RPCV Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), Senator Thad Cochran (R-MS), and Rep. Rosa DeLauro (D-CT) have introduced four bills that, taken together, emphasize access to service for people of all ages.
The legislators have called their initiative the Service for All Ages Initiative and it includes:
The Summer of Service Act would offer students making the transition from middle to high school an opportunity to participate in a structured community service program over the summer months. 100 hours of service would earn Read the rest of this entry »
Wednesday morning the House Education and Labor Committee will hold a hearing “examine the importance of national and community service in meeting critical economic needs” across the country.
According to a press release from the office Rep. George Miller—the chair of the committee—the hearing will focus on “re-invigorating” civic engagement, expanding national service opportunities for young people, and greening the United States with the help of national service programs.
Witnesses who will testify include:
In an address to a joint session Congress tonight, Feb. 24th, President Obama urged lawmakers to pass the 
Kennedy-Hatch Serve America Act which would expand funding for national service.
The Serve America Act, co-authored by Senator Kennedy (D-MA) and Senator Hatch (R-UT), was introduced in the Senate January 16 and would:
- Engage more Americans in a term of national service to solve critical challenges in local communities by increasing AmeriCorps from 75,000 to 250,000 Read the rest of this entry »
This week is Peace Corps Week!
This week, Feb. 23-March 3, is Peace Corps Week. A time to reflect on 48 years of international service by almost 200,000 U.S. Volunteers, and for Returned Peace Corps Volunteers to speak about their experiences in the corps with schools and community groups across the United States.
Check out Peace Corps Week events going on in your region. Also find out how the National Peace Corps Association — the independent group of RPCVS — is celebrating. Read what the national service Resource Center has on tap for Peace Corps Week, too.
I’ll be in Boston tomorrow and Washington Friday, talking about service at the Idealist.org Nonprofit Career Fairs. If you ask nicely, I’ll tell you all about my time in Peace Corps China. Also check out these Idealist podcast shows on Peace Corps: with Bonnie Thie, China Country Director; and Eileen Conoboy, former Director of the Office of University Programs.
For information about joining the Peace Corps, call 1-800-424-8580 (press 1) to speak to a local recruiter. To learn more about Peace Corps Week, call 1-800-424-8580 (press 2, then ext. 1961) or email pcweek [at] peacecorps.gov or visit the Peace Corps website.
I listened to an open conference call hosted by Corporation for National and Community Service Chief of Program Operations Kristin McSwain. I am not going to post the more technical aspects of the call, but here are a few points I found interesting.
“Stimulus” members will serve alongside traditional members in existing programs (VISTA might be an exception). Stimulus members will address mostly these areas (though everything is still up in the air) :
1. Winterizing homes, housing access, keeping people in homes
2. Access to health care and providing health care
3. Nonprofit capacity building
4. Youth corps/development
Keep in mind, this is still separate from the Kennedy-Hatch “Serve America Act.”
Here’s the link to the page that will document the changes to national service through the Recovery Act. At the web site, you call a toll-free number to listen to a recording of the call.
The 2009 season of Idealist.org Nonprofit Career Fairs launches next Tuesday in Boston.
Looking for a job? An internship, full-time service opportunity, or part-time volunteer gig?
Check out this spring’s Nonprofit Career Fairs taking place in cities across the United States:
In addition to the nonprofit organization representatives (and even some grad school admissions staff) that you’ll meet, you can participate in workshops that run concurrently with the event. Workshops usually touch on topics of career transitions into the nonprofit sector.
At next week’s events in Boston and Washington, DC, I’ll be offering workshops on questions to ask if you’re considering full-time national or international service.
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This blog goes out to reader all over the country (and way beyond borders) so I don’t usually post items that are local. But I would like to take a moment to showcase a contest and event coming up in Portland, OR this May. It’s open to national service participants from Oregon and Washington although it draws interest nationally.
It’s called the Northwest National Service Symposium, and the idea is to encourage service participants to reflect on their experiences and create literary, visual, and/or performing arts from them. Projects are first submitted in a contest setting, and then gathered and shared at the event in May. First-year national service alums are also encouraged to participate.
This year, more that ever, we are diving into Web 2.0 resources to get the word out. These include:
Amy wrote one of the winning papers a few years back, and I submitted a project to the first symposium back in 1996 and have been on the coordinating team since 2002.
If you have any questions or thoughts on the symposium, drop me a line. There are any number of ways to reach me, including through The New Service blog, but you can always try servicesymposium at gmail dot com.
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Service is the topic on a call-in show today, on American University radio station WAMU 88.5 FM.
