FCL Sites Around the World: California

Piru, CA
Fillmore, CA
Tarzana, CA
FCL Alumni Club, Los Angeles, CA

Piru, CA

Have you ever attended a preschool graduation where parents brought vats of food, raised funds for caps and gowns, took incredible pride in their program and celebrated a year of learning, family festivals and service projects? Take a look at the farming community of Piru turnoff at a bend on Highway 126, in the Santa Clara Valley. This close-knit community had never successfully sustained a preschool until the FirstFive (early literacy) grant program challenged Full-Circle Learning to open a preschool in the county-owned Piru Community Center. The children now gather there to learn academics, the arts and social skills using the Habits of Helpers curriculum, with projects supervised by lead teacher/site coordinator Sugey Lopez.

These young children learn to associate learning with service from their earliest memory. They enter kindergarten ready to read, to think, problem solve and to interact with others in collaborative, compassionate ways. Teachers at the local school now recommend the program to parents.

Field trips can be simple and still effective. For example, a unit on friendship challenged students to prepare “letters” for friends nearby as well as in a partner country. They walked to the post office on a field trip to mail the letters.

Now the program quickly fills up each fall, and a waiting list often collects by midyear. In 2009, the graduation had to move to the grounds of the nearby church for lack of space. State grants are still lean, but the project has attracted attention as a successful FirstFive program and is one of the few still growing in a state where the recession has meant slashed budgets for many. Parent involvement now augments teachers’ efforts and helps the students in many ways. Children and parents and teachers all help to make the Piru Preschool thrive.

Fillmore, CA

Youth from age 2 to 18 strive to become “planters of peace” in their corner of the world and in the countries they touch through global projects. Rancho Sespe, a village of 100 agricultural families living near Fillmore California, has offered an annual Full-Circle Learning summer school and year-round enrichment classes since 2001. The summer portion of the project has been funded by the Mona Foundation since 2008. Nine participating teachers and volunteers escorted the children on journeys of the heart and mind in 2009. Highlights included field trips to a butterfly and animal research project at a university, a fish hatchery where students learned about careers in forest management, a nursing home where they honored seniors for preserving a safe, clean community, and a beach and nature preserve they not only cleaned but where they honored the ranger. They learned by teaching. They made exchange items for global partners, including a picture book about their own Rancho Sespe sacrifice legend for children in Molejon, Panama. Gorgonio Tobias, the quiet hero, wanted to capture this story through the universal language of art, while others made dioramas or plastic bag bird mobiles for park officials or solar cookers for Kenya.


Somehow, these details still do not capture the personal stories behind the summer school’s frenzy of activity. The students often thirst for immersion in principles that will ripple through their lives each day over the long hot summer and remind them to be strong throughout the year. The reason lies in the alternate choices they face outside their little hamlet.

A half mile away, just before the summer school began, 18 youth were stabbed at a birthday party where gang rivalries erupted. Two months prior, one of the gentlest youth in the summer school grieved the murder of his cousin due to gang violence.

Students in the Ambassadors’ class had the opportunity to examine the relationship between drinking, violence and empathizing with the whole human family instead of with just one group. They role played difficult choices that make it important to know and act on convictions when all the odds are against you. They learned to identify and stand up for their convictions. By the end of the summer, one girl spontaneously committed never to drink alcohol again. One boy learned to reach out to the least popular members of a peer group. Others decided to turn to lives of altruism as they reviewed new life goals. They acted on empathic convictions not only by pouring themselves into group causes, but by documenting their own metamorphosis from caterpillar to chrysalis to butterfly.

The parallels between enhancing the higher nature of the individual and preserving nature itself echoed through this summer of growth, with some students making lifelong commitments they could not have made without the influence of kind and caring role models who guided them through the process.

Beyond the room dividers, their younger brothers and sisters learned songs and read books and applied their zeal to creative integrated learning projects, to prepare to honor those they would visit and to plan for wise life choices and service to the human family. At the end of the summer, a parade to hang the birdhouses that invite cleaner air for songbirds and humans brought everyone together in the community’s backyard. Everyone contributed to make their village a better place and their world a little larger and their hearts more expansive.

Tarzana, CA

Students at Tarzana Elementary School speak 44 different languages. Some come as refugees from every corner of the globe. They settle in apartment buildings nearby, creating an economically challenged and diverse school community. The teacher in 2009 decided that unity would serve as an appropriate year-long theme.

Early in the year, students from Tarzana Elementary School’s Habits-of-Heart program visited a mock refugee camp sponsored by Doctors Without Borders. There, they learned empathy for students driven into camps because of conflict in their countries. They came to understand the resiliency needed by young people who must live in the camps, and they came to a new appreciation for the reason to resolve the conflicts that often create the need for refugee camps. Some students, immigrants themselves, shared their thoughts about the difficult adjustment to new life in a strange place.

