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ANDREA: So, hi everyone. Thanks for joining us today, 

and welcome to our June 2018 webinar. My name is 

Andrea Robles and I am from the Office of Research & 

Evaluation at the Corporation for National & 

Community Service, also CNCS. Our office’s objectives 

are to support our agency’s mission by building 

knowledge on civic engagement, volunteering, and 

national service. As some of you know, we conduct inhouse research, but also fund research through 

competitive grants to researchers, scholars, and 

dissertators at institutions of higher education.

And we also support research and evaluation of our 

programs and grantees. Our webinar series is one way 

we share our ongoing research and findings. Today we 

are very excited to host another Research & Evidence 

webinar titled “AmeriCorps Capacity Building and 

Financial Effects on Non-profits.” Before I move into 

introducing our speakers, we’d like to cover a few 

housekeeping items as this is the first webinar we 

are hosting using our new platform Adobe Connect. And 

I’m going to pass it over to Emily who is a much - an 

expert on this at this point. 
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EMILY: Thank you all for your patience as we get started 

with Adobe Connect. We want to let you know the 

webinar today will recorded and posted online 

following the presentation. Unlike previous webinars, 

there is no dial-in phone line for this presentation. 

All audio is broadcast over the internet using your 

computer speakers. All participants will be in listen 

only mode until the question and answer session 

following the presentation at which time you can ask 

a question using your computer like a phone by 

selecting the right-hand feature from the menu above. 

You can also ask questions at any time during the 

presentation by using the question and answer, or 

chat boxes below. As we mentioned earlier, this 

webinar will be recorded, and if you experience any 

technical difficulties, please let us know in the 

chat boxes. And I believe that takes care of all or 

our housekeeping items.

ANDREA: Thank you, Emily. So we all love new 

technology, but then sometimes we have a few 

glitches, so hopefully like Emily said, any 

questions-just put it in the chat box. So now we’d 
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like to introduce our speakers. We will begin with 

introductory comments from Dr. Lily Zandniapour who 

is a Research and Evaluation Manager here at CNCS, 

and has been researching this topic for many years, 

and continues to champion his work at CNCS. 

This will be followed by two presentations. The first 

presentation is “Expanding the Footprint: How Habitat 

for Humanity Affiliates Expanded Capacity for 

National Service Programs.” The presenters are Doctor 

Daniel Cooper, who is the Executive Director for 

Center for Equitable Cities at Adler University; 

Doctor Judah Viola, Ph.D., College of Professional 

Studies and Advancement at National Louis University; 

and Doctor Bradley Olson, Associate Professor of 

Psychology, Co-Director of Community Psychology 

Program, National Louis University. 

They conducted an evaluation and wrote a report 

titled “2013-2016 External Evaluation for Habitat for 

Humanity’s National Service Programs. And the report 

can be found in our evidence exchange, and we can 

tell you more about that in the Q&A. The second 
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presentation is “Measuring Impacts of National 

Service: Lessons from Research”. The presenter is 

Doctor Daniel Teles, and he is our 2015 Research 

Grantee and the first dissertator we funded through 

our Research Grant Program to universities. 

He is now research associate at the Urban Institute. 

And finally we will have concluding remarks from 

Bethany Cannon, who is the specialist in the Longterm Volunteer Department at Habitat for Humanity 

International; and Anthony Nerino who is a research 

analyst at the Office of Research & Evaluation here 

at CNCS; and [unintelligible] who suggested this 

topic for this webinar. 

And I want to give a special shout out to Bethany 

Berggren for agreeing to join us because this webinar 

coincidentally fell on Build-a-Thon week AmeriCorps 

numbers participate with Habitat for Humanity across 

the county. And I know that our CEO, Barbara Stewart,

is also involved in the Build-a-Thon, so thank you 

for taking the time to do this. After the speakers’ 

presentations, we will conclude with a question and 
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answer period. Please feel free to ask any questions 

or provide comments in the chat box. We will be 

sending out a post-webinar survey so please let us 

know your thoughts on this webinar, but also ideas 

for the future webinars. I will now hand this over to 

Doctor Lily Zandniapour.

LILY: Thank you, Andrea, and good afternoon, everyone. 

I’m going to be brief, but I wanted to say a few 

words regarding the topic of today’s webinar before 

handing it off to our presenters. Over the past few 

years, there’s been an increased recognition of the 

importance of organizational capacity by grantmakers 

in the private and public sectors. Funders are 

increasingly recognizing the value of supporting 

organizational capacity in the non-profit sector. 

The main reason for this attention is that time and 

again grantmakers are seeing firsthand that for 

organizations to deliver on their mission, achieve, 

and document their impact, you need strong, sustained 

capacity. This capacity covers many different areas 

including leadership, fiscal management and 

fundraising, evaluation and learning capacity, 
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collaboration, communications, and technology to make 

a few. 

