.

What service activities can students of various levels be involved in to help reach your project goal?

One of the major lessons learned in the early stages of development in this project included the need to identify differing tasks for students of varying experiences. Students can be well-matched to different needs. An appropriate level of care in selecting learning tasks for academically-placed students is critical. Expecting large groups of students to have homogeneity in skills and experience can be a major barrier. Identifying the multiple needs for a project’s tasks/roles to appropriate to student ability and interest is manageable, and less demanding of students who may be struggling in the course. Training, whether it is with the community college freshman or graduate students, must be provided.

How will the community recognize benefits gained from the student service activities?

Over 160,000 residents of Middle and East Tennessee called the 2-1-1 Tennessee information and referral system requesting services this past fiscal year. Historically, social and human service agencies and organizations change with the economy and many do not survive their funding period. Other resource services do not reach their target goals or benchmarks for service. Regardless, this changing climate has resulted in a dramatic change in the listed service profiles about what is and is not, available in our communities. Last semester alone, students updated more than 450 services – more than the allocated administrator/part-time resource specialists can update in a year.

2-1-1 Tennessee has documented that the number of needs per call has been increasing over the last several years. Information & Referral Specialists have substantially decreased the amount of time it takes to locate resources for each person in need; this has been attributed to the capacity of 2-1-1 Tennessee to provide faster connections to multiple types of services within one call. Sending call reports to community agencies and funders provides evidence of increased need for multiple services within households. Without the data collection and database management services provided by the students in these courses to continually verify and update the community service listings, callers-in-crisis may be referred to resources that are either no longer in service, have changed their eligibility requirements, moved locations, or be given resources that have changed telephone numbers or added informational and intake websites. This type of referral could result in lost hope for many callers in need, particularly callers in immediate or suicidal crisis. Too, without the addition of newly identified service profile resource listings into the database by students, callers may not find access to a resource desperately needed.

Did your project planning phase involve students in selecting the service(s) to be performed?

Yes. Students in each consecutive cohort (semester) are encouraged and highly rewarded for efforts to contribute to the learning of new methods of problem-solving to complete tasks. In fact, in Cohort III, students made the decision to slow the uptake of new services to the databank in order to properly verify, correct and edit data already listed. The proposal was made that adding new resources to the database would be counterproductive to the tasks of sorting (verification and editing) the errors in the databank. Thus, the 2-1-1 Tennessee Project Administrator is now able to generate service listings needing immediate update necessary for AIRS accreditation that also follows the academic curricular content to accomplish the overarching course goals. Too, this ability to generate such specific needs allows the assignment of non-caller assignment tasks for students of various learning experience. These self-elected students provide crucial assistance with data entry, coding, and tracking of data.

How do you manage reflection activities?

Reflection activities occur in informal and formal methods. Informal reflection activities are necessary to problem-solve barriers to task completion and are a part of every classroom discussion. We spend approximately the first 5-10 minutes per class period (after the training and beginning of implementation) critically thinking about how to solve specific issues that students meet. Frustration reported by students is received and guidance is provided as needed. Students have reported their thankfulness of not being the person-in-crisis when searching for resources that address specific social problems because of the difficulty in finding help. Students work through a scaffolded “best practice” model of decreasing supervision to plan and complete the assignments that will sustain a course-level, multi-class comprehensive effort to support the 2-1-1 Tennessee Project. Participation in the Service Learning process at VSCC uniformly requires students to complete the following forms that provide formal documentation and liability protection for the college, pre-post survey data for evaluating institutional efforts to meet Service-Learning student outcomes, and a Service-Learning Project Evaluation (c. Fall, 2011) aimed at continually enhancing and streamlining the work with ongoing contribution of best-practice methods of data collection specific to the needs of the Project, and include the following:
1. Student Needs Assessment
2. Guidelines for Students Involved in Service-Learning
3. Service Learning Project Application
4. Waiver of Liability (completed in class)
5. Pre-Service Survey
6. Time Log (completed in class)
7. Post-Service Survey
8. 2-1-1 Project-Specific Service-Learning Evaluation

