Five Questions With: Ashley Belanger

Ashley Belanger, executive director of the Rhode Island Urban Debate League, first came to the nonprofit as an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer in 2008 with the Rhode Island Campus Compact and Brown University.
Following her term of service in 2009, she worked for the league as senior program consultant. When the league incorporated in 2010, she became the organization’s first executive director. The league works to empower students as they engage in policy debate programs to improve academic performance and college readiness. Here, Belanger discusses the league’s growth strategies.

PBN: What attracted you to the position of executive director four years ago and how do you feel you are making a difference?
BELANGER:
As an AmeriCorps VISTA volunteer in 2008, having never seen a policy debate round, I was convinced by April of that year that there was no activity that could better prepare a young person for virtually anything they might want to do.
After my year of service, I was given the opportunity to stick around as a consultant. And when the organization incorporated as an independent nonprofit in August 2010, it didn’t even feel like a choice: I had drunk the urban debate Kool-Aid and I couldn’t get enough.
Here’s how I know this work makes a difference: Take Alejandro. He comes from a low-income family. He’s acutely aware of how cycles of poverty work. Growing up, he saw others try to break the cycle through what he calls “street intelligence” – that is, selling drugs, assault, harassment, and theft. Not through education. And definitely not through academic debate.
Statistically, Alejandro wasn’t supposed to succeed. The odds were stacked against him.
Today, he’s a Brown University freshman and a volunteer debate coach with the league. He credits debate for keeping him on the right path when he was about to choose another road. His way of saying thank you is to pay it forward.
Alejandro is just one of the many amazing young people I have the honor and privilege of working with. More and more often, our graduates are coming back as college student volunteers. They don’t want their league experience to end after high school. And they want to pass it on to the next generation.

PBN: How many students do you serve and do you track their progress beyond high school? If so, how?
BELANGER
: Last year, we served more than 150 students from 14 high schools.
For the past two years, we have begun collecting information that will ultimately allow us to track students’ college matriculation and graduation rates through the National Student Clearinghouse.
A recent study using 10 years of data from our sister Urban Debate League in Chicago shows that 86 percent of urban debaters enrolled in college and that those who did were 80 percent more likely to graduate than their nondebating peers.
Given the kinds of college readiness skills – critical thinking, critical reading, writing, research, analysis, and perseverance – students develop through debate, this is not surprising.
Here in Rhode Island we are working to build the infrastructure that will allow us to conduct similar research at the local level. Thanks to our partnership with the National Association for Urban Debate Leagues, we will have access to the National Student Clearinghouse database – a resource not available to most small nonprofits due to its high cost.
We also are working with our partners at the Providence After School Alliance to define and measure some of the soft skills students develop through debate. More and more, research is showing that academic indicators are not the best predictors of future success and personal fulfillment, and that things like grit, optimism, and empathy play a critical role in long term outcomes.

PBN: Tell us about one of your standout successes.
BELANGER:
If you don’t already know Genesis, you will soon enough.
Right now, she’s on track to pursue her dream as a criminal prosecutor. But I won’t be surprised when the Genesis-for-Governor signs start popping up around 2042. She can pretty much count on my vote, too.
Genesis didn’t speak a word of English when she got on a plane to Providence eight years ago. She and her mom moved here from the Dominican Republic for better opportunities. And after losing her father to violence as a child, Genesis set her sights on becoming a criminal prosecutor. That’s why she joined the league – she knew it would be great preparation.
Genesis debated all four years of high school. She earned academic credit for debate, represented Rhode Island at two consecutive Urban Debate National Championships, thrived in her advanced placement English class, and graduated seventh in her class at the Juanita Sanchez Educational Complex in Providence.
And although most people start their legal careers after earning a juris doctorate, that’s just not Genesis’ style. She started hers two weeks after high school graduation. When a prominent local attorney sat in on one of her debates senior year and heard about her future aspirations, he hired her.
She’s now in her second year at Rhode Island College and she’s a double major in Justice Studies and Political Science. She sits in the front row in all her classes and makes sure her professors know her by name. Within her first month at RIC, she was invited to meet with the vice president of academic affairs and with the president of the college.
In addition to carrying a rigorous course load, Genesis continues to work part-time as a paralegal and also as a supervisor at a movie theater.
And although Genesis has a lot to juggle, she always makes time to volunteer with the league. She considers it a second family, and like Alejandro, she wants to pay it forward.