Historically, grantmakers prioritize projects support 

over capacity support. However, we’re currently 

witnessing a rise in the number of philanthropic and 

grantmaking organizations that are taking note that 

without strong capacity, you can’t succeed in meeting 

problematic goals. Grantmakers for Effective 

Organizations, in their publication “Strengthening

Nonprofit Capacity”, report that based on their 2014 

survey results 77 percent of staffed foundations in 

the U.S. provide some kind of capacity-building 

support to nonprofits. In addition, 27 percent of 

those that support capacity building reported that 

they had increased their support in the past three 

years. 

CNCS’s work is funded mentally about capacity 

building of individuals-mainly national service 

members, the nonprofit organizations they work with, 

and the communities they serve. That said, the agency 

has increased its attention and focus on capacity 
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building and measurement of capacity change in the 

past few years. For example, the agency made 

investments in capacity and evidence building through 

its programming during the past administration in 

Social Innovation Fund. 

A national assessment of that initiative showed the 

program was successful in strengthening the capacity 

of its grantees in different areas, but particularly 

in evaluation and evidence building. The agency’s 

flagship program, AmeriCorps, has invested in 

capacity building through the Commission Investment 

Fund. CNCS has also invested in the development of a 

Capacity Assessment Tool that it plans to roll out in 

the next few months, so there will be more to come. 

With that, I now turn it over to our first presenters 

that are gonna be talking about the Habitat for 

Humanity study. Thank you.

JUDAH: Thank you, Lily. We’re very excited to be here 

today to share the findings from an evaluation 

project that demonstrates ways in which Habitat for 

Humanity, with the support of CNCS, was able to grow 

its capacity through leveraging the members of 
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AmeriCorps and VISTA national service programs. 

Habitat for Humanity International is one of the 

biggest recipients of CNCS National Service members, 

and therefore is a great test case for better 

understanding the potential of this capacity-building 

effort on the part of CNCS to grow the value of 

capacity building to strengthen the nonprofit sector.

Our agenda for today is to talk through why it was 

important at this time to evaluate the National 

Service Program. We’ll share a little bit of 

terminology to make sure we all understand the terms 

we’re using in the conversation today. We will share 

the evaluation research questions, talk a little bit 

about the design and measures that we used, and share 

our findings and lessons learned. So there were four 

main reasons for evaluation Habitat for Humanity’s 

National Service Program over the last several years. 

The first had to do with internal program 

improvement-the formative type of evaluation where we 

were trying to help Habitat for Humanity 

International better understand trends related to its 
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recruitment, training, and retention of national 

service members. Secondly, they were interested in 

expanding the use of national service among local 

Habitat affiliates across the country. The idea was 

that if we had a better understanding of what the 

strengths and challenges are with the program, and 

were able to share this information across Habitat 

for Humanity, or local affiliates would be interested 

in participating. 

Furthermore, they were interested in documenting 

outcomes to demonstrate the value of national service 

capacity building partners for potential funders, as 

well as current funders, and volunteers who would 

want to get engaged. And lastly they wanted to share 

information like webinars such as today about a model 

that they feel really is working well in the 

community. So when we use the terms “members” for the 

rest of this presentation, what we’re talking about 

AmeriCorps National Members and VISTAs.

If we say “HFHI”, we’re talking about Habitat for 

Humanity International, and if we use the term “host 
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affiliates”, we mean local independent Habitat for 

Humanity affiliates that hosted AmeriCorps National 

and/or VISTA. So the evaluation design for this study 

technically is called a quasi-experimental 

nonequivalent matched-pair repeated measures design, 

but what this means in lay terms is that we compare 

host affiliates-those that hosted members-to 

similarly situated non-affiliates, and we also looked 

at changes over time. 

Our evaluation was participatory in nature in that we 

worked hand in hand with multiple stakeholders 

including Habitat for Humanity International, local 

host affiliates, members, and alumni. The sources for 

our data varied. We tried to engage multiple 

stakeholder voices, which allowed us to try and glean

our findings and have more confidence in the 

reliability and validity of what we learned. We heard 

at the beginning of a service year from host 

affiliates-particularly from the leadership in those 

affiliates. 
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Sometimes they were called host site managers, other 

times they were the executive director or associate 

director that were responsible for the budget of the 

organization. And we use variables to match 

affiliates that hosted and didn’t host on things like 

the size of their budgets, their staff size, and the 

number of volunteers or houses that they build 

annually. This enabled us to look at the impact and 

capacity of members on affiliated outcomes. 

We also completed pre- and post-surveys of National 

Service Members and VISTAs, and this enabled us to

get member perceptions of their experience during the 

year. And finally, we heard from alumni-folks who had 

participated in the past, at least a year prior all 

the way up until about ten years prior, to understand 

what the impact of participating in the National 

Service Program was on their career trajectory as 

well as future interests. 

In terms of evaluation research questions, we’ll talk 

about two main evaluation question types and three 

sub-questions in each of the categories. The first 
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category of questions that we focused on had to deal 

with whether affiliates experience an increase in 

capacity compared to the similar affiliate that 

didn’t host. We measured the number of families that 

both hosts and non-hosts were able to serve. We 

measured the number of volunteers that each group 

engaged. 

