Advocates Hope Mentions in TV Scripts Can Boost AmeriCorps

Okay, detective fans, here’s a nonprofit mystery for you:

Why did Maggie Hart, a character in the HBO hit drama “True Detective,” mention the national-service program AmeriCorps on a recent episode?

And why did Chelsea Clinton tweet about it?

It’s not often that a gritty television crime show intersects with a do-good effort like AmeriCorps, a government program that pays stipends to people who spend up to a year helping nonprofits tackle social problems.

But national-service supporters, including Ms. Clinton—whose father, Bill Clinton, helped create AmeriCorps as president—have been urging Hollywood to enlist TV characters to help raise the program’s profile.

And the “True Detective” mention was their first win.

When asked by her detective ex-husband, Marty, what their daughter was doing while away in Chicago, Maggie says, “AmeriCorps.” He says, “Oh,” and she says, “Teaching.”

Though brief, the mention cheered advocates trying to ignite interest in national service, especially among young people, amid the doldrums of Washington politics that have kept the program’s future in doubt.

Supply and Demand

Eighteen nonprofits—including groups that rely heavily on AmeriCorps like City Year, Habitat for Humanity, and Teach for America—announced today they are joining a three-year campaign to inspire more people to sign up to fight poverty, provide disaster relief, or otherwise help their communities.

Zach Maurin, executive director of ServiceNation, an advocacy coalition coordinating the effort, says the groups will use tools like YouTube, the comedy video site Funny or Die, public-service announcements, and celebrity and athlete endorsements to “raise the clout” of national service. “It is still not something that is widely understood or widely valued, and young people still mostly don’t know it’s an option,” he says. “We want to change that and popularize the idea.”

Many Applicants

A new website, Serve a Year, foresees a day when all young Americans will ask each other, “Where will your year of national service be?”—a slogan national-service advocates have been promoting for years.

However, the effort is up against a serious supply-and-demand problem.

The number of people who apply to AmeriCorps already far outstrips the positions available—by about five to one, according to the Corporation for National and Community Service (although there is some duplication because some people apply in more than one place). The Serve America Act, enacted in 2009 with strong support from President Obama, called for a steady expansion of AmeriCorps to 250,000 positions by 2017. But after Republicans won control of the House in 2010, they blocked efforts to significantly increase the program’s budget as part of their campaign to cut the federal deficit. Except for two years when the program got a boost from the economic-stimulus program, the number of AmeriCorps slots has hovered between 70,000 and 80,000 over the past decade.

Mr. Maurin says that it’s good to have an oversupply of applicants so AmeriCorps can get the best candidates and that the pool is not a huge number given the size of the millennial generation (about 80 million people). He says ServiceNation will continue to advocate for more federal spending on AmeriCorps.

Ms. Clinton, vice chair of the Clinton Foundation, became involved in November when she and her mother, Hillary Clinton, helped lead a discussion in Los Angeles about ways the entertainment industry could raise awareness of both national service and early-childhood education. The director Rob Reiner moderated the event, which was co-hosted by the Clinton Foundation and ServiceNation. About 150 producers, directors, and writers, including “Grey’s Anatomy” creator Shonda Rhimes and “Girls” creator Lena Dunham attended.

Another attendee, Peter Paige, co-creator of “The Fosters,” an ABC television program about a family headed by an interracial lesbian couple, says the Clintons spoke so passionately that he was persuaded to try to integrate public service and early-childhood education into future scripts. The Fosters’ children are too young to be AmeriCorps members, he says, but the writers might be able to introduce an AmeriCorps teacher at some point.

“I’m so clear on the power that media plays in changing the national conversation,” he says. “Media representation is everything in our culture.”

The “True Detective” mention evolved from an earlier meeting between ServiceNation and entertainment-industry leaders in January 2013—including an HBO representative who was a former Teach for America member and pitched the idea, Mr. Maurin says.

Degrees of Success

The coalition is modeling its approach on the Harvard Alcohol Project’s “designated driver” campaign of the late 1980s, which persuaded ABC, CBS, and NBC to incorporate messages against drunken driving into the story lines of more than 160 prime-time episodes over four years.

While that campaign was credited with helping to reduce alcohol-related traffic deaths, a more recent effort to use television to influence behavior had little noticeable impact. In 2009, the Entertainment Industry Foundation coordinated a weeklong blitz of television shows that aimed to inspire more Americans to volunteer to help solve the country’s problems. More than 100 programs on ABC, CBS, Fox, NBC, and numerous cable channels featured plotlines, public-service announcements, or other activities promoting volunteerism.

But the predicted flood of new volunteers never materialized—and in fact the country’s volunteerism rate has fallen since then.

“We looked at that, and we learned a couple of things,” Mr. Maurin says. The volunteer programming lasted only a week and was confined to television, while the national-service campaign will last several years and use multiple communications channels, he says. Furthermore, asking people to perform a year of service, which is still a “niche” idea, is a more concrete pitch than asking people to step up volunteerism, which is already ingrained in American culture, he says.

The pro-AmeriCorps crusade is just the latest effort to build support for a program that has been regularly attacked by conservatives, notes Peter Frumkin, director of the nonprofit leadership program at the University of Pennsylvania and author of a book about national service.

“It’s part of the long struggle of the program to get public acceptance and prove it’s legitimate,” he says. But the advocates should aim to broaden the pool of AmeriCorps applicants beyond “overeducated, elite” college graduates, he says, and seek people who now feel “shut out and disengaged.”