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PBN: The National Association for Urban Debate Leagues had 7,300 students competing in debate leagues in 2012-13. How many of those were Rhode Islanders and what are you doing to increase the count in this state this year?
BELANGER:
In 2012-13, about 154 of those students were Rhode Islanders.
This year, 2014-15, we’re “shrinking to grow.”
In the world of nonprofits, there’s lots of talk about scalability, growth, expansion. Obviously when you find something that works, an education model that produces results, you want to make it available to more students. But I think we often sacrifice quality for scale.
If the league strictly cared about numbers, our work would be much easier. But that’s not why we’re in it. It’s certainly not why I’ve stuck around for six years.
We’ve learned a lot about what doesn’t work. And along the way, we’ve learned about some of the things that do work. Setting high expectations of our students. Finding amazing teacher-coaches at our partner schools. Spending time and energy to train and support undergraduate volunteers. Asking high school students to do things many people don’t think they can do. Giving them opportunities to fail. Giving them opportunities to try again and prove everyone (including themselves) wrong. Being intentional about building community.
In 2014-15, we’ve begun radically shifting our program model. We’re calling it the RIUDL (pronounced “riddle”) Revolution.
Working with a small group of our most dedicated teacher-coaches, we have developed specific educational goals. We are asking ourselves about pedagogy, process, and partners: How do we guide a student from cursory understanding to creativity, synthesis and original thought? How do we train teacher-coaches and volunteers? How do we make learning exciting? How do we evaluate our work and adapt our process? Who are we serving and why?
Imagine if every student in the RIUDL were debating about something that mattered to them, something they could really stand behind. Imagine if they understood how federal policy changes would impact their own lives and communities. Imagine if they saw themselves as advocates, activist, and change-makers…
So I guess the short answer to your question is we’re not trying to increase participation. First, we want to get it right. So the RIUDL Revolution will start small.

PBN: How do the summer camps and Summer Institute bridge activity outside the academic year?
BELANGER:
There’s a lot of research out there that shows the detrimental effects of summer learning loss, particularly on the populations we’re serving. Our Summer Institute is certainly not going to resolve the complex issues leading to educational disparities. But in attempt to mitigate a few of them, we’ll keep offering it.
The Summer Institute is a two-week intensive summer debate camp. It’s mostly run by college students and volunteers, many of whom are graduates of our program.
High school participants have an opportunity to get a jump start on the years’ debate topic, brush up their speaking skills, learn to do research in Brown University’s library, and learn about the college application process, among other things. But it’s not strictly about debate.
Evidenced in part by the number of debaters we have returning after graduation to work at the Institute, we know we’re also building a supportive community. When the debate season officially begins in September, we see that students from different schools who met over the summer are still hanging out. They’re prepping together before tournaments, coming to extra practices together on Fridays at Brown, and sometimes even debating together throughout the season.
For the past few years, we’ve had about 30 students attend the Summer Institute. Each year we try to figure out how to increase participation, but it’s tricky. Many of our students really want to come to the camp, even register and intend to come. But the reality for many of them is that they need to work, or they need to care for siblings, or transportation is impossible.
So we’re thinking creatively about how we might do things differently in the future to make it accessible to more of our students. And we’re thinking about how we might team up with other youth-serving organizations with similar values to make something even more impactful.
In the spirit of the RIUDL Revolution, I think you’ll see something really exciting in summer 2015.

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