NGS Movement

12/23/2017

Dear Community,

I am excited to announce that after five years of advising young people on how to add a year of service to their career path, the Next Generation of Service (NGS) curriculum, lessons learned, and other assets are being transitioned to Service Year.

Service Year Alliance was formed in January 2016 as a result of a merger of three organizations: The Franklin Project of The Aspen Institute, ServiceNation at Be The Change, and the Service Year Exchange at the National Conference on Citizenship. I am grateful to have been working with Service Year Alliance leaders since NGS’ early days in 2011 when we all shared a vision for a country where a year of service is a common expectation and opportunity for all young Americans.

The Next Generation of Service has reached thousands of students from over 400 universities across the country through our online content and workshops. Our “guides” – alumni of national service programs like AmeriCorps, the Peace Corps, and YouthBuild – have hosted over 200 one-on-one sessions with young adults, offering personalized guidance on how to navigate the search and application process for service year opportunities.

Service Year Alliance is excited to leverage the learning from the NGS mentorship program as a foundation to better engage alumni of service year programs in the recruitment of young people considering a year of service. Over the coming months, we expect to have much of NGS’ content transferred to ServiceYear.org and a process in place to have our NGS guides connect one-on-one with young adults.

Setting goals as big as the ones NGS (and Service Year Alliance) have envisioned is challenging and overwhelming, but every moment of the last five years has been worth it because the people who are involved in this movement truly live a life of service. Every bit of progress, every young person who came to NGS having never considered a year of service only to enroll a few weeks after meeting with us, every one of these wins is because of the support of our partners, donors and most importantly, our NGS volunteers.

Working with the NGS community has inspired me to move into a career focused on technology and democracy issues. I will be moving to Washington DC in September 2011 after completing my Masters in Public Policy from the University of Michigan Ford School.

I cannot thank you enough, and I hope you share in the excitement of this transition.

Happy Holidays!

In service,

Anna

07/29/2017

07/16/2017

"From Rural America to Robots" Go where you are needed, learn what AmeriCorps VISTA has been up to this year!

06/28/2017

“Wired to the world, they are more likely than past generations to see the globe’s problems as their own.Millennials are eager to serve the greater community through technologies, paradoxically, that empower the individual.”
~Rob Fournier
Columnist, The Atlantic

06/12/2017

It is an important time to encourage young people to serve - they are "heros"

Psychologists from Sigmund Freud forward have generally agreed: our core attitudes about life are largely locked in by age five or so. Changing those attitudes requires intense effort. Neil Howe and William Strauss took this obvious truth and drew an obvious conclusion: if our attitudes form in earl...

05/03/2017

Thanks FoodCorps for filling in where regulation lacks!

Yesterday, the USDA announced a relaxation of healthy school guidelines, slowing the timeline for schools to comply with certain regulations and loosening the standards for others. We are extremely disappointed to see yesterday’s action to relax science-based nutrition standards for school meals.

02/20/2017

is not waste!

Now, more than ever we must give young people a chance to serve their communities



“I think it’s an important endeavor to try to get rid of things that are unnecessary,” Mr. Moore said. “The American public has a lot of contempt for how government is run in Washington, in no small part because there is so much waste.”

The Corporation for Public Broadcasting, AmeriCorps and the National Endowments for the Arts and the Humanities could be eliminated.

01/05/2017

Trust in America is low and it negatively impacts our quality of life, good news can help! Check out this awesome Freakonomics Radio episode:

"So in the U.K., following partly an American lead, the government has championed a national citizen service. And what this means is for every young person, essentially a 17-year-old, increasingly, starts off with a — not everyone does it alone, but more and more every single year, goes and does voluntary experience, community service. This deliberately includes a couple of weeks which are residential and deliberately includes mixing with people from all different walks of life. Look, it’s only limited data, but in terms of before-and-after data, we see significant impacts in terms of higher levels of trust between groups and individuals, as well as instantly higher levels of life satisfaction and well-being too. So it looks like we can do something about it."

Societies where people trust one another are healthier and wealthier. In the U.S. (and the U.K. and elsewhere), social trust has been falling for decades -- in part because our populations are more diverse. What can we do to fix it?

12/31/2016

Happy New Year! We want to thank everyone who donated to our year-end campaign, it means the world that you believe in us. And of course a special to everyone currently serving around the world and in our communities, you are the hope our country needs.

Help us help young people seeking to heal communities!

11/29/2016

Happy ! Help celebrate the launch of our campaign. Today we are matching the first five, $30 donations

https://www.crowdrise.com/cometogether-year-end-appeal-2016/fundraiser/annalenhart

11/28/2016

"Coming together is a beginning; keeping together is progress; working together is success." ~Anonymous TOMMOROW (first five $30 donations will be matched)