New Jersey Nonprofit Leader: Heather Calverase, Teach For America

Posted as part of Nonprofit Career Month, featuring the diversity of career opportunities in the nonprofit sector. Listen to more shows in this series.

Today’s guest is Heather Calverase, Executive Director of Teach For America’s Newark, New Jersey region where she is responsible for growing sustainable base of financial, community, and district awareness and support including cultivating and stewarding donations, building strong ties with local school districts, and recruiting corps members.

Prior to her position with Teach For America, Heather worked in the business sector, including nearly a decade with Kaplan, best known for its test preparation books and classes.

Amy Potthast chats with Heather about what is appealing about what Heather brings to the nonprofit sector from her business sector experience, as well as her background on educational issues.

Podcast transcript coming soon.

New Podcast: An Interview with Teach For America Alumna Aaliyah El-Amin

The newest national service podcast show from Idealist.org features Teach For America.

Aaliyah El-Amin

Today’s guest on The New Service podcast is Aaliyah El-Amin, an alumna of Teach For America’s 2000 Atlanta corps. Teach For America is the national corps of recent college graduates who commit to teach for at least two years in urban and rural public schools and become lifelong leaders in expanding educational opportunity.

In the 2008-09 school year, 6,200 corps members taught in over 1,600 schools in 29 regions across the country while more than 14,000 Teach For America alumni continue working from inside and outside the field of education for the fundamental changes necessary to ensure educational excellence and equity.

In 2000, at age twenty, Aaliyah El-Amin graduated from Davidson College and joined Teach For America to teach 4th and 5th grade in Atlanta, Georgia. It was through her corps experience, that Aaliyah found her calling. During her time in the classroom, Aaliyah received her Masters degree in Elementary Education from the University of Georgia.

By the time she was twenty-three, she’d received her principal certification and had become an instructional facilitator at

Teach For America Podcast Transcript

Aaliyah El-Amin

Below is the transcript of our August podcast, “An Interview with Teach For America Alumna Aaliyah El-Amin.” Huge thanks to podcast intern Sara Lozito, an AmeriCorps team leader, for work in creating the transcript. Listen to the show here.

Amy: Welcome to the Idealist podcast. I’m Amy Potthast and this is the The New Service Podcast from Idealist.org – moving people from good intentions to action.

This month I chatted with Aaliyah El-Amin, a Teach For America alumna.

In 2000, at age twenty, Aaliyah graduated from Davidson College and joined Teach For America to teach 4th and 5th grade in Atlanta, Georgia. After leaving the corps and working as an instructional facilitator at her placement school, Aaliyah became the executive director of Teach For America Charlotte. She’s currently a doctoral student at the Harvard Graduate School of Education in in Education Policy, Leadership and Instructional Practice.

Hi Aaliyah, welcome to the show.

Wendy Kopp Shares Her Vision at the Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship

Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach For America and Teach For All, shares her vision of our mandate to eliminate educational inequities during her Skoll Awards for Social Entrepreneurship acceptance speech.

Teach For America is the AmeriCorps-affiliated program that brings high-achieving college grads to teach for two years in urban and rural schools throughout the United States. Teach For All is a network of Teach For America-inspired programs throughout the world run by independent social entrepreneurs.

According to the Skoll Awards page:

Wendy Kopp was struck by the inequities in the U.S. education system as a freshman at Princeton University where she saw smart, talented public school students struggle academically because of their weak preparation.

The Signing of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act

Today President Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act into law. It will take affect October 1 of this year. Read more about the Act.

During one of the most exciting National Volunteer Weeks in recent memory, President Obama and national service supporters gathered today at the SEED School in Washington, D.C., an academic and boarding charter school.

At the signing, Obama said, our “government cannot do everything alone,” but needs the help of citizens in local communities everywhere. And national service isn’t just for recent college graduates (watch news footage from AARP.) Sounding Whitman-esque, he called people every where to “Put your shoulder to the wheel” of service — and if you do, you can look back on the “moment when your own story and the American story converged.”

He also recognized Bill Clinton for launching AmeriCorps during his administration, and the First Lady Michelle Obama who was the founding executive director of Public Allies Chicago, a national service program.

Obama went on to talk about the long legacy of service contributed by the Kennedy family including Ted Kennedy, for whom the legislation is now named.

He also introduced Maria Eitel his nominee for the new chief executive post at the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) and Acting C.E.O. Nicola Goren.

The bill re-authorizes CNCS and its programs through 2014, and authorizes sweeping expansion of national service (with a nod

How to Apply to AmeriCorps

To clear up some confusion about how you get into AmeriCorps.

AmeriCorps is a network of programs throughout the United States (and its territories — yes, you can serve in Puerto Rico!) that provide the chance for you to serve in your community full-time for a year on a range of critical issue areas.

Programs also allow nonprofit organizations, government agencies, and schools to host you — in order to extend their capacity to fulfill their mission, and so you can initiate and run new projects that they haven’t been able to get off the ground, and/or to leverage the support of community volunteers whom you recruit and engage.

When do AmeriCorps applications come open?

The short answer is, it’s not too late to apply now and in the coming months.

Because AmeriCorps is a network of programs, the longer answer is that application dates vary by program. Different programs operate on different cycles, with new AmeriCorps members starting at different times.

