Service Year Alliance is an organization relentlessly pursuing a bold vision — making a year of paid, full-time service — a service year — a common expectation and opportunity for all young Americans.
At Service Year Alliance, we believe service years are solutions. Service years can be leveraged by communities to solve pressing challenges. They can empower the next generation of leaders that our country needs. And they can inspire us to focus on what we do better, together.
To advance our mission, Service Year Alliance unlocks the power of service years for communities, employers, programs, commissions, and policymakers.
We uplift service years as a powerful tool to realize theories of change, contribute to the social good, and find the right candidates to hire. We work to improve and enhance the service year experience for currently serving corps members, and ensure that all young people — regardless of their background — have the opportunity to serve [link to Strategic Initiatives/Equity]. And we lead groundbreaking campaigns to accelerate systems change and policy change.
Our work is organized around the following goals:
- SCALE: Create the conditions that will enable at least 200,000 to serve annually by 2023 (on the path to 1 million), matching the number of young people who enter the military each year.
- QUALITY: Increase the number of young adults who have high quality experiences that prepare them for career success and help them become public-spirited leaders for life.
- EQUITY: Create the conditions for all young people to serve, regardless of background, ensuring they have a sense of belonging during their experience.
Service Year Alliance was created in 2016 as the result of a merger of ServiceNation, the Franklin Project at The Aspen Institute, and the Service Year Exchange, a project of the National Conference on Citizenship.
