Tag Archives: Teach For America

02.07.09
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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

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

picture-10Full-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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12.10.08
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Wendy Kopp wins Presidential Citizens Medal

picture-16Kopp, 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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12.04.08
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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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11.21.08
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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.

11.20.08
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New Echoing Green Podcast – Application Tips

Echoing Green logoEchoing 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.