Class Action

Citizen Academy programs teach volunteers to strengthen their skills and increase their activism

Michelle Nunn and her colleagues spent a decade building a grass-roots organization that matched busy people with volunteer opportunities at charities in cities across the country. The organization helped people overcome one of the biggest obstacles to volunteering — the time crunch — by arranging short, one-time volunteer opportunities. However, it still left many volunteers wondering how they could do more to improve conditions for the needy and promote social change.

“As you’re working in a tutoring program or working in a soup kitchen, you start to ask questions about what are the policy issues here, and how can we solve the problems as well as address the symptoms,” says Ms. Nunn, who now serves as chief executive officer of the Hands On Network, an umbrella group that oversees Hands On Atlanta — the group she founded with 12 other people in 1989 — and 51 other affiliates in the United States and abroad. More than 300,000 volunteers a year work on community-service projects arranged through the Hands on Network.

To help such volunteers take their commitment beyond a one-day assignment cleaning up a river or painting a health clinic, Ms. Nunn realized she needed to teach them how to untangle political red tape, strengthen their leadership skills, and develop opportunities for pursuing advocacy campaigns and long-term community service. In 1999, she obtained $360,000 from the UPS Foundation so that the Hands On Network and Hands On Atlanta could start a project called Citizen Academy, which offered free training to Atlanta volunteers who participated in forums on topics like starting community projects, suburban sprawl, and social entrepreneurship.

With an additional $350,000 from the Surdna Foundation, the program soon expanded to affiliates in other U.S. cities. Grants from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation ($600,000) and the Omidyar Network ($50,000) allowed Citizen Academy to open programs in 10 locations: Atlanta, Boston, Los Angeles, Miami, Nashville, Philadelphia, Phoenix, Portland, Ore., Seattle, and the San Francisco Bay area.

Since 2000, Citizen Academy has collaborated with approximately 300 community organizations, corporations, and government agencies to run educational sessions and projects. The programs, organizers say, appear to be reaching their goal of drawing people into deeper involvement in social activism. About 15,000 people per year participate in Citizen Academy programs, with about 65 percent of them going on to some other form of civic activity, such as starting their own community projects, running for political office, or joining local boards, according to Toby Chalberg, director of programs and policy at the Hands On Network.

Local Approaches

Citizen Academy’s programs are taught by a variety of neighborhood leaders, elected officials, and activists. The sessions are available free and are offered mainly during nights and weekends. Some are one-time, while others are taught over several weeks, with a few all-day workshops and forums offered during the week.

Through the classes and community-service projects, Citizen Academy seeks to give participants an understanding of the history and current challenges involved in specific social issues, as well as help them hone their leadership and project-management skills and set personal goals to aid their activism.

Each program is tailored to its community. In Boston, Citizen Academy offers a book club to talk about social-change issues. The Phoenix group sponsors a Cesar Chavez Day, to honor the late Hispanic labor leader. In Atlanta — hometown of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. — Citizen Academy participants can sign up for a bus tour that explores the city’s civil-rights history.

One of the points Jill Sieder, a Citizen Academy instructor, tries to teach her students is that anyone can take a leadership role and start a nonprofit organization if they can identify a pressing need or problem and then figure out a way to confront it. Ms. Sieder, a freelance journalist who started the East Atlanta Kids Club in 1998, knows of at least two of her students who have gone on to start their own nonprofit organizations. Her class on starting community projects teaches participants that there is no magic formula to beginning such efforts. For example, she says, in her neighborhood she noticed that a lot of children had little to do after school.

“I live near a recreation center,” she says. “I knew there were some people in the neighborhood I could get involved. I said, ‘Let’s do something with these kids. We’ve got some time. We’ve got a place. We can do something. We don’t have to have 501(c)3 status and a big board of directors and all kinds of grants under our belt and a big strategic plan.’”

Taking the Lead

Some Citizen Academy participants are newcomers to the nonprofit world. When Dan Kayes, a Web analyst at Gap, in San Francisco, first began volunteering on environmental, homelessness, and other service projects in the Bay Area in 2001, he had no experience with charities.

He soon discovered TeamWorks, a Citizen Academy program that allows a group of volunteers to focus on specific issues and neighborhoods and requires a time commitment of up to nine months per project.

“What really drew me into it was the model of volunteering with the same group of people over five or six projects,” Mr. Kayes says. “It creates a shared experience. For me and for a lot of other people on the team this was kind of their introduction to volunteering, so it was cool to share that experience together.”

The TeamWorks program, he says, which exposes participants to a variety of charitable projects, is “kind of like a sampler platter for volunteering.”

In the last four years, Mr. Kayes and his fellow volunteers have cleaned homeless shelters, provided meals and hot showers for homeless people at a high-school gym, and distributed condoms in San Francisco’s Castro neighborhood to prevent the spread of sexually transmitted diseases.

Although Mr. Kayes says he thought of himself as pretty well informed about many of the issues facing people in his neighborhood, he realized after working on some of these projects how limited his knowledge was: “It was just a bunch of sound bites from TV and radio and the paper.”

Eventually, he received Citizen Academy training to become a TeamWorks project leader, which meant he was responsible for managing up to 12 volunteers and working as a liaison between the volunteers and the Hands On affiliate’s staff.

One woman who worked with Mr. Kayes on an AIDS project went on to spend a year in Israel working on AIDS-related issues. Others went on to business school to study nonprofit management.

