Summer of Service Program

by Christina Malliet

On November 8, Shirley Sagawa, author of The American Way to Change, wrote a piece for The Huffington Post on the importance of a Summer of Service (SOS) in combating the “summer slide” – the academic regression students experience while intellectually unengaged during the summer months. Sagawa suggests that such a program would provide opportunities for personal growth equal to those of summer enrichment camps, especially by encouraging students to cultivate a sense of purpose and take on leadership roles in their communities from an early age.

At ICP, we initiated the idea of Summer of Service in 2005 with our vision of a national program that engages young teens transitioning from middle to high school in an intensive “rite of passage” service-learning experience. In particular, ICP's work on this project included serving as an expert consultant on legislation related to the initiative, building support among stakeholders, and conducting extensive research on existing programs. ICP maintains a significant collection of resources for SOS programs and educators on our online resource center, including information on research, effective program practices, news about SOS, and a database of SOS program around the country.

Like Sagawa, we were excited about our successful advocacy for the inclusion of Summer of Service in the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act of April 2009. The Serve America Act allotted $10 million in funds for SOS programs, as well as $10 million for grants of $500 for students who complete 100 hours of service in the program. These generous funds allowed nearly 4,000 students to engage in service-learning in summer 2010.

As Sagawa says, this program is inevitably give-and-take for the youth and the communities they serve, proving that young people are effective in building a better world for tomorrow; “Communities across America might find an important new resource in their own backyards -- young people who are ready to serve, if only they are asked.”

Senator Harkin Supports Serve America Act at Hill Day Kick Off

On September 15 national service advocates and practitioners from 40 states participated in Voices for National Service’s Hill Day. They rallied in Washington, DC, to ask their Senators and Representatives to fully fund the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. I attended the kick off event for Hill Day on behalf of Innovations in Civic Participation (ICP).

Senator Tom Harkin (D-Iowa) and other service advocates addressed the crowd. The Senator emphasized the need for fully supporting the Serve America Act. The appropriation level he is requesting for the Serve America Act is higher than President Obama’s request and much higher than the House request. He urged participants in the Hill Day to ask their Representatives to support the Senate appropriation levels. To learn more and take action to support national service funding go here.

Senator Harkin spoke positively about working toward expanding AmeriCorps to 250,000 members by 2017 and he hopes that goal can be met sooner. He provided anectdotes about the important work of volunteers during disaster relief and focused specifically on the work of seniors. The Senator discussed increasing education awards and making it possible for SeniorCorps education awards to be transferred to any other person (not only family members) or perhaps individuals from low-income backgrounds.

The Senator was recently named chair of the Senate Health, Education, Labor and Pensions (HELP) Committee while also chairing the Appropriations Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education and Related Agencies. At the Tuesday event, Senator Harkin emphasized the importance of the HELP Committee and joked that appropriators and authorizers are always told to talk with each other and now he needs to talk with himself.

Following the Senator’s remarks Voices organizers sent participants off to a day of meetings advocating for national service.

Voices for National Service is a coalition of national service programs and organizations, state commissions and individuals who come together to advocate for national service. ICP is a Voices member. Voices was founded in 2003 in response to major cuts in federal funds for AmeriCorps. Voices members have participated in annual Hill Days since 2005. Thanks to the coalition’s work government support for national service in the US is now stronger then ever.

Shirley Sagawa on Senator Kennedy's Legacy

The Chronicle of Philanthropy featured this editoral by Shirley Sagawa last Thursday in remembrance of Senator Edward "Ted" M. Kennedy:

*cross-posted from the CoP*

Legacies: Sen. Kennedy and Public Service

By Shirley Sagawa

As tributes pour in about the role of the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy, Democrat of Massachusetts, he is being heralded for promoting national-service legislation, but little attention is focusing on the pivotal role he played in persuading liberals to back the ideas that eventually led to the creation of the AmeriCorps program. His vigorous efforts to promote the importance of public service — and to offer incentives to encourage people of all income levels to serve — will be one of his most important legacies.

In the late 1980s, the Democratic Leadership Council, a group of moderate Democrats, unveiled a legislative proposal to require students to give a year of civilian or military service in order to get financial aid. Liberals didn’t like the idea of forcing needy students to serve. The opposition of House Democrats was so strong, it looked like any attempt to authorize national service legislation linking service to benefits was going to die.