And as you might imagine, the number of new homes 

built, and homes rehabbed, was of key interest to 

Habitat for Humanity. The bottom line they were 

looking at had to do with the extent to which using 

National Service Program increased the number of 

homes that they were able to build and the efficiency 

with which they could build. The second category of 

questions had to do with whether members felt that 

they’d benefited from participating in the AmeriCorps 

or VISTA program. 

Within this category, we ask several questions of 

members and alumni about whether they value the 

training and mentorship they receive, whether they 

felt they’ve learned new skills that they’d be able 
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to apply in future work settings, and we also 

explored within the alumni how the national service 

experience impacted long-term interests in civic 

engagement.

DANIEL: Hi everyone. We’re gonna walk through some of 

the high-level findings, but the answers to those 

questions we found was a resounding “yes” for just 

about all the question we had asked, which brings me 

to increased capacity. So the first, which was 

something that [inaudible] increased the number of 

builds and rehabs.

FEMALE: Hi, we’re having a little trouble hearing you. 

DANIEL: Okay, sorry about that. Is that better?

FEMALE: Yes, much better.

FEMALE: Can you start that again? Sorry. 

DANIEL: I will talk into the microphone. So first and 

foremost, affiliates who hosted service members, on 

average completed nine more builds and 26 more rehabs 

during the evaluation period. Ultimately, this helped 

meet the goal of serving families and communitiesespecially in areas where an affiliate who had

targeted a hard-hit area that had been through a lot 

of foreclosures or a recession, this proved to be 
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very beneficial in terms of having a concentrated 

impact. 

Second, in terms of volunteer engagement, hosts who 

used members engaged more volunteers than similarsized affiliates. This translated to a substantial 

difference in the number of volunteers. On average, 

this translated to hundreds of volunteers were 

engaged with Habitat for Humanity affiliates because 

of the Service Member Program. So this next slide I’m 

just gonna walk you through some of the survey 

results.

This was done with affiliates, a host site manager, 

and executive director. Prior to hosting a service 

member, we asked them what their expectations were of 

how well members would contribute to increasing the 

quality of families served, the numbers of partners 

the affiliate has, the number of homes rehabbed or 

restored, or the pace of building. We heard from 

affiliates that this is what they were hoping to see 

improvements on by enrolling in the program, and you 

can see the bars in blue show the percentages that 
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agree with this question after the period of using a 

service member. 

So each category, with the exception of the number of 

partners the affiliate has went up substantiallyespecially the pace of building. We saw at the 

beginning there wasn’t a huge expectation that 

members would increase the pace of building, but 

after the program, 60 percent – 59 percent agreed 

that the page had in fact picked up because of the 

contribution the members were making. 

So I’ll talk a little bit about the benefits of 

service, thinking about the evaluation model and 

triangulating between what the affiliate got out of 

it and what the member got out of it, we’ll 

transition to the members themselves. So we surveyed 

both members and alumni and we found that some of the 

top three most common mentioned themes were folks 

valued the homebuilding experience they got, 

leadership skills that were imparted, and also 

project management. 
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So they also felt that the year of service helped 

their chances of finding a job, or receiving a 

promotion, or making a career change. So there was a 

very strong workforce development component to this 

that we saw through the surveys with alumni and 

service members. So here’s a breakout of these 

meaningful service year benefits. So we asked at the 

beginning of the survey period and at the end if they 

thought this would increase their chances of finding 

a job, or getting a promotion, or getting a career 

change. 

And this, particularly in terms of getting a 

promotion or making a career change - we saw some 

pretty big improvements. And that was especially true 

for the national members, and not quite as true for 

VISTA’s. VISTA’s and national numbers, as Judah 

explained, had slightly different roles within the 

affiliate. And Brad will talk a little bit more about 

the meanings of some of these findings at the end. 

So in terms of providing a pipeline to a career in 

housing and community developments, a lot of members 
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thought that their experience led them on a career 

path to choosing to do this work. For example, 34 

percent of alumni went on to work for an affiliate. 

What we heard often from affiliates is that a member 

was so helpful in helping them set up systems and 

processes that they didn’t want to lose this, and 

needed to keep the momentum going. 

And so the National Service Program actually does 

provide a good pipeline for Habitat affiliates to 

recruit strong employees. And finally, and this is

something that we think is very important: a lot of 

the members felt more connected to the community they 

served and the families they were serving as opposed 

to just doing work that keeps someone in an office, a 

lot of members shared that they were able to get out 

in the community and make contacts with the people 

they were serving.

So we saw significant increases in members saying 

after their service here they felt connected to the 

people in communities they were serving. And so 

here’s the graph that just breaks that out a little 
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bit so you can see at the beginning of the survey 

period about 50 percent felt that they would be or 

were connected to the partner families that moved in 

a positive direction up to 63 percent, for example.

