Our country is in the midst of a crisis, and national service is critical to our resilience as a nation and our ability to deliver necessary resources to Americans in need. Service Year Alliance is committed to ensuring that service years support the recovery efforts for this pandemic. We are focused on the following work in response to COVID-19:
Assisting Communities’ Immediate Response
- Keep people serving to meet communities immediate needs by educating policymakers on how to remove current barriers and urging the unlocking of stimulus funding to bring resources to areas of greatest need
- Deploy ServiceYear.org immediately to match as many people as possible who wish to serve with safe, necessary, and in-demand service year opportunities, particularly those on the front lines of this response effort. (Explore paid service year opportunities to help communities respond to COVID-19.)
- Connect our growing community of service year alums to ways to volunteer, by compiling and sharing resources with them throughout the pandemic and in its aftermath (Explore safe volunteer resources for service year alums.)
Supporting America’s Intermediate Needs and Recovery Efforts
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Explore, expand, and develop innovative and resilient service year corps models that are of the highest-need in response to COVID-19. Our highest priority new corps connects national service to the public health community so that national service can play a role in critical contact tracing needs. (For more information, explore: The Case for National Service as a Solution to Critical Contact Tracing Needs.)
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Other service year corps models include:
- Innovative corps in disaster response, community health, and medical reserve corps that can be deployed quickly to support the current needs on the front lines of the pandemic
- Develop service year models to increase access to broadband in rural and low income communities
- Virtual corps that can respond to the real, existing direct service needs of our communities (in education, health, aging, etc.)
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Other service year corps models include:
Promoting the Long-Term Health of Our Nation
- Advance a bold agenda for a mass mobilization of a generation of Americans into service years through a modernized Civilian Conservation Corps (CCC) that puts Americans back to work and addresses the long-term needs of our country
