AmeriCorps Expansion Should Consider Quality, Not Number of Participants

February 09, 2009

AmeriCorps Expansion Should Consider Quality, Not Number of Participants

If Congress moves to expand AmeriCorps, the national-service program, it should focus more on improving its quality than on increasing the number of people who participate, a consultant who helped draft the legislation that created the program told a forum on national service today.

“This has been the problem with AmeriCorps for many, many years,” said Shirley Sagawa, who served in President Clinton’s White House when he created AmeriCorps and the Corporation for National Service (now the Corporation for Community and National Service). Starting with Mr. Clinton, she added, presidents have “set the measure of AmeriCorps being the number of bodies in it.”

She said that’s why about half of the AmeriCorps members work part time instead of full time.

Ms. Sagawa, who served as the corporation’s first operating and policy officer, also headed a group that advised President Obama’s transition project on the future of the Corporation for National and Community Service. She spoke during a panel discussion organized by the Hudson Institute.

Both President Obama and the Serve America Act, a bill that has been introduced in the Senate, propose greatly expanding national-service programs like AmeriCorps, which places people in full-time and part-time nonprofit jobs for 10 or 12 months.

“If there’s a huge ramp up very quickly without being careful about engaging the nonprofit sector and really being thoughtful about where we can use AmeriCorps to best effects, we do risk sending people all over the place and not having outcomes,” she said. The program should also foster a kind of “core curriculum,” she said, “so the people who come for the experience actually leave with a heightened sense of civic responsibility and commitment.”

Leslie Lenkowsky, who headed the corporation in the Bush administration, said that while the time is ripe to get more Americans involved in community service, AmeriCorps is not necessarily the best way to do it. While some AmeriCorps programs, like Teach for America, can demonstrate real results, others are less effective because they operate through thousands of different nonprofit groups that each set their own requirements and do little evaluation.

See Mr. Lenkowsky’s opinion piece for The Chronicle on national service.

— Suzanne Perry

Comments

While there is much wisdom here, there is also a dearth of details. I hope the Chronicle covers the full Sagawa report and its findings.

Quality is absolutely essential. Based on my 14 years’ experience with AmeriCorps as national director / founder of a program that evolved out of a “planning grant” from the Corporation during the first year of AmeriCorps, I know that the Corporation has both a solid infrastructure and the experience to start new programs and grow existing ones with proven track records.

Expanding quality community service initiatives (including Senior Corps and VISTA, as well as AmeriCorps) that respond to the nation’s needs and tap the energy and talent of those who want to serve is timely. The experience is that during tough economic times, the ranks of those who want to serve swell enormously. The Corporation, along with its tested State Commission and national nonprofit infrastructure, are ideally prepared to respond. How to respond seems to be the primary question that Ms. Sagawa is raising, along with whether the emphasis on part-time to get larger numbers has sacrificed quality.

What are the details? Are there backlogs of quality projects that haven’t been fully funded or funded at all because the Corporation’s funding has been declining in real terms for at least 5 years? What does the research tell us about the value and cost-effectiveness of full-time vs. part-time service, and how can that data help drive project design, selection and further evaluation? What are the other programs and models that Mr. Lenkowski would have us consider and can some of these be supported by the Corporation?

These are only a couple of the most obvious questions raised by The Chronicle’s article. As I’m sure the Chronicle knows, there are a number of events in Washington DC this week being sponsored by The Corps Network, the Association of State Service Commissions, VOICES for National Service, Be the Change, and others, that are exploring the future of national and community service. I trust the The Chronicle will cover these and provide the grist to help the world of Philanthropy better consider how it can be supportive. For example, one of the barriers to growing AmeriCorps in real terms is the availability of matching funds and other organizational support to assure quality programs. During the early days of AmeriCorps, a number foundations and corporations came forward, recognizing that service has a multiplier effect and can enhance other initiatives they have been supporting. Can we see a revival of this thinking, especially in these turbulent times?

Cal George
Director of Organization Development, 40Plus of Greater Washington,
Former National Director / Founder, Community HealthCorps

— Cal Geroge Feb 10, 02:34 PM #
My organization applied for an AmeriCorps grant this year and we’re waiting to hear the result. We started our planning hoping to establish several full-time AmeriCorps positions in various programs in our agency. We quickly realized the need to convert those positions to half-time, purely because of the AmeriCorps requirement to provide health insurance with specific benefits to any full-time volunteer. The cost to provide that level of insurance, even inside of our agency health plan, made the full-time positions more expensive to our agency than if we had simply hired additional full-time staff members. If the AmeriCorps program wants to increase the number of full-time volunteer positions, they may want to revisit their health insurance requirement so that it’s affordable.

