Conducted by Christopher C. Weiss, Director of the Quantitative Methods in the Social Sciences, and Alexandra Murphy, Associate Director of CURP, this research is a program evaluation of the Penny Harvest Program, a Common Cents’ flagship learning activity for elementary and middle schools in New York City. Student participants in this yearlong program collect pennies and recycle them into new money for philanthropy. Since 1991, $4 million has been both distributed in over 5,000 micro-grants to charities and been used to support service projects. The goal of Penny Harvest Program is to develop moral and social responsibility in children ages four to fourteen. As children learn through the program to help others in their community by mobilizing, allocating and using the funds they collectively “harvest,” they have a unique opportunity to learn through practice the skills and responsibilities of democratic participation and demonstrate to themselves and others their value as contributors to the community. This study seeks to evaluate how the Penny Harvest Program works in schools and what kinds of civic and social benefits it has for the children who participate; looking specifically at program effects on children’s civic, social, and cognitive development and skills. The study is one of the first in the service-learning arena to examine service learning among elementary age children.

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