The early field trip also prepared them to embark on year-long classroom and community advocacy work on the theme of unity. Many art projects and classroom activities helped them make connections between school, home and community. They applied intergenerational unity at a senior center as they sang and gave gifts of art to adopted grandparents. They also conducted a unity march at a local fast-food restaurant, where students normally gather after school, to sing, speak to other young people about the concepts on their posters, and to hang the posters they had made as gifts for the restaurant.

This proved a test of mettle for preadolescents to put self-consciousness aside and address peers at a local hangout. By the end of the day, they felt good that they had reminded people of all ethnicities and ages of the importance of reaching out and finding common bonds.

The annual anonymous parent survey showed that at least three of every four students felt an increased motivation to learn, a greater ability to work as a team and an increased desire to serve and help others. (One parent wrote that the improvement in this area was unbelievable and checked off improvements in every category of development—the arts, academics and character development.) New adventures in service await in 2010.

FCL Alumni Club, Los Angeles, CA

Organic growth is a hallmark of Full-Circle Learning projects. Children at the original Los Angeles project painted flowers on burned out buildings to restore healing to a riot-torn community. They talked about what it means to build community and the virtues that build inner strength and outer resiliency. Understanding the trauma some had experienced, their teachers served as patient midwives of transformation. By the end of the first decade, the students attending the program seemed lighthearted by comparison, for many had faced their challenges by leading lives of proactive service since their earliest recollection. They had conducted countless local and global service projects and practiced 56 habits-of-heart by the time they left primary school.

Through their projects and communications, these elementary-aged children had helped a young girl in Indonesia break the gender barrier so her whole village of girls could attend school. They had conducted water treatment campaigns, regularly cleaned beaches and visited adopted grandparents and made daily lunches for homeless children. They had honored relief organizations and journalists who write about hunger. They had offered the county blueprints to make recommendations for environmentally sound public spaces. They delivered a quilt and proclamation to the World Bank after 9-11. They learned teamwork at a horse camp and traveled overnight to Yosemite National Park to honor both the indigenous people and the officials who share a commitment to conservation. They made solar cookers for co-scientists in Kenya and wrote letters about their convictions that inspired a local movement in Senegal. They sent hundreds of comforting cards to Children’s Hospital patients as well as to children in the refugee camps of Kosovo. What would they do as graduates? Some would form an alumni club.

The Full-Circle Learning Alumni Club emerged because these students and their parents decided they did not want their journey together to end. As they scattered to become high achievers in various schools, they incorporated program goals into leadership retreats and service projects here and abroad. They helped found two charter schools in Los Angeles, so younger students could enjoy the benefits of integrated education, as they had. As future physicians, chemists, artists, teachers and leaders, each one testified, in their written proposals to travel abroad, of a plan for lifelong altruism that drives their hopes and dreams. Their own words, below, best describe these dreams:

My Desire to Serve: Young Douglas

I am age 15. I feel inspired to become a pharmaceutical chemist and create cures that are affordable for everyone for big diseases like cancer. The way drugs and health care cost, now people who are rich can survive while everyone else suffers. I will do my best to change this so that everyone can be treated. This is a goal of mine because I feel we are all one family, the family of the human race.

As a Full-Circle Learning Alumni my youth has been rooted in serving others and making the world an environment for everyone to enjoy. In the Full-Circle Learning program itself we would do projects and put on shows to display universal connectedness and give to our global community as well. As an Alumni member we get to put our own ideas in action and make things more personal. I have learned to be moral and have taught others to do the same as well. In the summer of 2008, I volunteered to teach the ways of Full-Circle Learning in Lesotho, Africa. My goal was to inform the children of the small village I was teaching at about academic studies, conflict resolution, humanitarianism, and leadership skills. These basic foundations, although taught within a month, resulted better than most acts of an average public school. [Young instigated this trip before enrolling in high school. He has attended private middle and high schools, on scholarship, while serving in the Alumni Club and on many other activities.]

My Desire to Serve: Kathy Rosales

My name is Kathy Rosales and I am a part of a program called the Full-Circle Learning Alumni Club. I am 15. I have been a part of this program for twelve years, which uses project-based learning to encourage capacity-based learning. My experience with serving and giving back includes various projects. I have raised and sent funds over to schools in Africa to help promote education and essential needs for their community. With the help of my colleagues, we have helped to create images that promote peace and harmony for the world. We have also put together works of art to encourage attention to the relationship between peacemaking and climate change. Our art was housed in the Nobel Peace Prize Center in Oslo Norway in the summer of 2008.