BRAD: Okay, so thanks Judah and Dan, and this is Brad 

Olson, and we’re just about to move to Daniels’ 

presentation, but just to summarize: clearly CNCS –

this model is truly building capacity. Daniel has

covered many of the quality and non-qualitative 

findings of our last evaluation. And now we’re really 

sort of currently in an attempt to replicate these 

results and to look at some qualitative findings.

 And some interesting pieces that have newly arisen

new questions about what are the active ingredients 

that are [inaudible], but essentially we’ve heard 

that the members are constantly bringing new energy 

and ideas. [inaudible] a fresh perspective.

FEMALE: We’re having trouble hearing you, Brad.

BRAD: I’m sorry about that. Okay, soFEMALE: Brad, a little louder.

MALE: You’re breaking up.
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BRAD: [inaudible] are bringing new energy and ideas. The 

model is veryFEMALE: You’re breaking up, Brad. I think you need to 

get closer to the microphone.

BRAD: Okay. Okay, is this better here?

FEMALE: Now we can hear you, yes.

BRAD: You can hear me? Okay. So just to summarize, the 

new members coming to the affiliates are bringing new 

energy and ideas, the model is just overall very 

cost-efficient for the affiliates; it’s bringing 

about sustainability-we’re finding that many of these 

members stay on for the affiliate and work for quite 

a few years post their service year. Just huge 

benefits in terms of organizing volunteers, bringing 

on new volunteers, recruiting new potential 

homeowners, media policy work, all kinds of different 

advantages.

Just one of the interesting kind of paradoxes we’re 

finding is that some of the smaller affiliates are 

choosing not to apply for the CNCS funding-they sort 

of feel like they’re not big enough to be able to 

staff a new member for a year; they don’t have enough 
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builds. And so the irony is that those affiliates who 

could really benefit from this model most are 

sometimes reluctant, and so we’re doing a very indepth case study of a [sic] affiliate in Florida 

that’s very small but has grown quite a bit doing 

this through this CNCS program, and they’re just 

giving us remarkable pieces of the ways that capacity 

is build by taking this chance and benefiting from 

this program. So I will stop there. Thank you very 

much.

DANIEL: Hello. Thank you for having me. My name is 

Daniel Teles. I’m a research associate at the Urban 

Institute, and I’m gonna be talking about measuring 

the impact of National Service, really thinking about 

lessons from my own research about what data exists, 

and talking about how difficult it is to do what 

Judah, Bradley, and Daniel did for more than one 

organization at a time. And I should start with a 

[unintelligible] - I am one of the AmeriCorps – a 

former AmeriCorps with Habitat for Humanity. 

There I am, and one of the 34 percent apparently of 

members that went on to work for the affiliate. So 
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the first real issue we had – I had in my research 

was figuring out where the AmeriCorps actually are. 

And when I say this I mean both physically where they 

are and how to define where we might see an impact. 

So that comes down to which nonprofits or local 

agencies are sponsoring the AmeriCorps, where are the 

sponsors located, where are the programs with the 

AmeriCorps participating in located, where are the 

AmeriCorps living, where are their members working, 

and with whom? 

Which nonprofits or local agencies do they work day 

to day (which could sometimes we slightly different 

than who is sponsoring the AmeriCorps)? There is 

information available – public information thank you 

to CNCS on sponsor locations for all AmeriCorps in 

the state profiles. The link is on the slide here. 

And more recently, CNCS is sharing open downloadable 

data. There’s a link to some right there, and I’m 

sure there’s more that I’ve even come across. 

The amount of open data has been increasing 

significantly over the last few years. The 
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interesting thing about this data is that what we get 

our program locations as listed in the state 

profiles, right? So it’s relatively straightforward 

to find a home base of each organization that 

sponsors AmeriCorps if that’s what’s of interest to 

the researcher, or to an analyst, or to anybody 

trying to find this information out. 

What gets trickier is determining where the 

AmeriCorps members physically perform their service. 

With Habitat for Humanity, as we heard before, I 

imagine Judah, Bradley, and Daniel were able to speak 

with the – it sounds like they spoke with the 

affiliates. And if you can go on a case-by-case basis 

with any individual nonprofit, you can find exactly 

where people are working, but that’s not the data 

that’s sort of legally required of them to report to 

the states or nationally.

Additional complications come in the case of the NCCC 

AmeriCorps, which go on spikes throughout the country 

in tracking down where they were in each specific 

spike. In my personal research, I was interested in 
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the impact on donation revenue, so the home base of 

each sponsor was what I was looking for, and that’s 

what there is data for. But if we wanna think about 

impacts on outcomes, impacts on capacity-things like 

that, this could get a little trickier.

The next question I thought about was, “How do I 

define impact”, right? So I think of impact as a 

change that happened because of something. So the 

first question is, “What is that something? Is it the 

AmeriCorps? Is it the actual service hours? Is it 

their physical presence? What are we talking about?” 

And the second is, “What is the thing that could 

change?” In my case that research has to do with the 

finances of the nonprofits, but if we wanna think 

about capacity building or other long-term outcomes, 

that can be a little more complex.