Most programs that I know of open up their application process in spring and early summer; and incoming AmeriCorps members start in the fall (usually starting sometime between August and October).

Of course some programs, like City Year and Teach For America, offer many deadlines throughout the school year.

Answering the Call from Citizens Who Want to Serve

These days the fate of national service seems tied more than ever to the greater economic struggles our nation is facing. Citizens want to serve in their communities, and this week the Senate is debating legislation that would make it possible for more people to serve than ever before.

September 11th and 12th of last year, the Service Nation Summit convened hundreds of leaders, service corps alumni, and celebrities to talk about the need for expanded national service opportunities, to meet the growing demand among people of all ages to serve full-time in their communities.

While Summit participants were still returning home in the glow of that inspiring event, Lehman Brothers—just blocks from where the Summit took place in mid-town Manhattan—crumbled, and the bottom began to fall out of the economy.

This week, the U.S. Senate will take a hard look at the Serve America Act, a piece of legislation announced at the Service Nation Summit by Senator Orrin Hatch (while his partner Sen. Edward Kennedy, convalescing at home, joined him in spirit).

Little known in September was just how desperately needed this legislation would become by the time it saw the floor of the

Marketplace on NPR Looking for Stories from Teach For America Alums

Sharon McNary of Marketplace, the business show on public radio, has questions about people’s experiences with Teach For America.

The personal finance show Marketplace Money is exploring how Teach For America changes the lives and earning potential of the people who participate as teachers. She is looking for former corps members, relatives of corps members, or people at the schools who host TFA teachers. If you fit in any of these categories, please click here to share your TFA story with Marketplace. They want to know:

• How competitive it was to enter the program
• How it helped or changed the participant’s career options
• How you view the opportunity cost of being part of TFA, that is, what might you have been doing if you were not in the program
• How do you see the program changing in the recession and how might it change under President Obama call out for Americans to do more public service.

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National Service as Paid Volunteering? Uh…No.

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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Wendy Kopp wins Presidential Citizens Medal

Kopp, the founder of Teach For America, was presented today with one of the highest honors a U.S. president can confer upon a citizen.

The Presidential Citizens Medal “recognizes U.S. citizens who have performed exemplary deeds of service for the nation.” According to the Whitehouse.gov statement:

Wendy Kopp is an education innovator who believes that every child can learn if given a chance. Through her determined efforts, she has created opportunities for new teachers to help disadvantaged children realize their potential. The United States honors Wendy Kopp for her strong leadership in ensuring a quality education for students across America.

To learn the story of TFA’s beginnings, read Kopp’s memoir “One Day All Children…” In it she describes her first star-eyed visit to the White House, during the Clinton Administration.

She may have a chance to spend a lot of time at the White House. A movement has sprung up to get President-Elect Obama to pick Kopp as his Secretary of Education. Others speculate the spot might go to TFA critic and Obama advisor Linda Darling-Hammond.

Update 12/16: Obama picks someone else for Secretary of Education, FYI.

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Career Tip, Discerning Your Career Path!

What is discernment? Why does it matter for a corps member? The most frustrating and at the same time most exhilarating question of a U.S. person’s life is, what should I do with it? And that is what discernment is all about.

Discernment is the process of figuring out where your passions and values are leading you in your career and life. It may take any of these forms:

• A bolt of inspiration
• First-hand experience
• Reflection
• Observation
• Conversation
• Research
• Meditation or prayer

Done right, at the end of the process of discernment you should feel confident making decisions that influence your career and education. You should be able to articulate the direction you are headed in, and why.

And why does discernment matter to a service corps participant?
Your term of service can enhance your discernment process by exposing you to all-new experiences, giving you time and a forum to reflect on these experiences, and put you in touch with new networks of people whom you can observe and talk with about their paths and choices.

Discernment during your term of service can help your career because the process will narrow down your many choices and make your search for work or school more efficient. Once you have a sense of where you are heading, you’ll know better which networks to join, what questions to ask, which skills to build.

Careering towards your future
You may have come into your service term with an unwavering sense of what you’ll do when the term ends, you just want help getting there. On the opposite extreme, you may have no idea at all, period, and were hoping the term of service would offer you a refuge from thinking about it for a year or two. You may be somewhere in the middle.

It’s probably best not to feel that you have to find one career choice that fits the rest of your life. That’s old-school thinking, though you may get pressure from your parents to find a single career path and stick to it.

If you are participating in a service term at mid-career, you already know that career changes are almost inevitable in the United States today! People change jobs more frequently now than ever before, and the concept of “career” itself is ever-changing.

Steve Pascal-Joiner, author of The Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers for Sector Switchers likes to point out that an old version of the word to careen is to career, as in:

Career, (verb): move swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction (The car careered across the road and through the hedge.)

Career, (Archaic phrase): “in full career” meaning “at full speed.”

He adds that in his own career can be described similarly: moving swiftly and in an uncontrolled way in a specified direction.

Indeed, how long you stay in a job may be pretty closely tied to your generation:
•    Baby boomers (born between 1946-1964) stay in a job an average of 5 years (and thus have held about 5-8 jobs in their working life times)
•    Gen X (1965-1980) stay in a job an average of 3 years (and thus have held about 3-7 in their working life times)
•    Gen Y/Millennials (1980-2000) stay in a job an average of 16 months (and thus have already held 2-6 jobs in their working life times)

While you may be more prone to move from job to job throughout your career than your grandparents were, that doesn’t necessarily mean you will always be free to launch yourself in new directions.