But Senator Kennedy saw the wisdom of strengthening Americans’ engagement in public service. For him, it was a value deeply ingrained in his family and in the work he did every day to fight for those in need. He sought to put together legislation that would serve this end — including a test of the controversial idea of tying student aid to full-time service. He worked tirelessly to convince his House colleagues to go along, while at the same time, courting Senate Republicans and President George H.W. Bush.

The legislation that resulted from his vision laid the groundwork for AmeriCorps — which offers an education stipend in exchange for service — as well as the Learn and Serve program to integrate community service into the lives of children in elementary and secondary school.

In 1993 he successfully led the fight to persuade Congress to pass President Clinton’s AmeriCorps plan. And last year, seeing the first opportunity in more than a decade to extend and expand national service, he worked quietly behind the scenes with Republican Sen. Orrin Hatch to prepare new legislation that would attract bipartisan support and might be signed within the first 100 days of a new administration.

This forethought resulted in a bill signed by President Obama on April 21 — the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, so named by the gracious act of his longtime friend and sometime opponent, Senator Hatch.

I first met Senator Kennedy near three decades ago, as an intern in his office at the beginning of the Reagan administration. Awed by his energy and commitment, I was inspired to pursue a career in public policy.

I had the chance to work for him again after law school, as an aide on the Senate Labor Committee, working on national service and youth policy. Because of Senator Kennedy’s leadership on behalf of national service, millions of other Americans who never had the opportunity to meet him have also been introduced to the life-changing power of serving others. They have and will go on to make a difference and to inspire others to serve.

Through them, as Senator Kennedy put it nearly three decades ago, “the work goes on, the cause endures, the hope still lives, and the dream shall never die.”

Shirley Sagawa is a visiting fellow at the Center for American Progress, in Washington.

National Service Does Not Lead to Civic Apathy and Disengagement

In his recent article for The Heritage Foundation, Brian Brown argues that the rise of progressive values calling citizens to national service to combat social needs and challenges has instead made the American populace apathetic and increasingly disengaged from civic society.

Brown argues that addressing social ills on a national level means that the solution must therefore also be scaled up to national levels. In doing so the common person loses a sense of identity with the cause and accomplishment in effecting a solution, since any results must necessarily be less immediate. Brown concludes that the only effective civic service must be at the local community level, and that national service programs have been failures, despite progressive governments’ attempts to rally the populace around a cause:

“…20th century Presidents frequently charged into office with calls to new wars, hoping to arouse an increasingly disconnected populace into real public-spirited participation. From the Community Conservation Corps to VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) to the Serve America Act, American leaders proved to each generation on a national stage that Americans, while privately generous, did not feel a common call to the kind of national service that…would define the newly remodeled nation. The emergence of each new program underlined the fact that the previous one had not done the trick, and each one had to be replaced or reinvented within a generation.”

At ICP, we disagree. The evidence is plain that, far from each new initiative failing, Americans have been enthusiastic about taking advantage of opportunities for national service and are clamoring for more.

In 2007, there were 158,735 applications for 75,000 AmeriCorps spots. In 2008, there were 171,085 applications. The 2009 fiscal year is still in progress, but on July 20 Tim Zimmerman, Director of Creative Content for Be The Change, announced on Change Wire (the blog of ServiceNation) that according to an unpublished Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), between November 2008 and June 2009, AmeriCorps had received 146,699 applications with a third of the year left. Clearly, Americans view national service as a valuable pathway to civic engagement, and the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, with its intention to vastly expand the number of opportunities available, will strengthen that pathway.

Nor have national service programs resulted in Americans feeling apathetic and lacking in a sense of accomplishment in addressing broad, society-wide social needs. AmeriCorps members work in hundreds of organizations throughout the country, serving the needs of a community to which they become closely attached, and where results are real and tangible.

Recent research by the Corporation for National and Community Service, moreover, finds that members of AmeriCorps programs have significantly greater belief in the thought that they can make a difference in their community, and are more engaged in volunteering and other civic service activities.[i]

While Brown is quite right that effective service takes place at the community level, he fails to acknowledge the ability of national government to provide the means for inspiring and connecting volunteers to service opportunities in a community, such as through serve.gov, and to providing support for making those opportunities successful, rewarding, and even profitable (it is worth noting that the economic contribution of volunteer service in 2007 added up to approximately $158 billion[ii]. Specifically, volunteers leveraged through CNCS programs demonstrated an economic contribution of approximately $4.62[iii] billion on a budget of $884.5 million[iv] – a return of $4.22 return on every dollar invested in the programs.)

