Imagine hundreds of community members working across local government agencies, schools, and community organizations undertaking challenges like emergency preparedness, public health, student mentoring, poverty reduction, and climate change. Although they serve in different organizations and different capacities, service year corps members come together for shared training, professional development, and group service days, creating a broader identity and a shared purpose across all their various service sites. Upon completing their service year, corps members are prepared with the skills they need to enter local, in-demand careers or attend post-secondary institutions, and have the knowledge and strategies they need to be engaged citizens and active community leaders.
That's what happens in Service Year Impact Communities.
Service Year Impact Communities are collaborative efforts among community stakeholders to leverage service years as a tool to address community needs. By coordinating local efforts, impact communities work to create the conditions for universal national service — full-time, paid service that is impactful, equitable, offers career, education, and civic opportunity, and exists at scale. Impact Communities can be at the neighborhood, city, county, regional or state level. When service year programs work together with local government agencies and elected officials, community leaders, philanthropic organizations, education institutions, and other community stakeholders, they are more effective at transforming lives, strengthening communities, and fueling civic renewal.
Undertaking the work of a Service Year Impact Community has a variety of benefits for service year programs, corps members, and communities. Impact Communities make service more cost-effective by creating a shared capacity among programs. They help connect corps members to the broader work happening around them by creating a cohort experience across programs. Finally, they help make service years more impactful and resilient by working together, reducing overlaps, and identifying opportunities to bring service years to new issue areas and organizations. By coming together, stakeholders can utilize the framework of national service to address local needs.
Impact Communities work to ensure they offer high quality programming to effectively meet the needs of communities, set up corps members for success, and transform the local and national civic landscape by empowering committed servant leaders.
Learn more about these 10 Service Year Impact Communities:
- Appalachian Kentucky
- Central Florida
- Central Texas
- Flint, Michigan
- New York, New York
- Philadelphia, Pennsylvania
- Poughkeepsie, New York
- South Carolina
- Stockton, California
- Western New York