Recognize that once you have invested in specialized education, started making a living salary, and taken on expenses such as a mortgage and/or family, backing out of one path and embarking on another is quite a challenge. The more you can do to think through your options and personal compatibility with career choices, the better.

Tools for Discernment
Chapter Chapter Three (PDF) of the Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers offers a couple very good exercises to help you figure out the trail head to the career path that resonates with you, and to see what opportunities are out there for you.

• The Tracks exercise, developed by David Schachter of NYU’s Wagner School of Public Service, gives you a way to explore job openings that inspire you — either because of the position description or the organization. (Listen to the Idealist podcast featuring Schachter.)
• The Four Lenses approach, also developed by Schachter, aims to help you think more clearly about your career prospects by narrowing down what exactly it is you mean when you say “I want to work in education,” or “I want to work on the environment.”

So read that chapter.

But, what else can you during your term to help you discern what’s next for you? Fleshing out the list I drafted above:

A bolt of inspiration isn’t exactly something you can do. It is something that strikes you when you least expect it. Echoing Green’s book Be Bold talks about the “moment of obligation” — when change agents identify what means the most to them, and then commit to carry out their dreams. You can read about Wendy Kopp’s bolt of inspiration to create Teach For America in her book One Day All Children…: The Unlikely Triumph of Teach For American and What I Learned Along the Way.

First-hand experience includes what you have done in the past and what you are doing during this service term. The more, varied experiences you make for yourself, the more information you have to go on. Challenge yourself to try things you never thought you would enjoy, volunteer in new roles or on new issue areas.

Reflection is key to discernment. Someone wise once said, “It’s not experience that is the best teacher—we learn nothing from experience. We only learn from reflection on our experience.” Consider keeping a journal, or setting aside time weekly to debrief and evaluate your own experiences. What kind of activities, people, and environments have given you more energy? What activities, people, environments have served as your own personal Kryptonite (sapping your strength)?

Observation gives you a chance to see for yourself what different opportunities entail, and give you an idea if it’s for you. You may have never had a chance to work on an organic farm, but if you could spend a day or two seeing farmers in-action, maybe even working alongside them, asking questions about their work, you’d get a more vivid understanding of farm work. Public interest law may sound good to you, but it’s not something you can practice without a huge intellectual, financial, and time commitment. But shadowing a lawyer, observing in a firm — these are ways to give you a clearer sense of what you’d be doing as a lawyer.

Conversation with mentors, peers, and professionals in your target field gives you a chance to introduce yourself to potential colleagues and employers, listen to advice, and ask questions of people who are already engaged in careers you are considering. Informational interviewing is one format for these conversations (see Chapter Four (PDF) of the Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers). Informally, you can chat with people about their work and education at parties, community events, family reunions, etc.

Research is the way to find out what jobs, organizations, and/or degrees exist, what benefits you can expect from different career paths, how much your skill set is worth on the job market. The Tracks exercise is one kind of research in Chapter Three of the Idealist Guide mentioned earlier is a spirited way of doing the research; conversation is another.

Meditation or prayer can play important roles for some people when making major life decisions. Consider using vacation time away from your service site to take part in a retreat or solo exploration time, if that would help you gather your thoughts. Or consult with leaders of your faith community about resources and traditions you can tap into that will help you unearth your life’s calling.

Discernment during your term of service strengthens your service experience by sharpening your senses and encouraging you to agree to new opportunities and responsibilities.  The process can bring direction to your work, and confidence in your response to those pesky “What will you do next year?” questions.

Having a direction also helps you to prioritize which additional skills you need to develop, and which additional relationships are important to nurture.

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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How the Media get National Service Wrong (Sometimes)

As news media pick up stories about graduating students missing out on high-power corporate jobs and falling back on national service, some details are skewed.

Here is my rebuttal to some stories I’ve seen in the media lately about national service as a solution to college student angst about employment and loan repayment. Like this one from the Wall Street Journal, and this one from MSN Money.

A term of national service is not the same as nonprofit employment. And there’s a lot more to public service than a year of stipended national service. It’s misleading to say that when the Class of 2009 is locked out of entry level positions at huge corporations, they may opt for “nonprofit work” by joining AmeriCorps for $10,000 a year.

What’s wrong with that kind of reporting?

1. Recent coverage is perpetuating the false idea that only people rejected from business careers look into national service and nonprofit work.

Service is not the job you can get when no one else will hire you. Competition is high for national service slots. Far more people apply to most service corps than there are openings. For example, Teach For America saw 25,000 applications last year, but only needed a fraction of that to fill all its corps member openings. Chicago’s Inner City Teaching Corps has gotten five times the number of applicants than it’s had openings.

Service organizations are looking for people committed to social justice, who actually have volunteer, leadership, and issue-focused experience. People for whom a term of service is a plausible commitment, and who have something to offer communities.

And in fact, you can actually graduate from college aspiring to a national service experience or nonprofit career — because you are committed to social change, community issues, living your faith, etc. That is, if people who are mentoring you can educate you about these kinds of opportunities.