Additional complexity comes from the fact that the 

AmeriCorps part of this, or the complex system that’s 

going on, we have the government giving grants to 

nonprofits, nonprofits applying to grants from the 

government; we have nonprofits applying to within the 
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government: CNCS or AmeriCorps. We have the general 

public applying pressure on their legislators, but 

also donating money to the nonprofits who are then in 

turn – who are also asking them for funds. 

And those known profits are producing some sort of 

outcomes that might be in general more interesting. 

One of the impact on outcomes then – what my research 

was in the impact sort of on the donations, and 

fundraising, and financial details going on within 

the nonprofit. So what is easy to do for nonprofits 

is to count dollars. And we can do that generally by 

looking at – we could go on to one of the many 

websites that shows this stuff, or looking at their 

tax return data.

The National Center for Charitable Statistics 

releases data – I’ve got the link here, this is what 

I’ve used in the past that’s build in the 990 forms 

sent in by nonprofit organizations. And that is going 

to show things like their total revenue, the revenue 

from donations and grants, total expenditures. 

There’s actually a lot more data in there, but it 
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becomes the more-refined piece of information we’re 

looking at, the more difficult it is to compare 

across organizations and across years.

So the question is: what does - how many questions 

can we really answer just looking at the financial 

data-these tax returns of nonprofits? Of special 

interest to me is that we know that the returns 

aren’t gonna show outcomes. We don’t know if there’s 

capacity building going on. And they also have very 

incomplete data on physical in [inaudible] 

contributions and absolutely nothing about 

volunteered time.

I was interested in looking at the impact of 

AmeriCorps on volunteer numbers, and came to the 

conclusion that that data just simply wasn’t 

available in a large scale to look at that. It’s 

difficult to link that to whether those volunteers –

and I was interested in linking that to whether those

volunteers donated more money, again the data’s just 

not available to my understanding to determine 

something like that at this time.
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Part of their reason for that is there’s no 

centralized data set on volunteering. There’s nothing 

analogous to this tax return data. We do get some 

diffused data that differs from one AmeriCorps 

sponsor to the next AmeriCorps-sponsored report: how 

many different volunteers were leveraged by the 

AmeriCorps? And we can find survey data on 

volunteerism from National Public Survey Data such as 

the American Time Use Survey or the Current 

Population Survey.

But the issue in these both public and other academic 

surveys is that there’s no way to link these to the 

specific nonprofits. We know what type of 

organizations people volunteer for, but not the 

specific organizations or the specific times that 

they’re doing the volunteer work. So better tracking 

of volunteers is needed. National volunteerism data 

comes almost exclusively from these surveys, and 

because we can’t match that to the information on the 

nonprofits, we don’t have a sense.
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There’s no one place we can go nationally to 

determine which nonprofit organizations are working 

with more volunteers than others, other than going to 

each nonprofit one by one individually. Then even 

when we can find this information, there’s an 

additional difficulty in linking the data. So the 

Employer Identification Numbers are most commonly 

used things to link one organization to itself again 

in some other data set. 

That is on all of the tax return data. And nonprofit 

EINs are public anyway because those tax returns end 

up public. I would like to see more data sets include 

them because it would make it easier for us to 

compare what’s going on from one source of 

information about the nonprofit sector to another. My 

experience has been that generally when we want to 

link – try and match organizations to themselves 

using multiple different sources of data, we have to 

do that based on the organization name, and that can 

be very tricky. 
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We’re sort of hoping that there aren’t two nonprofits 

with similar sounding names that could be confused 

for each other. And finally, there’s the issue of 

tracking and measuring outcomes, which again I think 

while as an economist I’m interested in what’s in 

this and IRS data, and what’s going on with the 

nitty-gritty with fundraising and revenue. I think 

for a larger audience it’s things like capacity and 

outcomes that are of much more interest.

Unfortunately there’s very little information about 

outcomes and it’s very difficult to compare outcomes 

across organizations. So maybe within two 

organizations that are affiliated with the same 

national entity, you could compare outcomes: how many 

houses did this organization build or how many people 

were fed. But comparing across organizations is very 

difficult. And even beyond comparing across, there’s 

just no national repository of outcomes data, so it’s 

difficult to find out what impacts there are on 

outcomes if we can’t even find outcomes across the 

board in any one collected [unintelligible].
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So the question I’d like to pose to the audience that 

people start thinking about is: what outcomes should 

be used to measure the impact of national service? If 

we’re interested in something beyond what’s going on 

with revenue and expenditures, and what are the 

actual outcomes that could be – that national service 

members are having. How would we want to measure 

that? Where would we start with collecting that data? 

Thank you.

FEMALE: Thank you, Daniel, and Daniel Cooper, and 

Judah, and Bradley. We are going to just have some 

concluding remarks from Bethany and Anthony, so 

Bethany...