Today, starting at 1:06 EST, Kojo Nnamdi will spend an hour speaking with guests about national service and volunteerism.
Guests will include:
Learn more details of the show.
Kojo Nnamdi show takes calls and e-mails from listeners. To join the show: call 1-800-433-8850 or e-mail kojo[at]wamu.org.
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CNCS has a established an official page dedicated to how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 will affect national service.
The plans are still a bit vague, but the dollars roll out quickly. I imagine existing programs will see an influx of members serving in economy-related areas pretty soon here.
For anyone with a keen interest in this, CNCS is hosting an open conference call on Friday, February 20. Anyone who misses the call will be able to hear a reply by dialing a toll-free number. All the details are on the web page.
College students who are passionate about national service and community organizing find ways to serve as campus organizers through ServeNext.
ServeNext.org, a grassroots advocacy organization for national service, is hiring campus organizers at colleges and universities in Arizona, North Carolina, South Carolina, Pennsylvania, Maine, Georgia, and Kansas.
The ServeNext Campus Organizers will lead a variety of activities on their college campuses to build support for national service and current service legislation.
According to the ServeNext website, “America needs a new era of national service and active citizenship to solve major social challenges, unite the country, and create jobs. Campus Organizers will play an important role in mobilizing college students to help make this happen by working to pass major legislation. ServeNext is looking for energetic applicants who are committed to service and social justice and interested in politics as a means to improve lives.”
Read the entire position description.
Questions? Ready to apply? Email a cover letter and resume to info@servenext.org.
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New podcast episode from Idealist features the founder and head of Atlas Corps.
The latest New Service podcast series features Scott Beale, Founder and Executive Director of Atlas Corps, a service and exchange corps for professionals in the NGO sector. Also known as a “two-way Peace Corps,” Atlas Corps brings rising professionals from NGOs in the Global South to the United States to serve for a year; U.S. professionals find opportunities to serve at NGOs in Colombia, India, and soon, elsewhere.
Atlas Corps has just started accepting applications for the 2009-10 fellowship year.
In the show, Scott and I talk about the need for professional global exchanges, starting up a new service corps, and his experiences that led to developing Atlas Corps.
You can download the episode now or subscribe to our podcast (opens iTunes).
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Friday, Nicola Goren of the Corporation for National and Community Service issued the following statement with details if what national service funding was slated for a vote Friday night in the final version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
Dear Colleagues,
As we head into the President’s Day weekend, we wanted to give you a quick update on Congressional action on H.R. 1, the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009.
This afternoon, the House approved the Conference Report on H.R. 1, and the Senate is planning to vote tonight. If the Senate approves the measure, it goes to President Obama for his signature.
The Conference Report contains $201 million for the Corporation for National and Community Service and its programs, with top line numbers as follows:
- $89 million for AmeriCorps State and National
- $65 million for AmeriCorps VISTA
- $40 million for the National Service Trust
- $6 million for information technology upgrades
- $1 million for the Inspector General
The bill contains additional legislative language addressing the proposed use of these funds. You can read the bill language and joint explanatory statement of the managers by visiting the budget page of the Corporation’s website at http://www.nationalservice.gov.
We will be analyzing the legislation and OMB government-wide directions, and seeking public input, as we develop an operating plan for the use of these funds.
We will keep you posted on further developments.
In Service,
Nicola Goren
Acting CEO
Corporation for National and Community Service
Yesterday the Senate passed its version of the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009; here are the details of funding for national service as detailed in their version.
Nicola Goren, Acting CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, issued this update:
Dear Colleagues,
This afternoon the full Senate passed the American Recovery and
Investment Act by a 61 to 37 vote. The Senate bill contains $201
million for the Corporation and its programs, broken down as follows:$160 million for operating expenses, including:
- Up to $65 million for AmeriCorps State and National grants
- Not less than $65 million for AmeriCorps VISTA
- Not less than $13 million for research related to volunteer service
- $10 million for AmeriCorps NCCC
- Not less than $6 million for upgrades to information technology
- $1 million for State Commissions
- $40 million for the National Service Trust
- Requires submission of an operating plan prior to making any obligations.
The bill also includes $1 million for the Inspector General. These provisions are the same as the original Senate bill, with the addition of Inspector General funding. …Read the text of the legislation, click here or visit the Corporation’s budget page.
The next step is for members of the House and Senate to meet in a
conference committee to work out differences between the measures, with
the aim of trying to complete work before President’s Day. We will keep
you posted on further developments.In Service,
Nicola Goren
Acting CEO
Corporation for National and Community Service
Read more about the version of the bill that passed the House of Representatives on January 29th.