Mid-career professionals who’ve dedicated their lives to earning their companies a profit are often surprised to find how tricky it is to break into the nonprofit sector. While business skills are valuable in running nonprofit organizations, and many nonprofit careerists earn MBAs, the nonprofit sector is not the repository of people who didn’t make it as capitalists.

Not that there’s anything wrong with being a capitalist.

2. A term of national service is not an alternate career path or a nonprofit job.

A term of service is usually a year or two — it’s not exactly an alternative career path. It’s short term. After your term you can decide what to do next — you’ll have more experience than you did as a college senior, but your options in life are still as wide open.

While most U.S.-based service programs are 501(c)(3) nonprofits themselves, corps members are supported by a range of host sites, not just nonprofits. Corps members teach in public schools and serve in local government agencies, as well as in nonprofit organizations.

Nonprofit careers do exist — and national service is a great launching point. To understand nonprofit careers better, check out the Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers.

3. Finally, one of the biggest misunderstandings people—including reporters—have is that nonprofit = no money. That nonprofit work is volunteer work and doesn’t count as a “real job” that can support a person or family.

At Idealist.org we have had to work hard, and will continue to work hard, to get people — college students, career counselors, parents, mid-career professionals — to let go of certain notions they have of nonprofit employment.

Saying that college grads will settle for a $10,000/year “job” in the nonprofit sector because of the loan repayment benefit implies that nonprofits pay poverty wages to staff. That’s a serious issue for the nonprofit sector wanting to beef up its workforce and leadership pipeline (PDF) in time for baby boomers to retire. And it’s irresponsible journalism.

From the Idealist.org document debunking the top-ten myths about the nonprofit sector:

The term “nonprofit” refers to the 501(c) tax code in the United States. Non-governmental organization, or NGO, and “charity” are the common terms used outside the United States. Revenues generated by nonprofit organizations go back into programs that serve the organizations’ mission. There are no stockholders receiving annual financial dividends, and employees do not receive a bonus at the end of a good year. According to Independent Sector, $670 billion are earned by nonprofit organizations annually, and one in twelve Americans work in the nonprofit sector.

To learn more about the nonprofit sector, read Chapter One of the Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers. To learn more about nonprofit salaries, check out these free, online resources: Occupational Outlook Handbook, Salary.com, and CareerBuilder.com (use the term “non-profit,” with a hyphen).

To learn more about service opportunities, check out the Corps and Coalitions list on the right-hand sidebar of this blog.

David Eisner’s recent speech about the need for national service explains its value from the perspective of governing healthy communities during an economic downturn.

New Echoing Green Podcast – Application Tips

Echoing Green’s latest podcast episode highlights tips for applying for one of its prestigious social-enterprise fellowships.

For people who have innovative ideas for solving the world’s most intractable social ills, Echoing Green offers two years of start-up funding, support, and networking. Wendy Kopp, founder of Teach For America, received seed funds from Echoing Green. Chris Myers Asch, founder and leader of the U.S. Public Service Academy movement, is a current Fellow. Read about other 2008 Fellows.

From Echoing Green’s web site:

Applicants should be sure to check out this week’s episode of the Be Bold podcast.  In this episode, Echoing Green’s Lara Galinsky answers questions about the Echoing Green Fellowship including:

• What is the Echoing Green Fellowship?
• What are the application requirements?
• What are common mistakes in the application process?
• What additional resources does Echoing Green provide to applicants?

Applications to the fellowship are due December 1, 2008 at 5pm EST. The initial application is online. Read more about the application process.

Listen to the Idealist podcast on Echoing Green featuring Lara Galinsky.

Call for stories. Also, Echoing Green has issued a call for submissions to its next verstion of the book Be Bold.

Obamas, Public Allies in the Spotlight

Service program receives more, positive, media attention while solving tough social problems for communities and offering professional growth for corps members.

Public Allies has received a lot of tough press among obscure blogs this year, but with established connections to the future President and First-Lady, the outlook in the media has just gotten brighter for the national, Milwaukee-based AmeriCorps program.

Here are just a couple news items involving Public Allies in the past week since the election:

The National Public Radio show Morning Edition mentioned Public Allies this morning in a discussion of Michelle Obama’s executive experience since graduating from law school. She was the founding Executive Director of Public Allies Chicago.

The San Francisco Chronicle published this article about social entrepreneurs’s hopes for the new administration. The New York Post ran an article on Michelle Obama.

Michelle Obama chatted last week with a Newsweek journalist about her experience with Public Allies and the future of national service generally:

[Richard Wolffe:] You want to continue what you did with Public Allies (which trains young people to become leaders of community groups and nonprofits) as First Lady. What’s your thinking on how to go about that?

[Michelle Obama:] Barack is talking about a deeper investment in national service; that’s been part of his platform. He’s been meeting with some of the leadership of the AmeriCorps national-service movements—the Public Allies, the Teach for Americas, the City Years of the World—and figuring out how do we use that model, expand upon it, and help use that as a more creative way to defray the costs of college for young people and get all Americans really engaged. What AmeriCorps showed me, during the time that I worked on it, is that all these resources of young people, and not-so-young people, as I call them—because AmeriCorps is not just for young adults but people of all ages—you can fill a lot of gaps with the help of community-service hours. The young people in my program worked as program directors. They worked with kids and they worked in parks and they worked with nonprofit organizations that didn’t have the resources to bring people in full time. So this is one of those clear win-wins. You can help kids pay for school, you can get needed man-hours into really critical things like the environment, senior care, Head Start—a whole range of things. And you get the country more focused on giving back.