BETHANY: Hello. Just to mention since it seems to be a 

theme, I’m Bethany Cannon. I work with Habitat for 

Humanity International, and I, too, am a 

Habitat/AmeriCorps alum, and got hired on after my 

service, so it does tend to be a trend. And I am at 

Build-a-Thon, so happy to join you all. We have about 

400 AmeriCorps members in Raleigh, North Carolina, 

for a week we’re building 12 houses and some home 

repair projects as well. 
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We’re very happy to have Barbara Stewart join us for 

that. She was excited to pick up a hammer. I just 

want to talk for a minute about why this evaluation 

has been important to us, and how we’ve used these 

findings. Because this evaluation compared Habitat 

affiliates that host members to affiliates that do 

not in similar situations, it has been a great way 

for us to really clearly demonstrate the impact of 

the AmeriCorps program for affiliates.

We’ve been able to show affiliates that may be 

interested in the program but have never hosted 

exactly how AmeriCorps members can help them reach 

their strategic goals and serve more families. We at 

HFHI hold applications each year for local Habitat 

affiliates that are interested in hosting AmeriCorps 

members, and it’s really important to us to have a 

competitive host site application process in order to 

select sites that will be the best partners for HFHI 

for this program, so this data has been really 

helpful to demonstrate the program’s value especially 

to affiliates that have never used it. 
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It also has give us a way to show how AmeriCorps 

members build capacity. Particularly we learned in 

the study that during the year that we researched, 

only host affiliates that had AmeriCorps members saw 

in increase in homes built, while on average non-host 

affiliates saw a decrease that year, so it really 

showed the ability to buffer maybe difficult years 

having an AmeriCorps member. And we can clarify the 

“how” of how AmeriCorps members create this impact.

Most of our members – not all, most of our members 

serve as construction crew leaders, so they’re out on 

build sites leading volunteers with different teams. 

And, in essence, we learned that host sites served or 

engaged 70 percent more volunteers than non-host 

sites, which is just a huge number to be able to see 

the impact. It basically tells us that each 

AmeriCorps member – their impact is multiplied 

exponentially by the fact that they’re leading 

volunteers. 

And I think it gives an example for why so many more 

houses are able to be built when AmeriCorps is 
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involved. We’ve also used the results of the study to 

recruit AmeriCorps members-particularly by 

highlighting the skills and knowledge that alumni 

said that they learned, as well as the fact that 34

percent are hired after their service, which is a 

major draw for a potential candidate. And they’ve 

also been helpful results in demonstrating to 

internal stakeholders the impact of the program.

And by that I mean other HFHI departments and 

leadership. We have consistently received support 

within our organization for the program, and our 

government relations and advocacy office has seen the 

value and made us a priority initiative for advocacy, 

which is greatly appreciated, and we’ve been able to 

mobilize alumni and our networks for advocating for 

this program, and the great impact that it has.

We’ve also been able to use the results to inform our 

program design and make improvements. So for 

instance, if AmeriCorps members noted additional 

training or resources that they needed, we’ve been 

able to incorporate that into future programming. And 
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it’s given us some direction for a deeper dive, so we 

are actually currently working again with Judah, Dan, 

and Brad for our next external impact evaluation.

And we’re asking more questions around the difference 

between larger cohorts – so an affiliate that has 

maybe 15-18 members consistently versus affiliates 

that maybe only host one or two, and to see how those 

– what’s the difference in experience in impact and 

in value of the program to those affiliates. So we’re 

gonna do some qualitative studies this year to get 

some case studies on that. So really appreciate 

working with Dan, Brad, and Judah, and it’s been a 

great – the study’s been very helpful to us in the 

past and we look forward to another great impact 

study.

FEMALE: Thank you so much. We should use you more 

often. So I’m just gonna turn it to Anthony for some 

last closing words, and to start us off with the Q&A. 

ANTHONY: Thank you. I won’t talk for very long. I know 

there’s a bunch of questions. I see them popping up 

in the feed here, but I wanted to thank Doctors 

Cooper, Viola, and Olson, and Doctor Teles for the 
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research that they’ve done that has brought us to 

this point. I read the study about two years ago, and 

was intrigued by it, and brought it to the attention 

of some of the folks in our office, and when the 

opportunity came to talk about this in a broader way, 

I suggested it for the webinar.

 But personally in looking at our past history, on 

looking back at what we’ve been doing, it occurred to 

me that organizational capacity has been the one 

outcome that has been hiding in plain sight for 50 

years. Our programs go back to 1965, and in 

particular the Senior Corps & VISTA programs, and 

they were predicated on the notion that we would be 

building capacity both in communities and within 

organizations. 

And if you look at the anecdotal studies that have 

covered that whole period of time, it appears that 

they do. And you can even draw links to what was

reported then, to what I see in the more rigorous 

research that was presented today with regard to ties 

to the community, the shaping of the member, the 
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increased ability to deliver services and goods, and 

importantly, and not talked about very often, is the 

sustainability of a program. 