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With as much professional development training you get during your service term, it’s bound to happen, sooner or later.
Sometimes workshop facilitators, bless their hearts, fail.
Experts they may be, but their ability to convey their knowledge can fall flat if they aren’t well-versed in what their audience’s special needs are, if they appear arrogant, or if they are not experienced in front of a crowd.
In an attempt to be humorous— or to cover the topic in a way that even a child could grasp— a workshop presenter may even offend you. They may have grossly misrepresented the content of the workshop in its title and description. You may have missed some crucial piece of the bio that would have told you to stay far, far away.
As someone who facilitates workshops from time to time, and attends many, I’ve put together a cheat sheet with ideas for surviving a workshop that doesn’t meet with your expectations:
Keep an open mind; unless you are participating in a corps at mid-career, you may have a lot to learn —listen closely, follow up on references and resources mentioned during the workshop, and ask questions that help the facilitator make the workshops more relevant to you.
Workshop presenters usually try their best to help you discover relevant information, and they are probably not responsible if there’s a rule that forces you to be at the workshop. So cut them some slack.
If you find yourself in a workshop that really does need some improvement, be proactive (you might want to print this list out and keep it handy in your wallet — never know when you will need it):
When a workshop doesn’t go well, and you paid for it either with money or time away from your service site, all you can do is try to salvage some joy. Even if it’s just the thrill of achieving a perfect circle with your pen.
This blog post has been adapted from a section of the forthcoming Service Corps Companion to the Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers, due out this coming spring from Idealist.org.
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If you’ve been considering a term of national service, keep in mind some of the biggest differences between doing a year-long term of full-time service and serving as a community volunteer.
To the uninitiated, a term of national service can seem to be “paid volunteering” because participants earn a basic living allowance. However, real differences exist, and local communities throughout the United States feel the direct impact of those differences.
Community Volunteers
From Flickr user who.log.why
Community volunteers donate their time through a nonprofit or school. They improve their communities because they can extend the human resource capacity of the places where they volunteer.
The amount of time they donate is up to them, but it’s usually part time. Some volunteers join a service project for a few hours on a single day, achieve greatness, feel good, and move on.
An organization’s part-time, longer term community volunteers may help out on sustained projects, or they may tackle shorter tasks that change from day to day.
Finally, as long as their duties are within the bounds of labor laws, the specific assignments are between community volunteers and their supervisors. Community volunteer service rarely comes under strict scrutiny for effectiveness, sustainability, and performance measures the way national service corps member positions do.
In sum, in the United States millions of community volunteers collectively devote billions of hours of their time to causes they believe in. Their contributions to social services are crucial to the operation of most nonprofit organizations and schools. Most serve on a part-time basis, often while in school, gainfully employed, or retired.
National Service Corps Members
Full-time national service is different in that participants — often called members or corps members — really dedicate all their work-day time to their service. In fact in at least two programs, members cannot hold down any work outside of their service.
National service programs in the United States include AmeriCorps, AmeriCorps*VISTA, AmeriCorps*NCCC, Teach For America, City Year, and many, many others (see the list of Corps and Coalitions in the right-hand side bar of this blog) not all of which receive funds from the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS).
CNCS funds—in part—most of these domestic service corps. It invests money through states, national organizations, and local communities, and that funding is leveraged through host service site matching contributions and other private donations.
Each service program is evaluated and approved at the state or federal government level before funding comes through and corps member recruitment begins. Grant proposals requesting funding for members must show performance outcomes, goals, and measurements. Corps members and their supervisors track the effectiveness of their service regularly, and supervisors write grant reports detailing corps member achievements.
Corps members initiate and lead hefty projects, on critical issues, like disaster preparedness and response, education, poverty, environment, and public safety.
Because corps members serve for a period of 10 to 12 months (or longer, if they commit to a second term) they have a chance to affect lasting, positive change in their organizations — through developing new programs, identifying and going after new sources of funding, and leveraging the efforts of millions of community volunteers.
Corps members also change their communities in permanent ways — by serving in schools, tutoring struggling kids throughout their term, consistently mentoring children of incarcerated parents, increasing the job skills of recent immigrants or high school dropouts, rebuilding communities in the wake of natural disasters, and creating access to affordable health care through local clinics and health organizations and more.
Finally national service is an investment in the corps members themselves, developing the future of public service leadership in the United States. National service corps members receive hours of targeted technical skill-building training throughout their terms. Two-thirds of AmeriCorps members followed in a longitudinal study go on to public service careers. The Eli Segal AmeriCorps Education Award has made further education possible for thousands of alumni.
