The Peace Corps sends young Americans to 141 countries, but its number of volunteers is less than half the record high it reached back in 1966. The state of Washington, however, continues to churn out an impressive number of civic-minded youth interested in the program.
For several years running, the Evergreen State’s colleges have claimed the highest number of Peace Corps volunteers, consistently sweeping top spots in categories for large, medium and small colleges alike. The University of Washington, with second-place showing of 73 students in 2016, has taken first or second place for all but one year since 2005. For medium-sized colleges, Western Washington University, with 48 volunteers, nabbed second. And among small campuses, University of Puget Sound tied for second, with 13 new recruits.
Recent changes to the application process, like letting a person choose the country where they wish to live, boosted the number of applicants. Still, the nation should look to Washington for some ideas on how to foster a global commitment among the next generation.
At the University of Washington, a master’s student who completed a Peace Corps mission abroad is a constant presence in the school’s career center. “Over the course of four years of undergrad, students are going to see and hear from the Peace Corps a lot,” says Patrick Gordon, who served in Bulgaria. “It’s become a part of the overall environment of the campus.”
Despite a decade-long strong performance, U of W doesn’t hold top honors for contributing the most Peace Corps volunteers. That designation goes to the University of California-Berkeley, which has sent 3,640 alumni, compared to Washington’s 2,981.
Tag: volunteer
A Better Way to Boost Civic Engagement
In 1933, President Franklin D. Roosevelt launched the environmentalist Civilian Conservation Corps, one of America’s first experiments in public service (aside from the traditional routes of joining the military or running for office). Decades later, John F. Kennedy’s global Peace Corps and Lyndon B. Johnson’s domestic anti-poverty program, VISTA, followed. And later, Bill Clinton formed AmeriCorps to instill service as a core ideal. NationSwell Council member MacKenzie Moritz, chief of staff and head of partnerships at Service Year Alliance, believes that civic engagement is about to reach its apex, as more young people sign up for a year of service. NationSwell spoke to him by phone in Washington, D.C., about how 12 months of service could heal the country’s divides.
What is a service year? Who can participate, and what do they do?
A service year is an opportunity to do a year or two of full-time, paid service with a nonprofit, government or university, working to address an unmet societal need. Some of the best-known examples out there are things like the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps programs like Teach for America and City Year, and the Jesuit Volunteer Corps. Our focus is really on this idea of how to provide opportunities for people to act on the responsibilities of their citizenship. [With Service Year Alliance,] we primarily focus on recruiting 18-to-28-year-olds — whether after high school, during college or after — to have this opportunity really early in life, because we think it will unlock a next level of civic engagement for the rest of their lives. Of course, they’re certainly not limited to those ages; plenty of people decide to do a service year later in life.
Why is a service year so important now?
After two years in Philadelphia, where I taught ninth-grade world history, I ended up leading Teach for America’s national recruitment strategy and technology team. At that time, we were seeing 60,000 applicants every year for 6,000 positions. There was just a tremendous interest from young people to give back, to leave their mark on society. The vast majority of people that were raising their hand to volunteer were ultimately told they weren’t a good fit. They were being rejected, only to go home and read a newspaper article about how Millennials care only about themselves. With our politics, people aren’t feeling as connected to larger systems as they had historically, leading to declining rates of social trust. We need something new that restores the fabric of our country.
What would you say to the person who thinks service years are well and good for others, but not for them?
The Franklin Project got started at Aspen Ideas Festival a couple years back, when Gen. McChrystal was asked whether he believed in the draft. He said, “I think you’re asking the wrong question. The right question is, ‘Should every young American serve?’ I think the answer to that is yes. But does the military need everyone? I think the answer is no. We need to create a lot more pathways for young people to serve.”
He went on to say that citizenship is a membership. We spend a lot of time talking about its rights, and we spend very little time talking about its responsibilities. About only 1 percent of Americans serve in the military, and frequently those are folks who come from families that have a long history of serving in the military. It’s really dangerous for us, as a country, to get into the mindset of thinking that service is someone else’s job, that it’s not a shared responsibility across all of us. Service years involve exploring your identity as a citizen.
Is there a book you’d recommend for someone who wants to understand your approach to public service?
“Heart of the Nation: Volunteering and America’s Civic Spirit,” by John Bridgeland, chair of the domestic policy council in the Bush administration during 9/11, does a really good job of providing a history of service in America and outlining a future of where we could go.
What do you wish someone had told you when you first took this role?