— human services grants officer Feb 10, 03:44 PM #
Not all AmeriCorps programs “do little evaluation” as the author suggests. They do, however, vary in the type and depth of evaluation they do. This is an important factor in the vetting process when deciding which programs should receive AmeriCorps members, but is not a flaw inherent in the number of volunteers serving.

— kg Feb 10, 03:51 PM #
I’m an AmeriCorps VISTA member in the middle of my service year. I wanted to comment on two things: first, regarding health insurance: perhaps the state/national AmeriCorps programs are set up differently, but I do know that the VISTA program (which is focused on indirect service, supporting the work that nonprofits do in the community) does not require the organization I am working for to provide health insurance. Rather, our health coverage (not strictly insurance) is administered through an AmeriCorps contractor. Secondly, the article seems to suggest that it is less than desirable to have many part-time volunteers, emphasizing full-time service. However, options to serve part-time can help draw in qualified and motivated people whose circumstances, whether educational or financial, do not allow them to serve full time. (The AmeriCorps living stipend is very, very low, and there are restrictions on outside employment or on taking classes in many, if not most, of the programs requiring full-time service.) Quality of outcomes is certainly more important than number of bodies, but part-time vs. full-time has nothing to do with whether the hosting organizations will achieve desired outcomes.

— A VISTA in Indiana Feb 11, 10:23 AM #
As an AmeriCorps Program Director involved with national service since 1993, I support Ms. Sagawa’s call for quality over quantity. Since my program, Volunteer Maryland, was one of the first national service demonstration projects in the early 1990s, we have developed tried and true systems for recruitment, training, and management of AmeriCorps members. However, each year, we have had to trim our operating budget without lowering the number of members we deploy in local communities because of the chronic call from Congress and the Corporation for National and Community Service to lower the per member cost and deploy more bodies. I know our program is ready to expand our sites and member placements; however, we need proportional operational support to make this happen. If we have learned anything in the first sixteen years of AmeriCorps, I hope it is that program staff are not able to quickly and dramatically increase the number of bodies who fill AmeriCorps slots without sacrificing staff and member development and retention, community benefits, and program quality.

To Mr. Lenkowsky’s point on the lack of or inconsistent program evaluation that occurs in the AmeriCorps program network, I have to say that this is a moot point. In terms of evaluation, the Corporation has truly exhausted this issue in its requests for funding proposals, grant review and negotiation processes, grant awards and regulations, and reporting requirements. I know that in Maryland, all of our programs have strict evaluation requirements. Many of these programs, like Volunteer Maryland, work with a diverse group of nonprofits and communities. This diversity leads us to evaluate each program on its merits—not to compare it to different types of programs and services. It is in this diversity that, I believe, AmeriCorps demonstrates its true power to help communities achieve real results. Most programs, like Volunteer Maryland, look to community members themselves to identify problems and propose solutions; we then deploy AmeriCorps resources with care to help those communities realize their own improvements. It’s not easy to standardize, to be sure, but it works.

— Barbara Ellen Reynolds, Volunteer Maryland Feb 11, 11:10 AM #
Americorps’ value could be greatly increased if the Corporation became far more serious about connecting Americorps service with long-term careers in commmunity organizing, community development, and community change. Grassroots groups and other nonprofits addressing issues of poverty face severe staffing problems because of the absence of “pipelines” preparing people for challenging work on our nation’s largest issues — poor schools, the lack of services, unemployment, exclusion, lack of opportunity, hopelessness.

Americorps could greatly alleviate this crisis if it added a Second Step component designed to recruit and support highly committed graduates of its volunteer programs, providing them with advice, transitional income, and extended educational benefits as they move on to internships, apprenticeships and educational programs which are geared specifically to prepare them for longterm careers improving communities and increasing opportunities for people from low-income backgrounds. This would be particularly valuable if it stressed the recruitment of people of color and people from limited income backgrounds whose leadership and assistance are much in demand.

— Andy Mott, Community Learning Partnership Feb 11, 11:23 AM #
There is an essential corollary to Shirley’s point about measuring results as the number of people serving – the fixation on driving down “cost per AmeriCorps member.” This focus was originated by Congressional critics and then exacerbated by the Corporation itself. It is absurd as suggesting that we should judge the success of our military by the cost per soldier.

The initial impact was to eliminate essential operating funding that nonprofits used to support the AmeriCorps programs they run. This prompted some organizations to abandon their AmeriCorps efforts and discouraged new entrants. The second wave was an obsession with “volunteer generation” – compounding the measuring results by bodies problem. The Corporation needs leadership on staff and in Congress that will help shift the focus back to results.

Michael Robbins
The SEED Foundation
Former CNCS staff & former AmeriCorps Program Director

— Michael Robbins Feb 11, 01:22 PM #

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