Every autumn, BAPA’s Teen Service Corps comes back to life, and Beverly/Morgan Park starts building their next generation of neighbors. These teenagers, showing up for their first meeting and perhaps not quite sure what they signed up for, are the neighbors we’ll count on ten years from now. They will join a committee, organize a cleanup or step in wherever something needs doing. Our program exists to start a habit that lasts a lifetime. A number of years into the program, BAPA and our community are investing in the adults these teenagers will become.
The Beverly Area Planning Association’s Teen Service Corps asks young people in grades seven through 12 to commit to something larger than themselves before most of them can vote or hold a full-time job. The program itself is straightforward, built around monthly meetings, potential required service hours and guest speakers who show teenagers what civic life looks like up close. Our hope is the effect runs deeper than the structure suggests. Ask a parent or guardian whose child has gone through the program, and they will describe a teenager who started paying attention to their block, their school and their neighbors in a way that did not exist before.
This coming January, that idea grows up. BAPA plans to launch its first named Volunteer Corps in January 2027, an adult program built on the same foundation as the Teen Corps. I think it is a natural next step. For years, we’ve done an excellent job teaching young people to serve. In the coming years, I hope to provide a structured place for that instinct to land once childhood ends and adult life, with its competing obligations, begins.
Anyone who has spent time in community organizations has watched this happen. A teenager volunteers through high school, sometimes through college, and then life takes over with a job, a move, a family. The habit of showing up rarely disappears. It just loses its shape. People still want to give something back to the place they live. What is often missing is an easy way back in, a program that treats an adult’s time with the same intention the Teen Corps gave a 15-year-old’s first afternoon of volunteering.
BAPA’s Volunteer Corps is meant to be that entry point. It will follow some of the same structure that has made the Teen Corps work, with meetings, meaningful hours and a chance to hear from the people already doing this work in the community. What changes is who walks through the door. Instead of teenagers guided by families and teachers, it will be adults who choose, on their own, to make community involvement part of their year.
This idea grew out of watching what already works here. Beverly/Morgan Park has never lacked people willing to serve. The gap I am hoping to bridge sits between the version of civic responsibility taught to a 12-year-old and the version practiced by a 40-year-old with a mortgage and a full calendar. Good intentions alone rarely sustain a community. Structures make it possible for those intentions to become action, year after year.
The Teen Service Corps and the new Volunteer Corps might look like two separate programs for two separate age groups. I see them as one continuous idea, expressed twice, resting on the same premise: a neighborhood takes deliberate effort from people who decide to show up.
As the Volunteer Corps prepares to welcome its first class of adult members in January 2027, it is worth remembering where that instinct began. A teenager willing to give up a Saturday morning becomes, eventually, an adult willing to give up an evening or a weekend for the same reason. This community has been quietly teaching, and learning, that progression for years.
Civic engagement begins the same way it always has: by showing up. The Volunteer Corps will give that commitment a new path in January, but the chance to strengthen Beverly/Morgan Park starts today. Interested in helping build it? Email volunteer@bapa.org. I hope to see you out there.
Herb