If I had been holding myself to the expectations I had for myself as a college graduate at 21 years old, I would not be doing any of what I’m doing today. There’s so much out there that I didn’t know existed back then. There are a lot of different levers that exist out there for changing our society. It’s very easy to fall into focusing only on the ones you know. With how fast the world is changing, there’s a lot more that are being created all the time. I hope that, 10 years from now, I’m doing something that doesn’t exist today.
What are you most proud of having accomplished?
When I was a teacher back in Philadelphia, I had the opportunity to meet a lot of amazing young people. My male students, you’d ask them what they want to do, and they’d say [play in] the NBA or the NFL. In a moment of frustration, I ended up taking a trashcan and putting it on a stool. I said, “Alright, everyone get out a piece of paper. Crumple it up. On the count of three, shoot.” Ninety-five percent of them didn’t go in. “Okay,” I said, “We need a backup plan here.”
The funny thing is that one of the students ended up playing in the NBA, which makes me look foolish, but I was right for the rest of them. The students I’m most proud of are two of the students I taught as ninth graders, who, after college, did Teach for America back in Philadelphia and now, after completing that, are staying in the classroom. It’s been such a privilege to mentor them over the years, stay in touch with them and see the cycle go all the way around. There’s just so much talent and potential in all of America’s classrooms. I got to play a small role in helping people to realize that, and I’m excited to continue to help with that through all the work that I do.
To learn more about the NationSwell Council, click here.
Note: Since the publication of this article, Service Year Alliance has become a NationSwell advertiser.
One App Has Revolutionized How the Red Cross Mobilizes Volunteers
Volunteers for the American Red Cross of Chicago & Northern Illinois respond to three or four disasters every single day — a total of 1,200 emergencies around the Windy City every year. Most of the incidents are house fires, and at least two of the group’s 1,740 disaster helpers show up at the scene while embers are still smoking to offer shelter, transportation, financial assistance, food, water, clothing and blankets.
That is, if the volunteers get there in time. Until recently, dispatchers picked up the phone after receiving an emergency alert and started going down a list of names. “It was all individual phone calls, one by one,” Jim McGowan, regional director of planning and situational awareness for the Red Cross, tells NationSwell. “It was typically a list in a spreadsheet. It was as good — or as bad — as on paper. We would try to figure out who was closest and then call that person first and hope they can go.” Not surprisingly, the phone tree method proved clunky and inefficient. Too often, assistance arrived at a house dripping with cold firehose water and no one in sight.
Recently, a new open-source application built by John Laxson, an engineer and Red Cross volunteer based in San Francisco, has helped the Chicago regional Red Cross vastly improve its emergency response. With the technology’s help, dispatchers in the Second City now identify volunteers twice as fast.
“We’re not first responders. We’re not going there to put the fire out, so the work that we do isn’t life or death. However, typically in a city like Chicago, where it’s really hot or really cold, we want to get assistance to that client as fast as possible,” McGowan says. “If it takes us took long to get there and the conditions are harsh, that person is going to seek help elsewhere…a friend’s house, a restaurant, the police station. We lose that opportunity to connect with them to begin with, [and they miss] out on services because we’re too slow to respond.”
The system is built with the responders in mind. They input their availability into a schedule, so dispatchers don’t waste time dialing people at work or out of town. When a fire, flood, or other calamity occurs, the dispatcher (also a volunteer) enters its address and receives a list of available names sorted by travel time. After the volunteer arrives, he or she can text updates back to the central hub.
Automatic text messaging and other so-called “cloud communications” are trending in the nonprofit world, bringing volunteerism into smartphone era. For instance, Polaris Project and Thorn use the “BeFree” text messaging hotline to combat human trafficking; the Arkansas Children’s Hospital, the country’s sixth largest pediatric hospital, sends reminders to patients’ cell phones to put a small dent in the 250 daily no-shows that were costing the medical institution tens of millions of dollars annually; and the Crisis Text Line offers round-the-clock support for distressed teenagers.
Nonprofits always face the problem of limited means: they take on huge challenges and stretch their budgets as far as they can go. Fortunately, as the Red Cross has found, the web is making it easier than ever to mobilize volunteers. Maybe being hooked to our iPhones isn’t so bad after all. Our chance to do something good is just a text away.
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SXSW: NationSwell on the Rise of Online Youth Activists
On the final day of SXSW Interactive (that stands for South by Southwest for the uninitiated), two inspiring student activists joined Greg Behrman, Founder and CEO of NationSwell, and Ronnie Cho, the former Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, to discuss how they’ve successfully used technology to address national challenges.
