AmeriCorps Expansion Should Consider Quality, Not Number of Participants

If Congress moves to expand AmeriCorps, the national-service program, it should focus more on improving its quality than on increasing the number of people who participate, a consultant who helped draft the legislation that created the program told a forum on national service today.

“This has been the problem with AmeriCorps for many, many years,” said Shirley Sagawa, who served in President Clinton’s White House when he created AmeriCorps and the Corporation for National Service (now the Corporation for Community and National Service). Starting with Mr. Clinton, she added, presidents have “set the measure of AmeriCorps being the number of bodies in it.”

She said that’s why about half of the AmeriCorps members work part time instead of full time.

Ms. Sagawa, who served as the corporation’s first operating and policy officer, also headed a group that advised President Obama’s transition project on the future of the Corporation for National and Community Service. She spoke during a panel discussion organized by the Hudson Institute.

Both President Obama and the Serve America Act, a bill that has been introduced in the Senate, propose greatly expanding national-service programs like AmeriCorps, which places people in full-time and part-time nonprofit jobs for 10 or 12 months.

“If there’s a huge ramp up very quickly without being careful about engaging the nonprofit sector and really being thoughtful about where we can use AmeriCorps to best effects, we do risk sending people all over the place and not having outcomes,” she said. The program should also foster a kind of “core curriculum,” she said, “so the people who come for the experience actually leave with a heightened sense of civic responsibility and commitment.”

Leslie Lenkowsky, who headed the corporation in the Bush administration, said that while the time is ripe to get more Americans involved in community service, AmeriCorps is not necessarily the best way to do it. While some AmeriCorps programs, like Teach for America, can demonstrate real results, others are less effective because they operate through thousands of different nonprofit groups that each set their own requirements and do little evaluation.

See Mr. Lenkowsky’s opinion piece for The Chronicle on national service.