During the Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program, students work in small groups to partner with organizations from around the world and put their positive psychology expertise to work. Each service learning project studies the organization's structure, mission, and goals and develops an actionable plan to make an immediate impact and advance the mission. The Learning Through Service series takes a closer look at the service learning project process–and what both students and clients learn from the experience.
“Our vision is that all youth have the opportunity to live their potential,” says Beverlee Wenzel, President and CEO of The ROCK Center for Youth Development - Discover YouTM in Midland, Michigan. The ROCK (an acronym for Reaching Our Community Kids) has been helping teens in Midland and across the state thrive since 2001. Their programming for middle and high school students, plus training for the adults who work with them, includes out-of-school time opportunities, summer camps, and Discover YouTM youth skill-building workshops. In 2017, when Bev saw a need to extend their services to address college readiness and success, she reached out to the Master of Applied Positive Psychology (MAPP) program at the University of Pennsylvania to partner with Penn graduate students on a service learning project.
The path to partnering with MAPP
Bev and The ROCK were already well acquainted with MAPP. “By the time 2017 and the college project came along,” says Bev, “we had several years of our own experience building assets in youth, and we had two years of experience partnering with MAPP service learning projects and getting our programming more grounded in positive psychology.”
The ROCK-MAPP relationship began, Bev explains, back in 2014, thanks to ROCK board member and MAPP alumna Kathy Snyder. “Kathy was new to the organization, and she asked me if I knew what positive psychology was.” While Bev wasn’t familiar with the scientific study of human flourishing, per se, Kathy assured her that the organization was already implementing many of its techniques in their approach to impacting youth. As Bev learned more, she saw it was true. “Positive psychology speaks to me because it’s a strength-based approach, which is what Discover YouTM was founded in before we actually ‘met’ positive psychology. And my personal approach to the world is to emphasize strengths and not deficits,” Bev realized. “Kathy and I started working more together, and then the logical next step was to apply to be a service learning project partner with MAPP.”
For the first project, in spring 2015, MAPP students helped The ROCK connect the science of positive psychology to their Discover YouTM training for adults, which teaches how to deliver their development and resilience programs to youth. The 2016 service learning project involved a positive alternative to school suspension programs, now called Mastering Skills.
This third project would challenge MAPP students to apply their research-based positive psychology lens to the new Designing Tomorrow college attainment program developed by Bev and make recommendations for adjustments and improvements.
Bev had been inspired to develop Designing Tomorrow while working with her Local College Access Network (LCAN), the community organization tasked with lowering barriers for Michigan high school students to enter college. “I'd go to the post-secondary attainment meetings and just get really frustrated,” she says. “We were seeing high attainment rates coming out of the gate, but then high dropout rates and low completion rates,” she explains, adding that this type of failure damages a young person’s sense of self-worth while also leaving them with financial debt and no value from the experience. “To me, it was obvious what the problem was.”
While LCAN was focusing on useful nuts and bolts aspects of getting into college, like how to plan campus visits and fill out federal student loan forms, Bev saw that there was no programming to help students manage the personal and social challenges to college success. She knew her organization could address this shortcoming. “My vision was to have a program through Discover YouTM to make sure students were well equipped for the post-secondary experience, which would improve completion rates.” After adapting existing Discover YouTM programs for college students, she brought her program to MAPP for assessment.
Bev was matched with MAPP students Jill Greenberg, Lauren Ogle, and Kerry Sanderson to work on the service learning project in the spring 2017 semester.
“The ROCK was a very early adopter in bringing positive psychology to education,” says Kerry, who had been working in education for nearly 20 years before starting her MAPP degree. “My service learning project team and I were excited to work with them because of the incredible and innovative work they were doing with high school students. The ROCK’s aspiration to expand this impact to first-year college students allowed us to build on a successful program with our own creativity and enthusiasm.”
A path to improve college completion
The MAPP team quickly confirmed the gap in existing college attainment preparation that Bev saw. “There was so much focus on academic success but very little on student well-being,” Kerry recalls. “We found that we had a lot of work to do to bring a positive impact to college students and embraced it as an incredible opportunity for learning and innovation.”