Simone Bernstein, a senior at St. Bonaventure University in New York, said her frustration from the lack of information for teenagers who wanted to volunteer in her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, led her to work with her brother to start a website called St. Louis Volunteen. This later grew into VolunTEEN Nation, a national organization that lists volunteer opportunities for teens while also encouraging organizations to recognize the potential of younger volunteers.
“So many kids wanted to volunteer but there were very few places they could go to find those opportunities,” she said. “A few months after we launched St. Louis Volunteen, we got hundreds then thousands of emails from people who wanted to volunteer in their own cities.”
Bernstein wakes up at 6:30 every morning, runs three miles, then spends six hours each day working on VolunTEEN Nation — all of this on top of her academic work. She says she is grateful for Skype, Twitter, and other online tools that allow her to lead the national team, including 240 ambassadors across the country.
High school senior Charles Orgbon III talked about his work founding and running Greening Forward. The has its roots in a school project that had him picking up litter around the Mill Creek High School campus in Hoschton, Georgia. Initially, his Earth Savers Club only had three members, but the Internet provided Orgbon with a power platform to rally student action. Using a blog called Recycling Education, he shared posts on environmental issues with, as he describes it, “anyone who wanted to listen.”
Describing the transition that led to Greening Forward, which works to provide a diverse group of young people with the resources they need to protect the environment, Orgbon says that he started thinking toward the end of eighth grade about how he might use technology to advance the impact he could have.
“Let’s do more than just post on a website. Let’s build some resources and support tools to help young people build similar projects like the Earth Savers Club in their own communities,” he said.
The audience, many of them working professionals in their 20s and 30s, laughed when Orgbon defined a young person as someone under the age of 25.
This old 26 year old tweeting in the corner captured some other memorable moments from the conversation:
Cho moderated the afternoon session. While serving as President Obama’s liaison to Young Americans and writing the White House’s For the Win blog (which focused on the remarkable initiatives young Americans advance in their own communities) Cho came across many stories of student innovation. He talked about the importance of a platform to “highlight interesting, effective, impactful work” or Americans across the country.
This is exactly where NationSwell comes in, Behrman said, talking about the website’s model of telling stories about individuals making an impact and mobilizing support around innovators like Ben Simon of the Food Recovery Network. He then shared a video outlining the impact of its call to action.
MORE: How Much Food Could Be Rescued if College Dining Halls Saved Their Leftovers?
“The founding impetus is really these guys, people throughout our country who are doing amazing things, and sometimes they’re overlooked and sometimes people who are interested may not know about them, so we want to be a platform for them, a source for their stories,” Behrman said.
Then panel went on to explore the way tools from social media to smart phones have helped Bernstein, Orgbon, and so many student activists advance their causes and achieve national impact. The audience posed questions ranging from the distinction between activism and service to the role of school curriculum in encouraging volunteering. The conversation itself seemed likely to inspire not only more stories about student innovators who have leveraged technology to address national challenges, but strong support for them as well.
You Can Now Search for the Perfect Volunteer Opportunity on LinkedIn
Searching for the perfect volunteer opportunity? LinkedIn, the social network for professionals, has you covered. In August, the website added a section to user profiles that allowed people to include that they’re looking for volunteer opportunities, in addition to pre-existing sections that asked for volunteer experience and participation in charitable causes. According to a LinkedIn spokesperson, more than 600,000 people added that they were looking for volunteer opportunities since August, and more than 3 million users have added volunteer experience and causes to their profiles since 2011.
MORE: You Can Do More Than Just “Like” Your Favorite Charity on Facebook
Now, Linked is going even further in its volunteer-friendly efforts. The site on January 15 opened a new marketplace for people to find volunteer opportunities that suit their skill sets. Users can search through 500 postings (more will be added in the coming weeks), including everything from board seats to pro-bono consulting.
It’s not surprising that LinkedIn would add volunteer opportunities to the site. According to the company’s research, it can benefit your career. Unemployed people who volunteer are 27% more likely to be hired, LinkedIn says, and 47% of hiring managers that the site polled said they considered volunteer work equally as valuable as paid experience. “Volunteering is not just good for the community, it’s good for your career,” Meg Garlinghouse, head of LinkedIn Good, told Mashable. “That’s just another [reason] why we feel so bullish about making this a part of the LinkedIn experience.”
14 Ways To Give Back This Thanksgiving
In this article, Amy Neumann displays 14 ways we can give back this holiday season. While donating money or food baskets are common, Neumann focuses on some other effective methods that are not as popular. Some of these include: volunteering online, preparing an emergency kit for a friend or relative, teaching someone to read, or lending a hand at a local animal shelter.