Mr. Kayes says he enjoys seeing the impact TeamWorks projects have on the lives of the volunteers and the community members who benefit from them. “That’s what motivates me,” says Mr. Kayes. “It’s exciting to see people’s knowledge grow, and it’s exciting to see what they want to do with that knowledge at the end of the project.”

His goal, he says, is to train more people to become more active and effective volunteers: “That’s what I’m currently doing to make my community a better place. In my view, the point of all this is to organize community. I see myself as instrumental in enabling people to become involved.”

Lessons for Veterans

Although some participants in Citizen Academy classes, like Mr. Kayes, were new to the nonprofit world when they joined the program, others have long had ties to charities. Clare Rhoads didn’t discover Make a Difference, the Phoenix affiliate of the Hands On Network, until five years after she started her nonprofit organization, Dog Rescue. She has attended several Citizen Academy sessions, including one on becoming a better nonprofit board member.

“I wish I had found it before launching the nonprofit,” she says. “It would have saved me time reinventing the wheel. It has been a validation of some of the practices I learned through toil and labor, trial and error. The classes have also been a source of inspiration by providing me with innovative new ways of managing my nonprofit.”

For example, Ms. Rhoads says, Citizen Academy helped her create the idea for a new series of seminars on anger management and other emotional-health topics, focusing on the conditions that lead to animal abuse and neglect. The seminar fees will pay for low-income people to get their animals sterilized.

She and several other Citizen Academy participants say the connections they made have been as helpful as the instruction.

“The Citizen Academy classes allowed me to see all of the stakeholders who are potentially involved in solving social issues,” says Ms. Rhoads. “It was nice to have representatives of various nonprofits in attendance along with members of the local government and business communities. It is as if we all have vital pieces of the puzzle.”

Other participants say Citizen Academy has helped them gain the confidence and skills to lead others.

Mark Rubin, who oversees the Mitzvah Food Pantry network for the Jewish Federation of Greater Philadelphia and serves on the advisory committee of the Jewish Relief Agency, a hunger-relief effort, is also a veteran volunteer of more than 70 Hands On Network projects. He began participating in Citizen Academy four years ago and believes that its format helped him polish his social and management skills in a way that will aid his work as a board member and nonprofit employee.

“Citizen Academy introduced me to many professionals with different personalities, and I found myself learning from the best,” he says.

Despite his praise for Citizen Academy, Mr. Rubin says his involvement with the program has included a few moments of frustration. When he participated in one of the first TeamWorks projects organized in Philadelphia, he says, the team of volunteers he worked with fell apart quickly.

“There were people who couldn’t make it to the projects all the time,” he says. “We had trouble even deciding when to do the projects, and how much of what we would be doing would be social and how much would actually be volunteering. It was difficult for everyone on the team to participate on the first two projects due to scheduling conflicts.”

Encouraging representatives of Hands On organizations that have started Citizen Academy programs to swap information, he says, can improve the overall program and prevent problems such as those he experienced.

Focusing on Policy Issues

Hands On Network organizers say they hope to further integrate Citizen Academy principles into additional Hands On programs, and although they have had some chance to compare notes on Citizen Academy programs through conference calls and e-mail discussion lists, and at their annual conference, they hope to do more of it.

“We want our volunteers to understand the need to and desire to dig deeper into the issues, and we want to be more intentional about driving our Citizen Academy participants to engage in service,” says Mr. Chalberg of the Hands On Network.

He thinks the organization can achieve those goals by ensuring that every volunteer project includes at least a few minutes of talking about the issues underlying the work.

For example, he says, leaders of a condom-distribution program should make sure that volunteers have a chance to discuss issues related to HIV/AIDS and its prevention. Another approach, he says, is for project leaders to ask participants to reflect on their work after they have completed a service project, asking them what could be improved and what they plan to do next.

Surveys of Citizen Academy participants indicate a hunger for more training sessions on how to lead other volunteers, how to join and serve on a board, and how to become a fund raiser. In response, Hands On Network is trying to add more such courses to its Citizen Academy curriculum. The group is also using its Web site to provide potential volunteers with ideas, information, and tools. On the site, for example, volunteers who want to serve food at a shelter can learn more about issues and facts related to homelessness and hunger. (For more information, see the Citizen Academy Web site: http://www.handsonnetwork.org.)

Eventually, organizers hope other communities will be interested in embracing Citizen Academy.

“But these programs must be based on the specific needs of each community and geographic region,” says Ms. Nunn. “Most of our affiliates are seeing the opportunity and the need for this kind of programming, so in some ways it’s just a matter of finding the right set of specific programs that work in their community and also finding the resources to do it.”

Hands On Network is also thinking about some of the ways it can use Citizen Academy to help charities that recruit volunteers. For example, the National Wildlife Federation, in Reston, Va., has expressed interest in exploring collaboration between its online-training program for volunteers, Wildlife University, and Citizen Academy. The goal of the collaboration, according to Eliza Russell, the federation’s senior volunteer manager for education, would be to reach out to each group’s participants to increase volunteer involvement. So far, the National Wildlife Federation has had preliminary discussions with Citizen Academy’s organizers, but has not established any formal collaboration, says Ms. Russell.

Ms. Nunn and her colleagues encourage other organizations to use the Citizen Academy approach to train volunteers to become leaders.

“If nonprofit organizations could help train volunteers to be not only direct-service leaders, but also policy leaders or civic leaders and advocates,” she says, “it would be a powerful way of bringing people from direct service to civic engagement and public problem solving.”