By the end of the project, the MAPP team produced a report called Leveraging Positive Psychology to Support First Year College Students: The ROCK Goes to College. Their research supported extending the Discover YouTM stress management and relationship-building workshops to college-bound and early college students. Additional recommendations included adding three evidence-based activities addressing belonging uncertainty, time management skills, and academic purpose—areas the research indicated were leading barriers to college success.
“The concept of belonging uncertainty and the psychological toll it can take on students, particularly new-to-college and first-generation students, stood out as a major challenge we needed to address,” Kerry recalls. The MAPP report detailed an activity to help students recognize and overcome belonging uncertainty, focusing on building supportive communities within the college environment, which is shown to enhance well-being, academic achievement, and long-term success.
“One of the most meaningful interventions we designed for The ROCK to me,” Kerry continues, “was an activity called Career Here, where students are guided through the process of creating a purpose-for-learning statement that connects their strengths, values, and aspirations to a community-oriented career goal. Students are not often asked to focus on anything other than salaries and market need in career goals, and it was such a beautiful experience to see how deeply students connected to a meaningful purpose.”
For Bev, the MAPP student deliverable, like the two service learning projects before, was top notch. “Working with the University of Pennsylvania’s Master of Applied Positive Psychology program as a service learning project partner has elevated our organization and given us credibility,” she declares. Bev is so confident in the value of the work produced by MAPP students that she even encourages other local organizations to partner with MAPP through her leadership role with Midland Area Wellbeing Coalition.
And the MAPP students themselves bring energy and dedication to projects that service-based organizations thrive on. “Working with the MAPP students has always been a joy,” Bev shares. “They're eager. They're excited. And you can tell they’re at a point in their lives where they're choosing to do this work. They're investing in it and they believe in it. One of the reasons I work in the world I work in is because of people like the MAPP students, who are trying really hard to make the world a better place and improve the human experience.”
As a seasoned education professional, Kerry has seen how her MAPP experience enhances her own commitment to service. “I work at a community college, and through the MAPP program, and specifically with this service learning project, I was able to do much of my homework in real life. I field tested a number of the interventions we designed in and outside of the classroom with my colleagues and faculty volunteers,” she remembers. Today, Kerry is senior project manager for well-being and engagement at Gateway Community College where she continues to apply her practical experiences from 2017. “We still use a version of the Career Here activity in the First Year Experience course in my college district, so thousands of students are benefiting from the ROCK project,” she shares. “The MAPP program is truly transformative, both personally and professionally, and the service learning project brought all of the theory to glorious life!”
MAPPing impact
Several years on from the service learning project recommendations—and after some delays due to funding complications and the COVID pandemic—Designing Tomorrow is taking off. “The program is gaining traction in the post-secondary arenas,” Bev says. “We have an orientation-style program at Saginaw Valley State University; We’re working with Delta College; We have several professors at Central Michigan University using the program; And we work with our LCAN to train all their advisors so that they can translate these concepts to youth,” she reports.
In its current form, Designing Tomorrow includes a robust coach training program with an accompanying coaching manual, now in its third edition, designed to teach educators how to run a Designing Tomorrow college success program for the youth they work with. "If a person wanted to partner with us to deliver this program to students in their schools or to young adults in their community, they would spend at least 12 hours with us in training: six hours to get the foundational concepts of how to actually foster resilience, and six hours to understand how this program is best delivered to youth,” Bev explains. The manual covers basic positive psychology concepts like character strengths, as well as the MAPP-student-recommended activities addressing belonging uncertainty, time management skills, and sense of purpose.
And, since the coaching program is available online, the scope of Designing Tomorrow can reach far beyond Michigan youth. “We have 250-some coaches trained in various Discover YouTM programs, and they are from far beyond Midland,” Bev stresses. “Our goal is every kid everywhere,” she says, imagining the potential impact, “and there's a lot of work to do out there.”
For more information on the Master of Applied Positive Psychology degree program and how MAPP students make a difference in the world with the science of well-being, please visit www.upenn.edu/mapp.
