1. "National Service in America: Policy (Dis)Connections Over Time"
Principal Investigator: Melissa Bass, Brandeis University, Doctoral Candidate

2. "Civic Education through National Service: Lessons from American History"
Principal Investigator: Melissa Bass, Brandeis University, Doctoral Candidate

3. "The Changing Lifeworld of Young People: Risk, Resume-Padding, and Civic Engagement"
Principal Investigator: Lewis A. Friedland and Shauna Morimoto (doctoral candidate), University of Wisconsin- Madison

4. "Measuring Volunteering: A Behavioral Approach"
Principal Investigator: Chris Toppe, Points of Light Foundation

To order Melissa Bass's dissertation The Politics and "Civics" of National Service: Lessons from the Civilian Conservation Corps, VISTA, and AmeriCorps click here.

See also From the Horse's Mouth: A Dialogue Between Politicians and College Students.

CIRCLE Working Paper 11: National Service in America: Policy (Dis) Connections Over Time
Melissa Bass, Brandeis University, Doctoral Candidate

Project Summary
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“Over the past several months America’s largest civilian national service program has faced significant potential cuts in new enrollments.”

The program is AmeriCorps; the date, fall 2003. But these words do more than describe present reality. They describe AmeriCorps in 1995, and in 1999, and in fact, for much of the 1990s.

The program is VISTA; the date, 1971. And 1976, and 1981, and in fact, most of the 1970s and 80s.

The program is the Civilian Conservation Corps; the date, 1936. And 1941. By mid-1942, the program faced the most significant cut in enrollment possible: it was ended.

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While the proximate causes of AmeriCorps’ current troubles can be found in a complex array of administrative practices and budget decisions unique to the program itself, the larger question of why the program, after 10 years, is still struggling to be institutionalized can only be answered by looking at the history of national service programs more broadly. While all very different, America’s main domestic civilian national service programs – AmeriCorps, VISTA, and the Civilian Conservation Corps – all have faced similar obstacles. None have been deeply institutionalized, nor have they built upon one another, for a number of reasons:

• First, as a policy area national service is in some sense “surrounded” by hostile ideological stands and interest-based claims, from both the left and the right. It typically most strongly appeals to moderates in both parties. The result is that neither party may find it in its interest to strongly back a program that simultaneously offends some of its most committed supporters and appeals to significant numbers of the opposition.

• Second, national service advocates have few natural interest group allies. In the constellation of groups affected by national service, none support national service out of hand. In many cases support or at least neutrality from interest groups can be negotiated, but it is contingent and difficult to come by.

• Third, the above factors converge to make presidents the key actors in creating national service programs, but this very support compromises the programs’ future. The personal presidential investment that allows national service programs to exist at all makes them a convenient target for presidential opponents.

• Fourth, national service programs are products of their times, and as times change the programs can come to be seen as irrelevant or counter-productive. This makes them hard to sustain, and hard to use as models for future program development.

• Finally, the definition of national service keeps changing. The benchmark for what counts as national service continues to shift, making it (for supporters) less a program than an ever-elusive goal.

CIRCLE Working Paper 12: Civic Education through National Service: Lessons from American History
Melissa Bass, Brandeis University, Doctoral Candidate

Project Summary
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Fostering an ethic of active citizenship is typically a key goal for national service. However, national service advocates often assume that national service will act as civic education, paying insufficient attention to what this means and how different policy designs further or undermine different conceptions or aspects of citizenship.

This paper explores the relationship between national service and civic education through a study of the Civilian Conservation Corps and VISTA, to see what lessons we might learn and apply to the nation's current program, AmeriCorps. Given that citizenship has multiple, contested meanings, I look at this from five perspectives - constitutional citizenship; critical citizenship; citizenship as patriotism; as service; and as work. While this list is neither exhaustive nor the perspectives mutually exclusive, they suggest different goals for the national service civic education agenda.

Certainly, in attempting to draw lessons from programs that operated decades ago, one must take care. The CCC and VISTA were created under unique circumstances, for particular purposes, and at fundamentally different times than at present. Nonetheless, it is possible to learn from past experience. Therefore, I will suggest three lessons that our earlier programs can offer to current policymakers.

• Lesson One: Make Civic Education an Explicit Priority. The fact that the CCC made inculcating citizenship an explicit, high priority clearly differentiated it from VISTA. In both programs participants performed significant national service, but the attention paid to enrollees' civic development in the CCC made it a more effective instrument of civic education. AmeriCorps has done well on this score.
• Lesson Two: Integrate the Language of Citizenship into Existing Program Elements. One of the keys to the success of the CCC as civic education was its ability to harness seemingly unrelated policies and program elements to its civic mission, as well as to use civic language in connection with these elements. Words matter.
• Lesson Three: Incorporate Specific Program Elements to Support the Civic Mission - Carefully. If words matter to civic education, so do actions, and there are actions that policymakers can take to strengthen programs' civic impact. But they also must take care that their choices don't backfire, civically or politically. Any effort to improve national service as an instrument of civic education has to, at the very least, not jeopardize the civic education it currently accomplishes, by making the program's survival and growth less likely.
  

CIRCLE Working Paper 40: The Changing Lifeworld of Young People: Risk, Resume-Padding, and Civic Engagement
Lewis A. Friedland and Shauna Morimoto (doctoral candidate), University of Wisconsin- Madison

Project Summary
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It has been well documented by numerous surveys that young people today are volunteering at unprecedented rates. A new report by Lewis A. Friedland and Shauna Morimoto examines the motivating factors behind volunteering.

Young people are facing higher stress, greater uncertainty and risk (although coupled with opportunities for some), and looser connections among family, friends, and communities. While parents' occupation may still predict the broad income band that children will occupy in adulthood, it will not necessarily predict educational achievement, occupation, or lifestyle. Students recognize that their future life chances rest on college attendance. Anxiety resulting from this recognition has suffused both the lives and future life-planning of all sectors of high-school-aged youth.
Under these circumstances, young people of all classes are approaching service as (in part) an instrumental price to pay for college admission.

In addition to the resume-padding, this study finds that several other factors are motivating the rise in volunteer activity, and these factors vary by class and racial position, ideological disposition, and religious involvement. Additionally, the report contains a typology of youth volunteers.

CIRCLE Working Paper 43: Measuring Volunteering: A Behavioral Approach
Principal Investigator: Chris Toppe, Points of Light Foundation

Project Summary
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This article presents the results of studying two different forms of probing about volunteering. One is the standard perceptual approach used by the US Bureau of Labor Statistics (BLS) in which respondents are asked if they volunteer. The other is an experimental approach that uses behavioral prompts in which respondents are asked if they did certain things or performed certain behaviors. These two sets of questions were asked of the same respondents in the same survey, using the same data collection organization, the US Bureau of the Census that conducts the annual BLS survey of volunteering, thus eliminating many of the common sources of measurement error. The results show that behavioral prompts are more accurate than the perceptual prompts in identifying who is and isn’t a volunteer. Behavioral prompts result in higher estimates of volunteer engagement (more are classified as volunteers) and higher levels of commitment (more volunteer hours are captured).