Furthermore, it is puzzling why Brown would consider it a failing that programs need to periodically be reinvented. Society changes over time and Americans are constantly innovating new and more effective approaches to deep-seated social challenges.

A service program that remained static would become rapidly obsolete and irrelevant, but instead national service programs have evolved over the years to keep up with societal needs. The Civilian Conservation Corps (presumably what Brown means when he speaks of the Community Conservation Corps) lives on through modern programs such as the Corps Network and the AmeriCorps National Civilian Conservation Corps. Volunteers In Service To America (VISTA), having merged with AmeriCorps to become AmeriCorps VISTA in 1993, continues to be a powerful force against poverty, as it has been for the past 40 years. Innovation is hardly synonymous with failure.

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[i] http://www.nationalservice.gov/pdf/08_0513_longstudy_report.pdf, pp 19-32

[ii] Based on information as to number of volunteer hours contributed in 2007 (8.1 billion) (http://www.volunteeringinamerica.gov/assets/resources/VIA_Brief_FINAL.pdf), multiplied by the calculated value of volunteer work per hour in 2007 ($19.51) (http://www.independentsector.org/programs/research/volunteer_time.html)

[iii] Based on information as to number of volunteer hours through CNCS in 2007 (3.9 million) (http://www.nationalservice.gov/pdf/2008_budget_justification.pdf), multiplied by the calculated value of volunteer work per hour in 2007 ($19.51) (http://www.independentsector.org/programs/research/volunteer_time.html)

[iv] http://www.nationalservice.gov/pdf/2009_budget_chart.pdf

ICP Convenes Summer of Service Workgroup

On April 21st, 2009 President Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act into law. On the same day youth service-learning program practitioners and evaluators gathered at a meeting convened by Innovations in Civic Participation (ICP) to discuss and develop a vision for Summer of Service (SOS) programs.

High quality SOS programs target authentic community needs through thoughtfully-designed service-learning activities that challenge young people to solve problems, build valuable life skills, reflect critically about their role in society, and pave the way for academic success in high school and beyond. Guided by teams of youth-adult partners, SOS programs require a sustained and intensive commitment over the summer months to plan, execute, reflect and recognize the contributions of young people as leaders in tackling critical community issues.

As a result of ICP’s work promoting Summer of Service the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act includes $10 million in funds for SOS programs and $10 million for $500 educational award grants for students who complete 100 hours of service through SOS programs. This legislation makes SOS funding available for programs that serve students in both middle and high school, but prioritizes those programs that enroll students in grades six through nine.

The Summer of Service Workgroup meeting was organized by Jean Manney and Joshua Truitt from ICP. The meeting was led by Alan Melchior from the Center for Youth and Communities at Brandeis University and Nicole Tysvaer from the University of Michigan, both consultants on ICP’s SOS initiative. Melchior was assisted by Sadie Miller, a graduate student at the Heller School at Brandeis. Participating in the meeting were Lisa Bardwell from EarthForce, Ernest Morrell from UCLA and IDEA, Susan Root from NYLC and an evaluator of the WalkAbout SOS Program, and Jon Schmidt from the Chicago Public Schools SOS Program. Adraine McKell and Laura Lockwood from the ManaTeens SOS Program joined part of the conversation via conference call.

Nicole Tysvaer presented a draft of the Program Design Toolkit she is writing to assist practitioners in the field with designing and implementing SOS programs. Tysvaer also discussed plans for Program Insights, interactive multimedia presentations on exemplary SOS programs. The group offered excellent feedback from their perspective as practitioners.

The group discussed existing programs with an eye to what is working in the field and what needs improvement. This informed conversations and brainstorming sessions led by Alan Melchior about the mission, goals, assumptions, strategies, and outcomes of SOS programs. The group developed an inspiring vision for what these programs could become and their potential impact.

These conversations will inform ICP’s future work on the SOS initiative. Alan Melchior will create an Evaluation Toolkit to provide programs with a basic understanding of evaluation methods as well as a set of reliable tools that can be used by practitioners to generate data to assess both individual initiatives and the overall progress of programs across the field, and ultimately provide better evidence of program effectiveness. Improvements are coming soon to ICP’s SOS Resource Center, which will be informed by the Workgroup meeting as well.