Posts Tagged ‘americorps’
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Lost Generation? David Blanchflower warns of the ‘lull before the storm’
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.
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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 Levine, 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 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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Nice piece, yourself.
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