The Worcester Education Collaborative launched the “Woo-Labs,” a network of community-based partners working to advance educational and racial equity within the City, this past summer with just five partners. Now, looking to the school year, Woo-Labs will be expanding and improving kids’ out-of-school experiences.

Woo-Labs was formed as a cultural response to biases and inequities within the City of Worcester. Funded by the Greater Worcester Community Foundation and the United Way of Central Massachusetts’ Worcester Together Fund, Woo-Labs provides high-quality, culturally responsive, project-based learning opportunities for youth.

“It’s really us building a network of education ecosystem providers across Worcester who are committed to students’ success,” Assistant Director Emily Dodge said. “It specifically focuses on disadvantaged students who have experienced persistent gaps and continue to experience persistent gaps in opportunity and achievement.”

The organization, which serves as the backbone to bring the partners together, believes in a learning ecosystem. Through Woo-Labs, the Worcester Education Collaborative is able to join forces with local cultural institutes, youth serving organizations, higher education, and the Worcester Public Schools.

While the work to create Woo-Labs has taken place for a few years, Dodge recognized the importance of the organization especially in 2021.

“The pandemic, as you can imagine, has really exposed the longstanding disparities, not just in education but really across the board that students are experiencing,” Dodge said. “It revealed the need for a coordinated system of local organizations across Worcester to say, ‘How can we come together to better serve our students?’”

Dodge said that students have had a tough past two years within their school lives. From having to work over Zoom to not being able to work side-by-side with other students and their teachers, students’ education has changed a lot.

“Students really have borne the brunt of the educational and academic disruptions from the pandemic,” Dodge said. “Now more than ever, we really need to be focusing on rebuilding and providing those opportunities for accelerating students’ skill development. School alone….can’t do that on their own.”

Dodge said that to better support the kindergarten through sixth grade students, the City of Worcester needs to look beyond the hours spent in school.

Woo-Labs hosts College Corps Fellows to support the implementation of project-based learning opportunities for kindergarten through sixth grade students. The out-of-school learning experiences promote students’ social emotional skills while still aligning with state curriculum standards through a common measurement framework through observation and surveys that ensures the students continue to improve.

Fellows are compensated to work in-person for about 20 hours a week directly at partner sites to execute their project-based programs with students. 

Throughout the summer, the first partners with Woo-Labs were the Boys and Girls Club of Worcester, African Community Education, Broad Meadow Brook Conservation Center and Wildlife Sanctuary, Girls Inc. of Worcester, and the YMCA of Central Massachusetts.

Dodge said that one of the College Corps Fellows, who worked at African Community Education designed, implemented a project-based opportunity for students to study a topic of their own interests and create as well as present their findings at an end of program event.

“He said that it was just an incredible experience to be able to support the students in engaging in a project that they were authentically leading the research of. It was really rooted in their own interests,” Dodge said.

African Community Education focuses on literacy programs with recent African immigrants and refugees. Dodge said that to be able to see students own their own projects and fully immerse in them, it is a special moment and also important to the students.

“To see the growth over time, for them to be able to develop that project and then proudly share it out with their community, he said it was very rewarding and the highlight of his summer,” Dodge said. “That’s really why we’re doing this work, and it drives our purpose in this.”

Programs differ at each location, and the participating organizations recruit students themselves. There is no set curriculum, according to Dodge.

“We think it’s so important to leverage the strengths that all of our programs bring to the table,” Dodge said. “Our role is to really provide personal development to strengthen those learning opportunities.”

Looking into the school year, Woo-Labs is partnering with Worcester Center for Crafts, Black Excellence Academy, the Latino Education Institute, Recreation Worcester, the YWCA, the YMCA, Main Idea, the Boys and Girls Club of Worcester, Girls Inc., Edward Street, the Southeast Asian Coalition, Technocopia Worcester, the Worcester Art Museum, Mass Audubon, African Community Education, The Research Bureau, Worcester Public Libraries, the Ecotarium, and YouthConnect.

“One of the strengths I think is the diversity of focus and students that they serve,” Dodge said. “While the overall goal is to enhance social-emotional skills, they each focus in on that in different ways.”

Dodge said that the students that work with Mass Audon are able to grow their love for nature, for example. Those at African Community Education though focus more on literacy and understanding.

“I’m happy to say we can’t really put to it one label,” Dodge said. “We’re really leveraging the different Worcester community programs.”

Not only does this program create more community awareness, Dodge said, but it also enhances students’ educational achievement while advocating for a better school environment within the classroom. The different organizations that partner with Woo-Labs are able to improve the students’ capacity within their education through this specific student-centered culturally-sensitive response.

“It’s going to amplify the learning that students experience inside the school day and really focus on both academic and social emotional skill building,” Dodge said. “Worcester has such a rich diversity in many senses that I think gives our community such a great basis to work off of and leverage with this work…Our students have so many needs in and out of the school day. We have so many assets to help meet those needs.”

The Worcester Education Collaborative is continuously looking for college students to serve as part-time Worcester College Corps Fellows. Candidates should email their cover letters and resumes to Dodge at edodge@wecollaborative.org.