So what I want to say with regard to this particular 

research is I’m thrilled that it’s happening, but 

it’s not enough. What I think we need to look at is: 

how does this apply outside of a Habitat for Humanity 

Organization which allows us to do these kinds of 

studies? How does it work on the ground with a single 

organization that doesn’t have a comparison group. 

How do we do that type of research? And more 

importantly what sort of changes occur internally, 

organizationally in a program that are brought about 

by this increased capacity. 

It’s not just what we produce, it’s what we do and 

how we do it that are also of real importance to 

understand. So I’m issuing a mild challenge to say 

this isn’t the end, it’s the beginning. And I think 

everybody does believe that, but I would like to see 

us move in that direction. That said – wait a minute, 

I’m not supposed to say anything. Okay, nevermind. 
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That said, I want to turn it back over to Andrea, and 

she will start with the questions. Thank you very 

much for listening.

ANDREA: Well thank you, everyone. So now to jump into 

the Q&A: so for our online audience can you ask a 

question by typing it in the Q&A box? You can also 

ask a question using the microphone by selecting the 

right-hand feature from the menu above, and we will 

grant you microphone rights in the order the 

questions come in. So we have a few that already have 

started, so I’m just going to pose those and see if 

others come in. So, Judith Romley [phonetic]: how did 

the affiliates use their volunteer service members? 

And I think that’s forJUDAH: Bethany, feel free to jump in here. This is Judah. 

But what we heard was a variety of things for 

AmeriCorps National Service members. The most common 

thing that they did was to be supervisors at the 

build sites and to be volunteer coordinators, but 

there was a long list and variety of things they did. 

The VISTA members were more likely to be doing 

capacity-building projects, setting up systems 

internally, or working with the teams that do their 
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restores, and doing more off-site kind of central 

office type of work. But Bethany, feel free to jump 

in if you want to add any texture there. 

BETHANY: Yeah, thanks. I would say the majority of our 

national members are construction crew leaders, but 

we do also have people who work at volunteer 

coordinators, family services, coordination, outreach 

coordination, and then we have some VISTA – we have 

members that also help us with resource development, 

creating partnerships, like you said project 

management – so a variety of different roles, but 

mainly just around the services that we provide. 

FEMALE: Thanks. Another question. Let’s see, from Jono 

McKinney: you stated the model was very efficient. 

Please explain how you assess this.

MALE: That’s a very good question. What does our 

operational definition of “efficiency”? But we’re 

really going by the perception of the affiliate, so 

we did our insight visit in Seminole County, Florida, 

and just reading on some of the quotes that heard 

from the smaller affiliate, you’re essentially cost 

the affiliate $13,000, and we are essentially able to 
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double our number of builds than we would without 

AmeriCorps members. 

And then we’re really focused more on AmeriCorps 

members than VISTA. The members bring fresh ideas at 

a low cost, capacity building for more homes 

annually. I think one estimate that we heard was 85 

percent. I would need to look where that came from, 

but they said that through the CNCS able, the 

affiliate was able to take on essential partnerships 

such as with the Orlando affiliate that they could 

not have done otherwise.

And that given the ADDIS [phonetic] member program, 

they were able to service 22 additional families in 

the year. And ultimately, what they describe as a 

once very sad state volunteer program, they were able 

through the AmeriCorps members to increase that 

volunteer program by 53 percent, so that’s sort of 

one case example, but in general, when we say 

“efficiency”, we mean that they’re able to build more 

homes at a quicker pace by adding AmeriCorps members, 

and doing that work they wouldn’t have otherwise been 
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able to do at a low cost. The low cost being rather 

than hiring a full-time employee that might cost 30-

40 thousand dollars, it’s costing within that year 

about $13,000.

FEMALE: Okay, thank you. So we have one from Vivian 

Mercado: Is New York City [unintelligible] connected 

under the umbrella of AmeriCorps? I don’t exactly 

know what that is. Do any of you?

MALE: We were hoping you would.

FEMALE: Vivian, we see that I think that you need to 

explain a little bit more of what you mean, so that 

would be great. Do we have any questions that people 

want to read? Because if not, I want to turn to the 

two questions – one that Daniel posed when he was 

trying to do the work. Let’s see, what other outcomes 

or what other – I’m sorry I don’t have the question 

in front of me – but what other outcomes can we look 

at to see the impact of AmeriCorps? That was one. 

And then Anthony asked, “Where do we go from here? 

This is a larger scale, rigorous evaluation. What do 

we do with the smaller one-site programs?” Anyone can 

jump in. It doesn’t have to be just the speakers. So 
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Judah, and Brad, and Daniel, do you have any ideas in 

terms of what does with the smaller organizations orMALE: What we do with the smaller affiliates, and how 

they could be more effective, or in terms of – oh, in 

terms of evaluation?

FEMALE: Yeah, like how do you take these organizations 

that are more a single organization rather than an 

affiliates, and do some evaluation work on that?

MALE: I guess what I’m thinking about is where do you 

find or how do you match up an organization that’s a 

standalone organization in terms of its mission and 

its organization structure with a reasonable 

comparison. You know, an organization that is 

technically the same thing, and is situated the same 

way.

