My Daughter’s “Call to Action” Project Taught Me Why Civic Engagement Is So Hard to Teach
The email from my daughter’s fourth-grade teacher landed on a Tuesday afternoon, subject line: “Call to Action Unit.” Maya was eight then, still at the age where she believed she could be president of the entire world by fifth grade. The assignment was straightforward: each student had to identify a problem in their local community, research it, and then take one concrete action to address it. They would document the process and present their results to the class.
Maya chose the stray shopping carts in the parking lot of the apartment complex next to our neighborhood park.
I remember thinking this seemed like a strange choice. We had talked about climate change and recycling, animal shelters, the food bank. But Maya was firm. The carts had been there forever, she said. One was rusted and missing a wheel, half-submerged in the muddy drainage ditch. Kids played around that ditch. It made her feel a certain kind of angry that nobody had done anything about it.
The teacher sent home a planning sheet. It had sections like “The Problem in My Words” and “Who Has the Power to Fix This?” and “My First Step.” Maya filled out the first section easily, describing the carts with the sort of elaborate detail that only a child can produce. The second section gave her pause. Who could fix this? She wrote “the mayor” first, then crossed it out. Then she wrote “the president.” I suggested she look up the property management company for the apartment complex. She wasn’t sure how to do that.
For three days, she avoided the worksheet. She did her math homework, read her assigned chapters, even cleaned her room without being asked. The planning sheet sat at the bottom of her backpack, crinkled around the edges. When I finally asked her about it, she said, “I don’t know what to do for ‘First Step.’ I can’t just walk over there and start pushing carts.”
That’s when the real lesson of the project began.
I had been treating the assignment as a writing exercise. But watching Maya stare at that blank line, I realized the school was asking her to do something harder than crafting a persuasive paragraph. They were asking her to figure out how ordinary problems actually get solved in the real world. And the truth is, most adults don’t fully know either.
So we did it together. We looked up the apartment complex online. I taught her how to read a property management page, how to find a phone number buried in a contact form. She practiced what she would say before she called. “Hi, my name is Maya, and I’m working on a school project about the shopping carts near the park. They’ve been sitting in the water for a few weeks now, and I was wondering if someone could come get them.”
The woman on the phone was polite but vague. She said she’d “put in a maintenance request.” Maya hung up feeling accomplished, but also uncertain. Had she done enough? Was a maintenance request actually a thing that happened?
We walked to the parking lot that weekend. One cart was gone. The other two remained, one lying on its side like a fallen animal. Maya stood there, hands on her hips, trying to decide if this counted as progress. I told her it did, sort of. She didn’t look convinced.
The following Monday, the teacher asked the class to share their “Call to Action” experiences. A boy had written emails to three local restaurants asking them to stop using styrofoam containers. A girl had organized a small cleanup at the creek behind school with her Brownie troop. Maya listened to them talk while I helped in the back of the classroom, sharpening pencils and avoiding eye contact.
When it was Maya’s turn, she told the class about the phone call. She was honest about the outcome. “I don’t know if the carts are going to disappear,” she said. “But I did something about it. That’s what matters, right?”
The teacher nodded. She asked the class what they thought the goal of the project was. A kid in the back raised his hand and said something about making the world better. The teacher smiled and said, “Well, yes. But also, we wanted you to see that taking action is mostly about doing small, specific things even when you’re not sure they’ll work.”
I’ve thought about that moment a lot over the years. Maya is in middle school now, and the parking lot still has carts in the ditch from time to time. A new one appeared last month, white and rattling, crammed against the chain-link fence. The property management company never followed up. Maya doesn’t play at that park anymore.
But something from that assignment stuck with her. When her school sent around a petition to add a crosswalk on the busy street behind the gymnasium, she didn’t just sign it. She asked to see how the petition would be delivered, who would receive it, and what the timeline was. She asked questions for twenty minutes about municipal infrastructure that I genuinely did not know the answers to. She was skeptical, but her skepticism was informed. She had seen how civic action works in real life: it is often slow, anticlimactic, and dependent on the patience of people who don’t give up after one phone call.
When I look back at that planning sheet, I understand what the teacher was really doing. She wasn’t expecting fourth-graders to solve neighborhood problems. She was giving them a safe, low-stakes practice run at feeling the resistance of the world. She was teaching them that a call to action often ends with a polite voice-mail box and an uncertain wait. That progress can be hard to measure. That you have to keep showing up, making the call, writing the email, pushing the cart—even when no one seems to be listening.
Maya wrote her reflection for that project the other day, as part of a portfolio her English teacher assigned. She described the phone call as “the first time I realized that grown-ups don’t always have a clear plan either.” She wasn’t being cynical. She said it made her want to be the kind of grown-up who does have a plan, or at least keeps looking for one.
I think about the woman from the property management office sometimes, the one who took down Maya’s message. I wonder if she remembers the call, if she ever filed that maintenance request. Probably not. But I remember the way Maya straightened her shoulders as she hung up the phone, the way she checked the parking lot for weeks afterward. The carts are still there, sometimes. The lesson is too.
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