Earlier this year, Fast Company named Public Allies and its President and CEO Paul Schmitz one of the top 45 Social Entrepreneurs Who Are Changing the World.

11/12/08 an article about Public Allies appeared in the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.

11/13/08 in Canada’s National Post.

What is Public Allies?

Public Allies is a 10-month service and leadership program that serves in 15 cities across the United States.  Corps members — called “Allies” — serve with nonprofits and universities to “create, improve and expand services that address diverse issues, including youth development, education, public health, economic development and the environment.”

The monthly stipend (at $1300-$1800) is higher than many AmeriCorps programs, and Allies are eligible for the $4725 AmeriCorps education award at the end of the term. But the best benefit of the program may be its extraordinary training opportunities. This, from the Public Allies web site:

A rigorous leadership development curriculum delivered by community leaders, practitioners and educators, which includes:

• Intensive weekly skill training and leadership development seminars
• Critical feedback, reflection, and personal coaching toward individual performance and professional goals
• Community building and team projects with a diverse cohort of peers
• Presentations of learning at the end of the year to demonstrate how one met the learning outcomes of the program

Good news for Public Allies and for national service

Not only Public Allies stands to benefit from the media attention, but national service as a whole does as well, including efforts like Service Nation, the campaign for expanded funding for service.

Besides the media attention, no president has had as much direct experience with the challenges and opportunities of national service as President-Elect Obama, who was a founding board member of Public Allies Chicago. He stepped down from his board post before Michelle Obama joined as staff.

Read more

Read more about applying to Public Allies, its distinguished alumni network, hiring a graduating Ally for your organization, hosting an Ally at your organization, and the program’s legacy of achievement.

On Michelle Obama and Public Allies, check out the Public Allies factsheet, and look for this year’s Michelle: A Biography by Liza Mundy at your local library.

Pres. Obama and Government Careers

With record numbers of first-time voters and young people backing Obama’s presidency, perhaps a new generation of government workers will not be so hard to recruit after all.

With Baby Boomers retiring in droves over the next decade, fears have been widespread in public and nonprofit sectors that the United States will face a leadership shortage.

Not enough young people have shown an interest in government careers, and in-roads to government careers are not well known. Government has a reputation of being inefficient, less lucrative than business sector work, and very, very bureaucratic. People cite student loans that are just too high, and the need for better marketing of the compelling opportunities available in the government.

“This will not be a call issued in one speech or one program – this will be a central cause of my presidency. We will ask Americans to serve. We will create new opportunities for Americans to serve. And we will direct that service to our most pressing national challenges.”- U.S. President-Elect Barack Obama during a speech given at the University of Colorado, Colorado Springs July 2, 2008.

John F. Kennedy inspired a generation of youth to serve through initiatives like Peace Corps. Will a new generation of people — young people and people who are recently discovering civic engagement — be inspired to join the ranks of an Obama-led federal government? What do you think?

If you are considering a career in government — whether you supported McCain or Obama during this election cycle — you should know about these resources:

• Obama’s transition site, Change.gov, offers an online form to apply for a non-career position within the Obama Administration.
• AmeriCorps*VISTA and Peace Corps both offer first-year alums noncompetitive eligibility for federal government jobs. That means these recent program grads can apply for jobs not open to the entire public.
• Many other service corps (see the side bar) have placements in local and state government agencies that give professionals a taste of that work environment and access to new, highly relevant networks for this work.
• The Partnership for Public Service has developed an array of resources on federal-government career paths, for people of varying educational backgrounds and skills. Note that federal jobs exist throughout the country, not just in Washington, D.C.
• Job sites like Hill Zoo and USA Jobs specialize in government-sector jobs.
• The U.S. Public Service Academy movement led by Echoing Green Fellow Chris Myers Asch (Teach For America alum) aims to make public sector careers as clear-cut and supported an option as military careers have been for centuries. Listen to this Idealist podcast episode featuring Myers Asch.
• Some help exists for student loan cancellation in exchange for (years of) public service employment.
• Read about Obama’s pre-election stance on national service.
• Today’s Chronicle of Philanthropy asks if Obama will inspire more minority leaders in the nonprofit sector, and posts thoughts about what others think may be his influence for the charity sector.
• Read Equal Justice Work’s blog post on Obama and public service expansion.

President-Elect Obama has been particularly clear that his administration will count on the help of people who have supported his candidacy and on those who didn’t. Young people may accept this invitation by entering the government workforce. If they do so with the enthusiasm and turn-out they have shown in his election bid, the looming leadership crisis may fail to materialize.

NYC Teaching Fellows

New teachers primarily work in Bronx and Brooklyn schools with high demand for faculty, covering subjects that are also desperately needed. Within two to three years, Fellows earn a subsidized Masters degree from university in the area.

NYC Teaching Fellows — as with Teach For America, Inner-City Teaching Corps, Mississippi Teacher Corps, and other education corps we are looking at this week — is designed to bring new talent to schools.