MALE: Okay, one thing that we could do is to look to the 

funder. So in this case, if CNCS is providing funding 

for multiple organizations but they might only have 

one site or one type of service that they’re 

providing, or they’re a standalone organization. CNCS 

has that bird’s eye view to be able to say which 

organizations are doing similar work and then 

partnering both with the organizations and with the
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funder allows you to compare cross-organizations that 

might be similar – either in size and scope or in 

mission.

MALE: Okay.

FEMALE: So we have a few people who have their hands 

raised, and [inaudible]. Judith? You have to un-mute. 

It’s the microphone on the top part of your screen. 

You’d have to click on that. 

FEMALE: In the meantime we can start a question from 

[unintelligible].

FEMALE: Okay. You have to speak right into your 

microphone. 

JUDITH: There is nothing on the top of my screen. 

Okay, I’m talking as loudly as I can. What about 

organizations like [inaudible] that are working 

closely with higher Ed institutions to place many 

service members? It would be possible using some of 

your current investigators to come up with a simple 

research plan that could both gather for evidence but 

also help the participating institutions educate 

their own students in some aspect of community 

engagement. 
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MALE: It’s certainly makes sense to us in terms of 

working with higher education and where they’re 

utilizing National Service members across many 

different organizations. We can come up with a 

systematic survey technique that would be asking a 

similar set of questions across the organizations. 

MALE: One place this gets especially complex is the 

organizations that have service members doing 

multiple different types of service where the 

outcomes will be different, where some group could be 

working on schools and other people in a poverty 

program, all with the same – part of the same larger 

AmeriCorps program. And so I think what I’d like to 

see is some larger survey that gets at what are each 

of the – how many AmeriCorps members in each program 

are sort of working towards different goals.

FEMALE: Thank you. I see one person has their hand 

raised. Jono, could you say something so we can be 

able to hear you? Okay, well we’ll move on to 

Colleen’s question: was there any study done on how 

members fared during their year? With such a low 

stipend, it can be very hard for members to make ends 

meet-at least in our experience. I would be 
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interested to see a study that evaluates their 

financial status and quality of life during the 

program, not just after. And whether members would 

have better outcomes with increased stipends? That’s 

a great question. People weigh in on that? Or if you 

saw any of that during your research.

MALE: That’s something that we’ve definitely heard. So we 

had some open-ended survey items that were at the 

beginning of the service year and the end, and we 

certainly heard that that is in fact a challenge for 

people. And I think to your point about raising the

stipend, I think certainly that would be appreciated 

across the board, but I think what we saw is that 

people knew this going in. They sort of planned for a 

year of making a low wage before they went off to get 

another degree or to move on to the next professional 

opportunity. But certainly that is a hardship.

MALE: [inaudible].

FEMALE: We can’t hear you.

MALE: We heard from a lot of the affiliate that somehow

housing could be made available, that that actually 

worked out a lot better for the members, and that 

provided a much greater quality of life. So given 
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that Habitat is a housing organization, sometimes 

that is possible, and that was always seen as very 

helpful.

MALE: One other thing that added to quality of life had 

to just do with their ability to interact and 

socialize with other National Service members to 

learn about different ways to live in a thrifty way 

in that year in that particular location or 

geography; as well as just the quality of the 

relationship that they built, and the mentorship that

they felt from supervisors at the site where they 

were doing their service. 

FEMALE: Thank you, and just very quickly-I know we’re 

almost at the top of the hour, but Jonah 

[unintellible] has this question, and I’d just like 

to pose it: Conservation Corps are building on this 

Habitat model to measure how AmeriCorps members are 

adding to the capacity of our conversation partners. 

For first round, we are looking at impacts for forest 

service and state park partners. We’re almost at the 

top of the hour. I’d like to give our speakers and 

Bethany if there’s anything else to add. Judah’s 

group, is there anything you’d like to say? 
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MALE: We just want to thank you all for the opportunity 

and we feel like we’re happy to share more 

information. Of course we’ve got a more detailed 

report so if anybody wants to follow up with us, we 

had information on one of the slides, and since the 

session will be recorded, you’ll have access to be 

able to have our contact information. We’re always 

happy to answer any evaluation questions, whether 

it’s on this particular project or just kind of 

consultation. 

FEMALE: Thanks, and we do have your paper on our 

Evidence Exchange. If you go to CNCS website, hit 

Research and Evidence, and in there you’ll see 

“Exchange” and that’s where you can find the 

evaluation paper. Daniel?

DANIEL: Thank you for having me. And again, I think 

reiterate if anyone has follow-up questions, my 

contact information was up there and feel free to 

shoot me an email. 

FEMALE: Thanks. And Bethany? 

BETHANY: Just thank you for the opportunity to share 

about the impact. 
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FEMALE: Well, we hope you enjoy your Build-a-Thon 

week, and I wish you success. And thank you all for 

joining us this afternoon, and we’ll be in touch. 

Thank you.

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