About us

The International Youth Research Network (IYRN) consists of undergraduates at Brown University and Mount Holyoke College who have a central interest in young people's involvement in social entrepreneurial community organizations around the world. All members of this interdisciplinary team bring their particular disciplines or areas of study to bear on some aspect of informal learning, community development, and youth leadership. Issues, questions, and theories related to these topics focus their overseas and domestic study, volunteer work, research interests, and publications. Recent graduates continue their roles in building and sustaining social entrepreneurships and their participation with the Research Network.

Prior to 2008-2009, the IYRN studied youth-based organizations dedicated to environmental sciences, the arts, and sustainable design through ethnographic and quantitative methods. These reports included surveys of alumni of these organizations to identify specific skills, attributes, and academic and career aspirations that correlated with the amount of time spent in the youth group and the number of organizational roles undertaken there.

Currently under review for a special issue on social entrepreneurship of the journal Entrepreneurship Theory and Practice is an article (provided here as a pdf) reporting the work of IYRN and providing two case studies of young entrepreneurs currently working to ensure that financial, legal, and marketing plans sustain their ventures.

The IYRN expects to have the manuscript of a book ready to go to press before the end of 2009. Tentatively titled On Our Own Time: How Voluntary Learning Sustains Democracy, the volume examines what many call "informal learning." Research by the IYRN focuses on the process and valuation of voluntary learning pursuits by individuals across the life span who choose on their own to become expert in the skills and knowledge related to a highly specific topic or activity. Young social entrepreneurs' experiences working in communities and developing new enterprises represent one of the kinds of voluntary expertise pursuit explored in this forthcoming book.

In 2008-2009, the focus of the Network is also on organizing and hosting two Seminar Retreats on Sustaining Social Entrepreneurship, both held at Brown University. These seminar retreats bring together young social entrepreneurs working in the fields of health, environment, and education to explore key issues of enterprise and organizational sustainability and to create networks between young social entrepreneurs for support, critique, and strategy. The IYRN records the proceedings of these seminar retreats as grounding for further development of the field.

Senior members

Sarah Keeping ('09, Mount Holyoke College) has worked with the International Youth Research Network for two years, primarily through her role as observer-participant at Artists For Humanity in Boston, MA. As an environmental studies major at Mount Holyoke College, she brings a scientific eye to the question of connections between art and science in informal learning. Her lifetime study of ballet further informs observations of how these two disciplines intersect. She is additionally earning degrees in French and African studies. She has traveled internationally, studying for a year in southern France and doing a tour of microfinance work in Senegal. She is an avid supporter of nonprofit organizations and has enjoyed studying in depth the learning into which they bring young people from under-resourced communities.

Molly Mills ('10, Brown University) pursues her interest in community learning now at Brown with a double-concentration in Sociology and American Civilization. Her travels and experiences with Spanish-speaking immigrants in Northern California motivate her current research that examines the links among migration, dialogue, self-identity, and entrepreneurship. In the summers of 2007 and 2008, she carried out an oral-history interviewing project in Northern California with young immigrant women (primarily from Latin America), in collaboration with a local organization called Listening for a Change that collects and archives the stories of people of all ages in rural northern California. This work, the foundation for her senior thesis, examines the way that young people in a new environment navigate issues of identity and decision-making through discourse. Molly began work with the International Youth Research Network (IYRN) in the fall of 2006 and contributed segments to the recently published volume On Ethnography (Heath & Street, with Molly Mills, 2008). During 2007, Molly worked with Community Music Works, a Providence, Rhode Island music organization, on an organizational evaluation. She is also currently at work on On Our Own Time: How Voluntary Learning Sustains Democracy, a volume being written and edited by the IYRN team.

Roxanne Paredes ('09, Brown University) is pursuing a double major in English and Comparative Literature with a focus on French Studies. As creative writer and lover of literature, she relishes also feeding her fascination with all technologies and her faith that good evaluation can be both statistically rigorous and pleasurable reading. Her involvement with the International Youth Research Network (IYRN) began in 2006 in a long-term research project with The Food Project, a non-profit youth-focused organization that runs a community farm in inner-city Boston, MA and the suburban community of Lincoln, MA. In 2007, she continued her research interests by becoming part of a long-term study of Artists for Humanity, a non-profit youth arts organization also located in Boston, MA. Using these organizations as models, in the summer of 2007, Roxanne returned to her hometown in Manila, Philippines and looked at youth arts organizations and the role that arts-ranging from theater arts to music to visual arts-were playing in this very different setting. What difference could the arts and arts organizations make to the lives of individual young people in a huge sprawling urban center with so many priorities very distant from concerns about local youth? She is currently writing a thesis on Virginia Woolf.

