YPI

The Youth and Philanthropy Initiative, also known as YPI, teaches secondary school students the fundamentals of philanthropy, and gives students the opportunity to play a direct role in making a financial grant to a local, grassroots social service organization in their own community.

The Youth and Philanthropy Initiative (YPI) was founded in 2002 through the Toskan Casale Foundation to offer grants to local social service charities while simultaneously helping to bring up the next generation of active and informed philanthropists. YPI combines in-class learning with real-world community development experience, giving high school students the tools they need for understanding and engaging in philanthropic activity. Through its resource-rich school programming, YPI enhances curriculum in order to build students’ presentation, research, writing, communication and consensus-building skills, while the students themselves increase advocacy for, and fund grants to, local charitable organizations.

YPI takes place in secondary schools in North America and the UK as part of a mandatory course, so that each student across the entire grade level/year is able to participate. Students begin their YPI experience by taking part in an introductory workshop, forming teams, and working together to identify the social issues that are prevalent in their own community. Once they have identified these social issues, students select one issue as their focus, and search for local grassroots charities that exist in their community to assist vulnerable members of the local population. Student teams select the charity they believe best addresses their chosen issue, and begin preliminary research around the charity, its mandate and its activities. Teams contact and visit their chosen charity, conducting interviews to help gain a greater understanding of what the charity does, how it operates, the impact it has and challenges it faces, and how it can be supported by young people and the larger community. Students then go on to develop a presentation that will advocate on behalf of their charity and demonstrate the impact a grant to that charity would have on the community. The presentations are delivered in the classroom, and finalists are chosen to go on to deliver their presentation to a larger audience and a panel of judges as part of the YPI Final Presentation Assembly. Here, the judging panel will select one winning group to receive a $5,000 (£3,000) grant for their chosen charity. Through YPI, charities receive important funding from the youth of their community, and students - acting as young philanthropists - become powerful agents of social change.

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