Posts Tagged ‘americorps’
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Cuts threaten Americorps
Two years ago, the Serve America Act was passed with much fanfare. It established a goal of expanding from 75,000 government-supported volunteers to 250,000, and aimed to increase education funding and establish a summer volunteer program for s
tudents, paying $500 (which would be applied to college costs) to high-school and middle-school student who participate. The world’s voluntary organisations looked on with envy.
What a difference a couple of years can make. With pressure to slash budgets,
the Republicans are now proposing to abolish the Corporation for National and Community Service which funds the likes of Americorps and Learn and Serve America.
I think this seems like a false economy for the US, and a real blow for the young people affected. After all, the Americorps version of “national service” is voluntary, not compulsory, and participants receive living expenses and modest college expenses (not a bad option in a time of record youth unemployment rates). It supports innovative projects like Teach for America, which fills hard-to-fill teaching positions with America’s top college graduates, City Year, which has been shown to dramatically reduce teenage drop-out rates in schools, and numerous other voluntary organisations, large and small. (For more, see ICP’s collection of 52 of the most innovative Americorps programmes.)
As Shirley Sagwa writes in the Huffington Post: “Volunteers aren’t free — somebody needs to recruit them and manage them — and charities often struggle for resources, especially during down economies. AmeriCorps members, by recruiting and supervising community volunteers, make it possible for millions of people to make a real difference. As a result, the charitable sector is stronger and volunteers more effective, thereby lessening the need for greater government spending.”
Service Nation, Stand for Americorps and many others are campaigning against the cuts.
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Lost Generation? David Blanchflower warns of the 'lull before the storm'
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At a special lecture this week, organised by v, former Bank of England Monetary Policy Committee Member, Professor David Blanchflower, highlighted to a packed auditorium at the RSA, the dangers of youth unemployment for society and the long term negative impact on a young person’s life chances.And the panellists, including; Stephen Timms MP, Financial Secretary to the Treasury; David Willetts MP, Shadow Minister for Universities and Skills; Miles Templeman, Director-General of the Institute of Directors and Wes Streeting, President of the National Union of Students, agreed. Willetts acknowledging, ‘young people are the clear victims in this recession’.
With youth unemployment nudging one million people, Blanchflower warned that more needs to be done to support young people, stressing that, ‘we have to deal with this situation now because the costs of not dealing with it are even more serious.’
v’s Chief Executive Terry Ryall supported this analysis, saying, ‘we know from our work with 100,000s of young people that the recession is hitting them hard’.
v used the special event to call for funding and cross party political support to implement a unified national public service scheme, building on the success of our full-time volunteering programme ‘vtalent year’. Targeted at the most disadvantaged and marginalised – who will be the most vulnerable when the job market recovers – such a scheme could make a significant
impact on the lives of
young people as well as all the issues surrounding youth unemployment.
Watch Professor Blanchflower’s keynote address here.
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Youth volunteering drops in the US: What should we learn?
For the first time since 2001, volunteering amongst youth in the US is seeing a downward trend. The Washington Post speaks to Peter Lev
ine, director of Tufts University’s Center for Information & Research on Civic Learning & Engagement or CIRCLE, who acknowledges a ‘loss in momentum’ in youth volunteering based on research by the institute, though young people below the age of 25 are still ‘volunteering
in higher numbers than their parents did’. (That shouldn’t be cause for comfort per se because the population of the country has grown significantly as well). Levine is hopeful that the Serve America Act which will inject funds into AmeriCorps will be instrumental in changing this situation. Well-known US site Volunteer Match, that lists opportunities for volunteers, also had similar findings from a separate research study though they believe that the situation isn’t as bad as it sounds with thousands of young people having volunteered recently for the Obama campaign, for example.
Another potential reason for this drop is the bad economy, with young people preferring to work at McDonald’s for money rather than to volunteer their time for charity. Surprisingly, however, a lot of young people are applying to programmes like AmeriCorps and Teach for America, but are often failing to gain admission because they are so over-subscribed. So there are two clearly demarcated kinds of groups applying to volunteer – one, those that would volunteer locally but can’t afford to anymore, and the other, those that are willing and qualified to work in specific well-known, community service-focussed government paid schemes but don’t get admitted. What is important then is to create opportunities that make volunteering attractive enough for those who are unsuccessful in getting admission into these schemes not to give up community service altogether.
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Film: Everyday Heroes
Everyday Heroes is a film about a group of young adults who decide to dedicate a year of their lives to teaching and mentoring needy kids through the San Francisco branch of viagra from canada
href=”http://www.americorps.gov/” target=”_blank”>AmeriCorps. It is not as easy as it seems, and they have to deal with
a host of problems. Directed by Rick Goldsmith and Abby Ginsberg, the film aims to document the successes, failures, hopes and ambitions of a group of youngsters who, as they quite rightly describe it, are ‘potentially tomorrow’s leaders’. Though I haven’t seen the film, I think it will be an on-the-ground picture of what volunteering actually is like, and therefore very valuable for all young adults and anyone who is interested in youth volunteering in general.
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