The achievements of community volunteers are many and great. The service of AmeriCorps members is closer to the equivalent of the federal government offering human resource grants to local communities to contribute in crucial capacities. It’s not paid volunteering.
Check out Tim’s post on Change/Wire, which also features video testimonials of service corps participants talk about their achievements.
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Update 2/11: Senate passed their version of the stimulus with national service funding intact. Check out this post with the details.
According to CNN’s list of “what got cut” from the Senate’s compromise version of the stimulus package, national service funding to the Corporation for National and Community Service has been preserved.
Lawmakers vote on Tuesday on the compromise American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009. Between now and then, of course, more cuts may be made to the proposed legislation — including cuts to additional national service funding.
See details on how national service faired in the House version that passed last week.
In the Senate’s version, billions were cut, but not the $160 million dollars proposed to fund 16,000 additional “stimulus” AmeriCorps members. Some senators had questioned the funding and included it in a list of “wasteful” items in the proposed package.
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Google’s Public Policy blog featured the Idealist Global Volunteering Fair which Google hosted Tuesday night in Washington, DC.
Check out other fairs this week in New York tonight and Boston on Saturday.
The event Tuesday night drew a crowd of 650 prospective volunteers.
During the fair were three back-to-back workshops: International Volunteerism 101, Google Tools for Volunteers, and Affordable Volunteering Abroad.
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Program brings people to Japan for up to five years of teaching, in rural and urban settings.
From the JET web site
Sponsored by the Japanese Ministry of Foreign Affairs as a way to increase mutual understanding among people of Japan and people of other countries, the goal Japan Exchange and Teaching Programme (JET)is to internationalize local Japanese communities by inviting and involving foreign teachers.
Unlike most service programs I write about on this blog, JET participation is considered contract employment between program participants and the schools where they teach — JET teachers’s airfare to and from Japan is covered, and they earn a salary.
Similar to a service corps, JET participants form a network for support throughout Japan — and throughout the world as JET Alumni.
Also similar to a service corps, the JET participant’s role does not end when the work day ends — they are meant to be cultural ambassadors who have an impact in the community beyond the classroom.
JET recruits teachers from around the world. Applications to the JET Programme are made through the Japanese Embassy in your country; find yours.
Eligibility for the program includes qualities as varied as an interest in Japan, and good diction in your native language (for teaching purposes).
Today, the Idealist.org Global Volunteering Fair takes place in New York, at Barnard College. Check out the fair Saturday in Boston. In honor of the fairs, The New Service blog will feature international service programs all week!
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Diaspora volunteering connects Diaspora communities with their countries of origin through strategic volunteer placements.
Many people in Diaspora communities have a passion for helping their communities back home, and Diaspora volunteering is one of many ways they can help. Sometimes Diaspora volunteering can also counter the effects of out-migration of skilled workers and bring entrepreneurial energy to isolated communities.
The Volunteer Service Organisation (VSO, the U.K. counterpart to Peace Corps) is one international volunteer-sending group that offers Diaspora placements for long-term, stipended assignments. For example, VSO Canada—which accepts U.S. citizens—works with partners to match the skills of Canada’s Diaspora communities with the needs of “under-resourced social development sectors in their countries of heritage. VSO Canada (now called CUSO-VSO) works with people of the Guyanese, Filipino, and Ethiopian Diasporas.
African Foundation for Development (AFFORD) partners with VSO in the United Kingdom to harness the knowledge and skills of the African Diaspora to nurture small and medium-sized businesses in Africa through its Supporting Entrepreneurs and Enterprise Development in Africa (SEEDA) Initiative. (Other ways for members of the African Diaspora to contribute to the development of African countries: Project Diaspora, supporting members of the African Diaspora to support African nations through remittances. Mukuru.com specializes in remittances to Zimbabwe.)
Indicorps is a fellowship program that recruits young professionals of the global Indian Diaspora to Ahmedabad, Gujarat, India, to serve for one or two years with a grassroots organization. The program aims to nurture social conscious leaders “to transform India and the world.”
People of the Jewish Diaspora have many opportunities through which to volunteer with communities in Israel. Some places to start are the Jewish Coalition for Service, and also the National Council for Volunteering in Israel which lists volunteer opportunities for residents and non-residents of Israel.
Do you know of other international volunteer-sending organizations that focus on Diaspora volunteering? We’d love to hear!
Today, the first 2009 Idealist.org Global Volunteering Fair takes place in Washington, DC, at Google. Check out other fairs this week in New York and Boston. In honor of the fairs, The New Service blog will feature international service programs all week!
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