April 15 is Tax Day for all of us. But it was a particularly taxing day for the allied youth fields.
Two recent news stories juxtaposed the value and increasing challenges of this often-overlooked workforce.
The Power of Us highlights workforce pathways
The American Institutes for Research released the long-awaited “The Power of US Survey Report,” featuring key findings on the career pathways, professional learning, well-being and compensation of an important segment of the allied youth fields workforce: Adults who work with youth beyond school hours, beyond the school year, and outside of classroom settings including school- and community-based afterschool programs, summer learning programs and camps, sports, library and museum programs, youth employment programs and more.
As the report underscores:
“Whether they go by ‘mentor,’ ‘counselor’ or ‘afterschool practitioner,’ the adults in the youth fields workforce are essential contributors to children’s learning and development beyond formal schooling.”
The preparatory path into the youth fields is not as straightforward as the path into teaching. As the report highlights, most staff, even front-line staff, have post-secondary degrees, but “there is no common educational pathway into the youth fields for survey respondents.” Education was the most common degree (23%), followed by liberal arts, health sciences, business and social work. Only five percent had degrees in youth development.
Whatever their educational background, most (62%) indicated that the primary reason for choosing their first job in the youth fields was a desire to work with youth.
Youth work is a first job for many teens and young adults. For many of the 40% of 16- to 24-year-old respondents without post-secondary degrees, part-time youth work put them on the path to pursuing college degrees often at the encouragement of program staff.
AmeriCorps program cuts threaten triple ROI
But the same day the Power of Us results were released, program cuts and administrative layoffs were announced in AmeriCorps — the 30 year-old federal program that provides stipends and training funds to young adults and seniors willing to be of service to children, families and non-profits in their communities.
The Associated Press reported that 2,000-plus AmeriCorps’ National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC) volunteers received notice that their service was ending April 30 “due to programmatic circumstances beyond your control.”
The impact on the 18- to 26-year-olds being sent home midway through a roughly 10-month service term that deployed them on projects across the country related to education, housing, urban and rural development, land conservation and disaster relief is clear and troubling. The NCCC offers what I refer to as a triple ROI:
- Addressing individual challenges.
- Solving community problems.
- Building workforce and community connections.
Kate Rafferty, a former NCCC director who is quoted in the Associated Press article, expresses her worry for corps members in similar terms:
“They were not young people who had been striving to be service members somewhere,” Rafferty said. “They were looking for an opportunity to improve their life. They were looking for an opportunity to build some skills, and to be part of a community.”
The 2,000 NCCC corps members relieved of duty are only a fraction of the more than 75,000 young adult AmeriCorps volunteers currently serving in communities across the country. But more cuts are presumed to be on the horizon. While the plight of the youth fields program staff working with the NCCC volunteers is not completely clear, the Washington Post reported in a separate story:
The vast majority of AmeriCorps 650 full-time staff have been put on administrative leave with pay, effectively immediately.
“The leave notices come more than a week after members of Elon Musk’s U.S. DOGE Service visited AmeriCorps’s headquarters in Washington, and the agency unveiled plans to cut its workforce by ‘up to 50 percent or more’ as part of the Trump administration’s effort to reduce the size of the federal government.”
AmeriCorps fuels the allied youth fields
In addition to directly investing in priming America’s civic and economic pipelines, AmeriCorps fuels the allied youth fields. 55,000 AmeriCorps members and AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers work with students in schools and community programs nationwide. This is about one fourth of the total number of corps volunteers.
AmeriCorps funds are leveraged to support essential programs, including:
- In-school programs like Communities in Schools, placing site coordinators in schools to build relationships and coordinate needed services, and City Year, providing training, stipends and structure for young adults who act as student success coaches who work alongside teachers and counselors during the school day.
- Community-based programs like the thousands of program partners of the Afterschool Alliance that ensure these learning and relationship-building supports are available in the afterschool and summer hours, helping young people build skills as they pursue their interests.
The public and private funding sources that support the allied youth fields are as varied as the roles these adults play in their communities. AmeriCorps funds, which require matching dollars, are often the glue that binds these sources together. And these joint investments have garnered strong returns. As noted in the AmeriCorps ROI Issue Brief: Highlights from Studies of the AmeriCorps Return on Investment:
“For each $1 of federal and match funds invested in AmeriCorps programs, about $11.80 returns back to government, society, and individuals. When looking at the ROI on federal dollars alone (without match funds), the ROI is even larger: each federal dollar causes a return of about $17.30.”
This massive investment can’t be replaced by private philanthropy and local governments alone. Without the match incentive, the loss of federal funds could result in the loss of matching funds as well.
Dismantling AmeriCorps cripples programs that are tackling pressing but reversable problems, like chronic absenteeism.
Such efforts are securing bipartian attention but require localized solutions. A one-minute video from Communities in Schools brings this point home. Watch the PSA for “The longest roll call” here.
The video was developed by Communities in Schools, a long-time partner with Attendance Works, as part of “Being Present Matters“ — a public service campaign highlighting the nationwide absenteeism epidemic and the solutions needed to address it.
The video features a six-foot-tall paper attendance roll imprinted with 15 million names — one for every chronically absent student in the U.S. The camera follows the roll as it unwinds across landscapes and communities, pausing briefly to zoom in on an adult reading a name and a reason before resuming: “Sophia A. Grade 5. Absent because transportation was absent.”
The reasons for students’ absences vary and reflect the absences of key resources in their lives — housing, Wi-Fi, sibling care, tutoring, health care.
The solution, however, does not vary: Being present matters.
That commitment to be present is where the work of corps members and the youth fields workforce begins. Our country and our young people can’t afford to lose thousands of present adults at a time when they are needed most.
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In her columns, Karen Pittman is exploring the research behind the statement, “When Youth Thrive, We All Thrive.”