Dance sometimes motivates people to communicate and learn in ways that traditional learning cannot. In addition to my service, I have learned outside skills that have helped my leadership skills in a variety of ways. For example, I help to teach children different kinds of dance forms and styles. I have also begun to take college level classes that have helped enhance my academic skills.

The extent of my desire to serve is unimaginable, because I want to make a change in the world for the days that I am still here. There are other children that are unable to partake in the leisure activities that are available to me. By giving back, I will feel better about myself and about what I have done for the world. Helping others does not take away from my school activities and other hobbies. [Kathy was valedictorian at her middle school.]

My Desire to Serve: Enya Edwards

I am 15 years old and a member of the Human Family. I have been involved in many projects with my alumni group of Full Circle Learning. We have helped young kids in countries around the world such as Kenya , Panama, Java Indonesia, Lesotho and a few others and also in our local community. It is personally rewarding when I am able to change someone’s life in a positive way. Receiving a letter from a someone else saying that we’ve helped her to overcome a challenge, such as being the first girl to go to high school in her village or working towards being the first female doctor in her village makes me realize that what I’m doing is for a good cause. These are a few things that my alumni group and I have been able to accomplish in our many years of working as humanitarians.

Being a part of the Full Circle Learning alumni group has taught me to be aware of what’s going on around me and to appreciate and reach out a helping hand to everyone. I have also learned many different virtues that have helped me to be a better person, one being awareness. Through Full-Circle Learning I have become aware of what’s going around the world and ways that I can help less fortunate people. [In 2008, Enya went to Guyana , South America to “do more work as a humanitarian.”]

My Desire to Serve: Jade Romain

“I am only one, but I am one. I cannot do everything, but I can do something. And I will not let what I cannot do interfere with what I can do.”-Edward Everett Hale.

I strongly believe doing every bit of good I can to make a change that will benefit our world. I have a remarkable desire to serve our world. In my future I will become an anesthesiologist and join the Peace Corps.

The average American has about thirty years longer on this Earth than an African does. Being a young adult who is a humanitarian and wants to become a physician, I know it is my duty to help my peers have a positive frame of mind about any situation thrown at them and talk to them about how we can all keep our bodies healthy and keep our soul in good spirits.
I have a very long history with a non-profit organization, Full Circle Learning. I have been involved with them since I was in second grade and now I am a senior in high school. The teachers have taught children, as well as me, so many virtues that will stick with us for the rest of our lives. Humility and integrity have been my two favorite habits-of-heart since I was seven years old. [Jade, an honors student, volunteers at Cedars Sinai Medical Hospital on weekdays and has traveled abroad to serve each summer.]

My Desire to Serve: Douglas Rosales

My name is Douglas Rosales and I am 16 years old. I have helped the community and the world since the age of 9. I have helped open a school in the Los Angeles area. This school was set up to help children have leadership skills and help resolve conflicts. This school also helps with arts, music and being a better humanitarian to the world. I am involved in the Full-Circle Alumni, which helped open the school. We also helped send a project to Norway where we addressed the issue of global warming. We use many habits-of-hearts to be better humanitarians to the world and to discover ways to contribute for the greater oneness of the human race.
I am also involved in an engineering Saturday school. This helps elementary and middle school students further their quest of knowledge; so they can have more opportunities in the real world. I am also a tap dancer, piano player, drum player, and violinist. In my travels, I plan to make a good impression on all the people I come into contact with and show them a good American citizen who cares. I plan to be a person who they could come to and talk to about life and become more of problem solver and experience a giver. [Douglas, an honors student, has been involved in a number of extracurricular programs and has completed college-level courses.]

My Desire to Serve: Melissa Douglas

I am a Full-Circle Learning Alumni. I am currently eighteen years old and a new high school graduate. As part of the Full Circle Learning Alumni Club, I am an aspiring artist with hopes of helping to teach children in Ethiopia. There is a summer school that I wish to attend and experience next year. I have always enjoyed helping children learn and have enjoyed learning about new countries in return. I believe that this will be a rewarding experience for all of us. While it has occurred to me that Ethiopia is filled with ideas and cultural traditions that are strikingly different and contrast with those of America, I feel that the change will be something that I can come to recognize and accept. I do expect a number of challenges upon my arrival, but that does not stop me from wanting to make a change in the life of a child. [Melissa, currently a freshman at Otis School of Design, serves as a volunteer art and Japanese tutor at the Full-Circle Learning Academy middle school in Los Angeles. Her artwork has been used in a children’s book used in Latin America and the US.]

After an art project with incoming middle school students, the alumni talked about their long-term vision of one generation mentoring the next. They hoped that as other students graduate from their various schools, they too will form alumni clubs and sustain the lasting bonds that can enrich a community through group service and a passion for altruism.