Eligibility

People who enter the program don’t need to have had any formal background in education, but do need to have a 3.0 Grade Point Average in undergraduate course work. Read about other eligibility requirements.

The program recruits both recent college grads as well as career changers.

Training and “placement”

After an intense June seven-week pre-service training, Fellows start teaching. The program assigns each Fellow the New York City borough in which they will teach, and their subject. (Of particular need are math and science teachers.)

Fellows research and apply for the teaching positions themselves, and are granted a provisional state teaching license for their time in the program.

While teaching, Fellows earn the salary and benefits of starting teachers in the city (salary nears $46,000).

Master’s degree

Each semester, Fellows take two courses towards their master’s degree, mostly paid for by the New York City Department of Education. (Over the course of the program, Fellows contribute almost $7,000 towards the cost of the mastser’s degree, and that is deducted from their pay checks.)

The specific universities and degrees vary for each Fellow, depending on the borough where they work, and the subject they teach. More than half attend City University of New York (CUNY) schools. For most Fellows, it takes two to three years to finish the degree. After that, NYC Teaching Fellows encourages graduating Fellows to stay in the city and continue teaching. They cite a statistic I’ve seen elsewhere that it takes about five years for a new teacher to really hit their stride, and they want all their Fellows to reach that point.

Multimedia

Browse profiles and videos of Fellows, including Travis Brown’s. Read the blog of Bill King, third-year Fellow teaching biology and physics.

Also, watch interviews with first-year Fellow Kristen Bloomer and take a look inside Fellow Jeanine Tubiolo’s classroom:

Finally, watch this online presentation about the NYC Teaching Fellows.

Deadlines and application

Upcoming deadlines to apply for a 2009 Fellowship are December 5 and January 5. Read more about the application process.

Resources

For more resources on graduate education, check out the Idealist.org Public Service Graduate Education Resource Center, and if you live in the U.S. South, come out to one of our graduate admissions fairs touring — tonight in New Orleans and Monday in Atlanta.

This week The New Service blog is looking at education service corps. While many service corps programs have application due dates in the spring for a fall start date, most education service corps have deadlines throughout the winter and start in the summer. Check out this list of education-related opprotunities that don’t require an education degree.

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Mississippi Teacher Corps

New teachers receive intense summer training, work in critical-needs schools in the Mississippi Delta or in Jackson for two years, and earn teaching degrees.

Aiming to rectify teacher shortages, as well as to develop the untapped teaching talent and leadership of college graduates, the Mississippi Teacher Corps is a program to look at. Designed for people with no formal background in teaching but who are passionate about becoming teachers. Especially for you if you love challenging yourself and want to engage young people and their communities though they may be very different from your own.

Placement and benefits

Corps members work in either Jackson, MS, or in the Mississippi Delta, and are placed in critical needs schools. They receive starting teacher salaries and health benefits in their districts as well as full tuition (including textbooks) from the University of Mississippi School of Education to pay for a master’s degree in curriculum and instruction. Read the full program description.

Training, support, and education

During the summer, first and second year Corps members team-teach classes at Holly Springs High School near Oxford, MS. New teachers are observed and receive feedback and guidance.

Throughout the two school years, Corps members travel back to the university for Saturday classes twice a month towards earning their Master’s in Curriculum and Instruction. Corps members’s training, classes and workshops are tailored to their unique experience and are not open to other students at University of Mississippi.

Multimedia

Reading the blogs of program director Ben Guest, instructor Ann Monroe, and Corps members, you definitely get the feeling that the structure and benefits of the program are tremendous gifts to Corps members, but that the real gift is working with the students.

Watch this interview with Ashley Johnson from the Class of 2006:

Cohort and community

The program also fosters a spirit of community and friendship among its Corps members. Many schools of education boast the cohort model (in which students start together, take all classes together, and graduate together), but require that students attend full-time in order to participate. On the other hand, many students who go to grad school part-time miss out on the cohort experience. Mississippi Teacher Corps engages the Corps as a learning cohort, although members take their education courses only part-time.

Deadlines and eligibility

As with Teach For America and other education service corps, the Mississippi Teacher Corps has a few deadlines throughout the winter. The next deadline is Nov. 25. See the other deadlines and application. Also, you don’t need to have been an education major, though a 3.0 minimum undergraduate Grade Point Average is expected.

Resources

Follow Mississippi Teacher Corps on Twitter.

For more resources on graduate education, check out the Idealist.org Public Service Graduate Education Resource Center, and if you live in the U.S. South, come out to one of our graduate admissions fairs touring New Orleans and Atlanta in the coming days.

This week The New Service blog is looking at education service corps. While many service corps programs have application due dates in the spring for a fall start date, most education service corps have deadlines throughout the winter and start in the summer. Check out this list of education-related opprotunities that don’t require an education degree.

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Chicago’s Inner-City Teaching Corps

New teachers serve for two years in Chicago’s Catholic and charter schools, live in supportive inter-faith communities, earn alternative teacher certification, and work towards their education degree.

The Inner-City Teaching Corps of Chicago aims to transform education in under-served communities and to empower children in urban schools. The organization houses two programs that create and train new teachers who work in under-resourced schools in Chicago’s poorest neighborhoods.