A final critical assessment test/paper is due for the course that asks students to reflect on one set of resources for one particular social problem, identified in their assigned geographic region. This paper circles back to the learning objectives of the course by asking students to respond qualitatively, to the following questions:

1. Articulate a working definition of one of the various social problems we discussed during the course term.
2. Identify known systemic causes of that social problem in the county you researched.
3. Describe how those systemic causes play out in the county you researched.
4. Reflect on the effects of that social problem on individual lives in the area of service profile data you researched.
5. What local actions and policies are in place in to address the needs of people suffering that social problem in the county you researched?
6. Articulate how groups and individuals in that county can benefit from those specific initiatives, programs, strategies and policies in that county that have been designed to meet the targeted needs of those residents.

This reflection assignment requires a culmination of the class project experience in solving problems using a define-design-do-evaluate method to complete. Students are taught to evaluate their own individual papers using a rubric to define how well the student describes the problem, systemic causes and strategies available; the degree to which students integrate knowledge and concepts from the course text, lectures, and data gathering skills to identify resources appropriately targeted and matched to the needs of that community; the depth of the student evaluation of the agency/organizational resource available and verified for inclusion in the 2-1-1 Tennessee Project database; contributions to learning and best practices of data collection, and lastly, style and structure as put forth in the paper instructions.

Is the learning potential of participating students enhanced?

Results of the 2-1-1 Project-Specific Service-Learning Evaluation (2011-2013) summarily suggest:

1. Students report increasing their civic and personal accountability and responsibility values through the project work. (n=91%)
2. Students reported being better able to apply the academic content of this course to a real-world situation through service-learning (n=97%)
3. Students reportedly gained a better understanding of this academic topic through the service-learning experience (n=89.8%)
4. Students reportedly learned this academic content better because of the service-learning experience (n=84%)
5. The service-learning in the course reportedly helped students to gain knowledge and skills that will help them beyond this class (n=92.7%)
6. The service-learning in the course reportedly helped students to think about career and professional options (n=76.8%)
7. Students reported feeling they contributed personally to this project (n=91.3%)
8. Students reportedly felt that the project made a positive contribution to our community and community partner organizations (n= 100%)
9. Students reported they would recommend that service-learning continue to be incorporated into the course in the future (n=91.3%)
10. Students reported they would consider taking another service-learning class in the future (n=78.2%)

In addition, further performance measures included an eighty-four percent (n=84%) retention rate of students enrolled in these courses through five cohorts with an average final course grade point average of 3.7, highly rated competency scores of the approximately 209 student participants who have provided a minimum of thirty hours each, individually, (total of 6270 service hours) with data collected on over 1700 service listings (with an average data collection and data entry time of one-half hour, a conservative measurement) that translated into direct benefits to hundreds of thousands of Tennessee resident callers and website visitors needing information and referral services with a calculated cost-savings of $210,375.00 to United Way of Metropolitan Nashville and Family & Children’s Service during five academic semester terms the project has been implemented (this includes work by students submitted throughout two winter break periods when school was not in session).

Lessons Learned:

Perhaps due to the ailing economy, this partnership has allowed a window of opportunity in helping to see how collaborations such as this can serve to uphold financially strained departments within our own government institutions. Several opportunities have arisen that could provide students incredible service-learning that can also allow a sustainability of state or local initiatives that are downcast under budget cuts and decreased program funding. Examples include moving specialty call centers for human services marketing campaigns such as the annual Food Stamp Weekend Eligibility Campaign, or the Annual Tax Assistance Hotline to the campus setting and allowing student volunteers be trained in lieu of paid staff. The Tax Assistance Hotline could be an incredible experience for economics or other, similar degree-oriented students. There are many such prospects for our state schools to support our state and local governments and/or non-profits.