Students from ten local schools and community centers will visit the University of Notre Dame May 2 (Thursday) from 3 to 5 p.m. in the Stepan Center for a celebration of the Robinson Community Learning Center (RCLC) Take Ten violence prevention initiative.
Some 300 school children will attend the Take Ten Festival, which will include visits by Eric Crittenden of the South Bend Police Department, Superintendent Carol Schmidt of the South Bend Community School Corporation and a representative from the mayor’s office. The event will include games and activities, refreshments, distribution of T-shirts and performances by Notre Dame’s First Class Steppers and other campus musical groups.
Take Ten encourages young people to “Talk it out, Walk it out, and Wait it out” as a means to resolve conflicts peacefully. The program reaches some 8,000 children at 17 local schools, several public and private school districts beyond South Bend, the Center for the Homeless in South Bend, Boys and Girls Club sites across the state and other community locations. In the local area, the program is delivered through the more than 135 volunteers from Notre Dame and four other local colleges.
This year, Take Ten expanded to teaching lessons to parents and providing resources for adults.
On March 23, two members of Take Ten were part of a four-person panel that offered insights from the “Take Ten” as part of the screening and discussion of the film Bully, which traces the stories of young people who experienced that pattern of behavior and the profound impacts that can result from bullying. The screening was available for, students, faculty members and South Bend community members. The following discussion was focused on perspectives toward the movie and analysis of how the bullying problem should be addressed moving forward.
In addition, as part of Notre Dame’s CommUniversity Day, Take Ten was a featured at the Kroc Institute’s 2013 Notre Dame Student Peace Conference. The mission of the peace conference is to provide a venue for engagement in dialogue on important issues related to peacebuilding, global issues, and social justice. For this event, six members of the Take Ten team presented a chapter from the Take Ten Curriculum to graduate and undergraduate students from across the country.
The RCLC was started in 2001 as a community-driven education center sponsored by Notre Dame in collaboration with neighborhood residents and partners. The center offers a number of programs and activities sponsored by local agencies and organizations, including after school tutoring, a youth Shakespeare company, a youth entrepreneurship program, computer instruction and GED and English-as-a-new–language classes. For the first time, the Robinson Community Learning Center has AmeriCorps members serving in all programs as full-time, half-time, and minimum time commitments. Over 500 residents and volunteers participate each week in on-site RCLC programming, and as many as 300 Notre Dame students, faculty and staff volunteer with center programs.