Eligibility & placement

The Volunteer Teaching Corps recruits and supports recent college graduates, and the Urban Impact Through Education (UNITE) program brings “proven leaders from the business world into the teaching profession.”

As with Teach For America and other education service corps you don’t need to have been an education major, though a 3.0 minimum undergraduate Grade Point Average is expected.

ICTC places its Corps members in Catholic and charter schools because its Corps members are working towards alternative certification during their first year of service.

Alternative certification and education

The Corps’s Alternative Teacher Certification Program is a partnership with Northwestern University that adds a diverse group of talented new teachers to Chicago’s schools and allows Corps members to earn up to 22 credits towards an M.S. in Education during their term of service. Read more about ICTC’s professional development benefits.

Community living and other benefits

Volunteer Teaching Corps members live in supportive communities with other six or seven other Corps members—communities that are spiritual, and inter-faith, depending on the beliefs of the community members. Corps members receive room and board, health insurance, and a $5/day allowance. They can defer qualified student loans, and earn the Eli Segal AmeriCorps Education Award for each year they are in the program. (Corps members use the first year of the Ed Award to contribute to the cost of the first eight Northwestern University course credits towards their degree.)

Competitiveness

This year 35-40 Corps members serve in the Volunteer Teacher Corps, but the program gets five times that number of applications. About 35 teachers serve in the UNITE program for mid-career professionals transitioning into the field of education.

Career trajectory

While teachers nationally tend to stay in the classroom an average of 3-5 years before burning out, almost 90 percent of ICTC-trained teachers are still in the field of education, according to the organization’s 2007 Annual Report.

More info and open house

Read more about this year’s Corps members, and about admissions. Note that the next application deadline is Nov. 5 — that’s next week! Also note that ICTC runs several other programs.

Also note that the Volunteer Teaching Corps hosts a weekend-long open house in mid-January called the Come & See Weekend (January 15-18, 2009). Participants in the weekend stay in the VTC communities, participate in a Corps member’s classroom, and visit Chicago’s South and West Sides. Another application deadline follows that weekend on January 21.

Resources

For more resources on graduate education, check out the Idealist.org Public Service Graduate Education Resource Center, and if you live in the U.S. South, come out to one of our graduate admissions fairs touring New Orleans and Atlanta in the coming days.

This week The New Service blog is looking at education service corps. While many service corps programs have application due dates in the spring for a fall start date, most education service corps have deadlines throughout the winter and start in the summer. Check out this list of education-related opprotunities that don’t require an education degree.
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TFA Alum Michelle Rhee Explained, in the WaPo

Teach For America’s most controversial alum Michelle Rhee has garnered media attention for her iconoclastic, unbureacratic ways as the Washington, DC, chancellor of public schools. The Washington Post published a column by Jay Mathews today tracing Rhee’s basic philosophies about what works and doesn’t work in schools back to her time as a TFA Corps member in Baltimore.

“‘It was a zoo, every day,’ she recalled. Thirty-six children, all poor, suffered under a novice who had no idea what to do. But within months, for Rhee and other influential educators in her age group, the situation changed. She vowed not “to let 8-year-olds run me out of town….

“She found unconventional but effective ways to teach reading and math….Students became calm and engaged. Test scores soared. She kept one group with her for second and third grade. She was convinced that her students, despite their problems, ‘were the most talented kids ever.’”

But Rhee couldn’t teach them forever. According to Mathews, Rhee explained: “‘All of those kids would go on to other teachers and totally lose everything because those teachers were’ lousy. (Rhee used an earthier adjective.)”

The experience of working against convention to get those kids to succeed — and then the crushing disappointment of watching them go on to fail — shaped Rhee’s outlook and mission running DC’s public schools.

Teach For America, the nation’s most famous and elite education service corps, strives to eliminate educational inequities by placing graduates of top universities for two years in critical needs school districts throughout the United States. The program doesn’t aim to develop the teacher work force or address teacher shortages so much as to make it possible for all children to achieve in school, no matter where they are born, or under what circumstances.

It makes sense that Rhee works outside conventions. The two-year program trains its Corps members somewhat differently from a traditional academic program for teacher preparation. Because Corps members receive a couple months of training before becoming full-time teachers for the first time, their training tends to be very concrete, focusing on assessment, planning, and instruction, rather than emphasizing philosophy and content that are detached from the classroom application.

Hired through school district’s alternative certification programs, many Corps members earn certification through credits they earn through out their two years.

Corps members earn a starting salary for teachers in their district; benefits such as student loan deferment and the Eli Segal Education Award come through a partnership with AmeriCorps.

About a third of TFA alums go on to pursue careers in education. Most go on to leadership roles in other fields and sectors, informed by their years in the classroom. (Read about the impact of TFA Corps members and alumni. Read more about TFA’s career transitions support.) TFA has established partnerships with graduate schools who offer scholarships, application fee waivers, admission deferments and other benefits to TFA alums.

In the past year, applications to Teach For America (TFA) soared to over 25,000, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy earlier in the year, while only 6,200 TFA Corps members served last year.

That’s a lot of applicants who are turned away.

Many of these tens of thousands of applicants are drawn to Teach For America’s mission. Other applicants may be drawn to service more generally, and have applied to TFA because it’s hands-down one of the most prestigious, best-known, and best-funded AmeriCorps programs. Other applicants still may be attracted to the honor of serving with such an elite Corps of young people.