Daniel Sobol ('09, Brown University) works with his study of anthropology and science in his concentration in Performance Studies. He focuses his research primarily on informal learning through interplays between the performing arts and the sciences, whether in natural history museums, studies of the human genome project, or explorations of aging. His research has led him from the noisy halls of the American Museum of Natural History in New York City to the sweaty ballet and acting studios of the Moscow Art Theatre School in Russia. In the summer of 2008, Daniel traveled for his research on embodied learning in the sciences and the arts to Ireland, New Haven, and Washington D.C. with the Liz Lerman Dance Exchange, a dance company that devotes itself to creating dances with a myriad of communities, dancers and non-dancers. Daniel also traveled to Mali with Brown's New Works/World Traditions Dance Company to collaborate with local artists to develop and tour a performance about malaria education and prevention. As much performer as researcher and scholar, Daniel has directed and performed in numerous plays and dance performances at Brown University and throughout New England and Europe. Daniel is currently coauthoring On Our Own Time: How Voluntary Learning Sustains Democracy, with the other members of the IYRN.

Caitie Whelan ('07.5, Brown University), an anthropologist and educator, as well as a 2007 Truman Scholar, is a social entrepreneur who began community education development in 2004 with the Merasi, a population of socially marginalized lower caste musicians in Jaisalmer District, Rajasthan, India. Various projects culminated in The Merasi School, a community-based arts/education school in Jaisalmer, Rajasthan that she co-founded with Merasi leader Sarwar Khan. In the spring of 2008, she co-directed the Hearts with Hope 2 Tour, a two and a half month cultural exchange tour of seven Merasi musicians to fifty venues along the East Coast, including the Kennedy Center's Millennium Stage, Joe's Pub at The Public Theater, Brown University, and twenty-five public and private schools. She currently divides her time between the US and India, working to help local community members grow The Merasi School into a fully community-sustained entity.

Meeghan Zahorsky ('09, Brown University) ) is concentrating in International Relations with a focus on global security as it pertains to conflict resolution and economic development in the third world. In the fall of 2005, she began working with Professor Shirley Brice Heath to establish the IYRN in conjunction with carrying out research on the Food Project in Boston. Meeghan continued her research on youth organizations during the summer of 2008 at Artist For Humanity, a non-profit organization that strives to empower underserved youth by employing them in the arts. Her research focused on the connections between artistic development and informal learning in math and science, as well as, assisting AFH in self-evaluation in the anticipation of replication projects. She is also currently working on incorporating her research findings into the volume on Informal Learning: Youth in Science, Art, and Democratic Talk edited by the IYRN team. Beyond her academic interests, her passion for writing and desire to educate others on the Darfur conflict inspired her to co-author a novel that explores the crisis (currently pending publication). She strongly believes in the wisdom of Gandhi's motto - You must be the change you want to see in the world - and strives to do just that.

Associate members:

Rebekah (Bekah) Bergman ('11)
Rebecca Sigel ('11)

Faculty director:

Shirley Brice Heath
A linguistic anthropologist, Heath has carried out long-term research, published, and created documentary films with and about young people at work in their communities. A central focus of her teaching and research has been social entrepreneurial projects of young people in communities under stress and with few resources. She has worked in South African townships, Guatemalan and Mexican villages, former mining towns in England, and small towns in Sweden. Her publications also report long-term research in community organizations located in rural areas, mid-sized towns, and urban areas of the United States.
From 1980 until 2001, she taught at Stanford University where she helped start the Social Innovation Center at Stanford's Graduate School of Business in the late 1990s. In this effort, she worked with Greg Dees, a key founding figure in social entrepreneurship, to develop and teach courses in Social Entrepreneurship in the Public Policy Program. Stanford's Graduate School of Business and other business schools across the country use cases she developed on youth social entrepreneurial work. Publications and documentary films by Heath can be found on her website.

Collaborative research and publications with young people have been key features of Heath's work. Publications with secondary students as well as undergraduates include the following:

Teen moms learning to read with their toddlers (Heath & Thomas, 1984; Heath, Branscombe, & Thomas, 1986) PDF Available
Special-needs high school students building their skills and appreciation of literacy through joint research with Heath (Heath & Branscombe, 1985) PDF Available and PDF Available respectively.
High school students undertaking research on informal science learning (Heath, 1983/1996, chapter 7)
Community youth artists collaborating to create a documentary film and accompanying resource guide (Heath & Smyth, 1999, Heath and production team, 2000)
High school students undertaking research on language and learning in studios, laboratories, and rehearsals (Heath, Paul-Boehncke, & Wolf, 2006).

Memo to the SSE group on Communications and the Future

A complete list of Professor Heath's research, publications, films, and more can be found on her Curriculum Vitae.