This week The New Service blog is going to look at a few other education service corps, including Chicago’s Inner City Teaching Corps and the Mississippi Teacher Corps. While many service corps programs have application due dates in the spring for a fall start date, most education service corps have deadlines throughout the winter and start in the summer.

For graduating college seniors interested in applying to TFA this fall, note that the second for four deadlines is coming up Nov. 7. Read more about TFA admissions.

TFA has been a cosponsor of our Idealist.org graduate admissions fairs for years and this fall financially sponsored two of our grad fairs, including the upcoming event in Atlanta, Nov. 3.

Columnist Jay Mathews hosted a chat online about the column on Michelle Rhee.

Tuesday 10/28, Eli Lilly and Company and Teach For America announced a new networking partnership in Indianapolis that aims to strengthen the TFA Corps members as well as the students they teach.

Career Tip, Document Your Service!

Saving facts and artifacts to share with hiring managers and grad admissions

Among the most important things you can do during your term of service is to keep records of your accomplishments now to share later, during job and admissions applications.

By “records” I mean everything from numbers to writing samples to screen shots of web sites you helped design to photographs of you or your clients in action.

The Facts of Your Service: Numbers

At the very least, keep track of your numbers. What the numbers are will depend on your type of service. Hours of training is a common one.

If you are a teacher, tutor, after-school coordinator, or trainer, keep track of numbers of students or participants; increase in grades and test scores from baseline assessments at the start of year; number of classroom volunteers you recruited and managed, etc.

If you are a project developer, keep track of dollars you raised, community partnerships you developed, clients your program served, meetings you facilitated, volunteers you recruited and managed, etc.

A great way to measure the impact of your service is not only to count your direct clients, but also the indirect clients of your service. Two examples: if you are an AmeriCorps member working with adult learners of English, look at the help you’ve offered the adults, as well as the benefit to their children, and the community. If you are an AmeriCorps*VISTA developing a volunteer program, count your volunteers, as well as the impact of their service.

When you are ready to transition, use at least some of the numbers in your resume and in anecdotes about the impact of your work! Numbers help a hiring manager or admissions committee put your resume into context and understand the impact of your work.

(See these chapters from the Idealist.org Guide to Nonprofit Careers about preparing your resume and for the job interview.)

The Artifacts of Your Service: Portfolios

One way to present the artifacts of your service is to create a portfolio — similar to a professional scrapbook — of your service term, with sections for each skill set you have built or employed.

The portfolio can start off with your position description and/or work plan, your resume, your Description of Service (for Returned Peace Corps Volunteers), constructive performance evaluations, letters of recommendation, workshop evaluations, and thank-you notes or emails that describe the impact of your service from colleagues, community partners, and others.

Skill sets to include may be anything from trail and house building to grant writing, event planning, curricula development and teaching, program development, volunteer management, etc.

Mini-portfolios to leave behind

Rather than taking the whole portfolio to interviews with you, you can photocopy relevant sections and leave them behind at the interview, for the hiring manager or admissions counselor to look at in their own time.

I don’t recommend offering more than a few samples of your work, but I do recommend you wait till you are prompted to offer recommendation letters or reference contacts.

Online portfolios

Alternately, you can create an online portfolio like Beth Kanter — the guru of social media use for nonprofits — has done, through a tool like Wikispaces (public spaces are free). Include the link on your resume and cover letters with the rest of your contact information.

Online portfolios are especially useful if you’ve used multimedia to document your service. Linking to your audio or video podcast on iTunes or Youtube is easier if your portfolio is already online.

And a warning: Keep in mind that if you have designed web pages or developed web content, capturing the image of the web page through a screen shot is still the best route for documentation. Linking to the web pages is too risky. Once you have left your service site, you won’t know if your web pages will be updated, if links will have gone sour, or if your pages will have come down altogether. Because you have no control over the pages after you are gone, it’s best to preserve them visually through a screen shot rather than linking to them.

Writing samples

Writing samples are great to include in your portfolio.  A common question I get is what to use when you are asked for professional writing samples.

Depending on  your position this year, you should have a chance to collect a variety of these. Anything professional you’ve written should work — from grant proposals, brochures and newsletters, formal emails or letters, project descriptions, focus group or survey summary reports, web content, press releases, etc.

If you are in a direct-service role with few opportunities to write, try to create a reason to write tied to your service like a narrative summary of your service or a specific service project.

Hang on to your documentation

The problem many service corps alumni face is that they’ve saved all these documents on the computer at their old service site, and now that they are finished, can’t access them easily to share during the job or school search.

Save yourself the heartache by emailing documents and photographs to your personal email account, or backing them up on a thumb drive. You can also use online tools like Google Docs and Flickr to access documents and photos later on.

Returned Peace Corps Volunteers can request a photocopy of their Document of Service from Peace Corps, to be sent to them directly or to their hiring manager or graduate admissions office. (Peace Corps keeps your DOS for 60 years.)

Other reasons to document

Documenting your service is not just useful for your next steps. Keeping good records helps during your term with grant writing and reporting, monthly reporting for AmeriCorps*VISTAs, communicating with your supervisor, preparing for your mid-term or end-of-service performance evaluations, and creating public relations materials for your program.

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.