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JENELLE: Hello! I’m Jenelle Azore from ICF 

International. And before we begin there are a few 

housekeeping items to cover. This webinar will be 

recorded and posted online at AmeriCorps’ Impact 

Webinars page. If you have any questions or 

experience technical difficulties please let us know 

by using the Chat box feature and directing your 

message to the AmeriCorps Research Evaluation. 

 Please be advised that all lines have been muted to 

avoid background noise and to allow for greater 

engagement. You can submit questions on the 

presentation at any time to the Chat feature below. 

Select Everyone when submitting your questions. We 

will read your questions for you during the Q&A 

session following the presentation. Closed captions 

are available. To activate please select the Live 

Transcript icon on the Zoom menu and select Show 

Subtitles. 

 That takes care of our housekeeping items. The 

webinar will start now. Here to welcome us is Dr. 
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Mary Hyde, Director of AmeriCorps’ Office of Research 

and Evaluation. 

MARY: Thank you, Jenelle. Hello and welcome. I want to 

thank all of you for joining us today. We are 

thrilled to see there is such interest in this topic. 

Today’s topic takes us to the very core of 

AmeriCorps’ mission. Volunteers and national service 

members are the fuel and fire for our collective 

success. Given their central role in multiplying 

local efforts to improve community conditions, we are 

excited to share some new research on best practices. 

 The research is relevant to anyone seeking to 

effectively recruit and retain volunteers. AmeriCorps 

as an agency, built on Senior Corps and VISTA’s rich 

history of volunteering practice and research, in the 

decades following the creation of AmeriCorps a robust 

set of practices and body of knowledge has been 

established. AmeriCorps partners play a central role 

in managing local volunteers. 
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 And initiatives like the Volunteer Generation Fund 

help support the use of best practices in the field. 

AmeriCorps also has a long track record of sponsoring 

research on volunteering including the Nationally 

Representative Civic Engagement and Volunteering 

Survey, longitudinal alumni surveys, an annual member 

exit survey, and more locally focused research which 

the Office of Research and Evaluation sponsors 

through its research grant program. 

 The research that Dr. Hager and Dr. Hudson-Flege will 

share today builds on this foundation and we fully 

anticipate its translation into practice by the 

field. Next we will hear from our two speakers. 

First, we will hear from Dr. Mark Hager, Associate 

Professor in the School of Community Resources and 

Development at Arizona State University. Mark Hager 

is Associate Professor of Nonprofit Leadership and 

Management at Arizona State University. He is a 

return Peace Corps volunteer, having served in Sierra 

Leone after college. 
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 In 2003, while at the Urban Institute in Washington 

DC and with support from AmeriCorps, Mark was 

Principal Investigator for the Volunteer Management 

Capacity Study. That study provided a baseline 

understanding of management practices for supportive 

volunteers across the country. In 2017, AmeriCorps 

funded a follow up study dubbed the Volunteer 

Management Capacity II and that’s what Mark will 

share today. He’s been in Phoenix with Arizona State 

for fourteen years. However, his wife has taken a job 

in Houston. So, this summer he will move his family 

there and look for a new way to contribute to the 

nonprofit sector. 

 Our second speaker, Dr. Matthew Hudson-Flege is a 

Research Assistant Professor at Clemson University 

and the Program Director of Furman College Advising 

Corps, an AmeriCorps program. Matthew served in 

AmeriCorps after high school and also served in the 

Peace Corps in Jamaica after college. He has over a 

decade of experience founding, leading, and 

researching AmeriCorps programs. 
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 We will finish the presentation portion with brief 

reflections from Jennifer Bastress Tahmasebi, the 

Deputy Director for AmeriCorps State and National. 

And finally, for the last 25 or 30 minutes, we will 

open it up for Q&A. As Jenelle said, if you think of 

any questions, comments, or useful resources during 

the presentations feel free to add it to the chat and 

share with everyone. I will now pass this on to 

Professor Mark Hager to provide some introductory 

remarks and his findings. 

MARK: Well, thank you, Mary. Let me do my clicks here. 

Let’s see. So, there’s a presentation and there we 

go. Alright, everybody should see my title slide 

here: Slouching Toward Volunteer Management Capacity. 

Thank you, Mary. And it’s neat to be able to go 

first. I get to spend about 20 minutes chatting with 

you all off the bat here to kick things off. That 

gives me just enough time to give some flavor of some 

work that actually took several years to complete, 

offer some high level observations of what we got out 

of that work, and end with several encouragements. 
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 I should say that, unlike Matthew’s work that we’ll 

hear from here in just a little bit, my work is not 

specific to AmeriCorps or AmeriCorps volunteers. It’s 

more generally about what we call volunteer 

management capacity. It’s more broadly about how 

organizations of all kinds are engaging citizens to 

work in their communities in a great variety of ways. 

Although, I’ve always had at least one eye on 

national service. Mary mentioned that I spent time as 

a Peace Corps volunteer in Sierra Leone, I’m still 

active in that. But, more recently my 18 year old 

daughter has applied for an AmeriCorps slot. So, my 

family is sort of on pins and needles waiting to find 

out if our daughter is going to be able to get one of 

those spaces. So, we talk about it a lot, studied it 

a lot, and so we have that top of mind right now. 

 Let me jump in with a little bit of context here 

about how I sort of think about volunteering. And I’m 

not going to say anything that’s strange to the 

people on the call, but I think the world as a whole 

needs a little bit of a reorientation about how 

volunteering sits with organizations writ large. I 
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think there is some sense that nonprofits or other 

organizations that might engage volunteers are kind 

of like businesses in that the businesses or the 

nonprofits hold all the cards. They make the decision 

about who they’re going to hire and we’re lucky to 

get a job. 

 And even on the business side, we can see right now 

that that’s not always the case or is changing right 

now with what’s being called the Great Resignation. 

Where you see that employees hold more of the cards. 

Right now we’re sort of challenging this convention 

that the businesses always hold the cards, the 

employers always hold the cards, and we’re seeing 

people saying I don’t want that job anymore. I don’t 

want to do what I’ve been doing. I’m going to go do 

something else. 

 Well, it’s always been that way for volunteers. It is 

a social situation where volunteers are the ones that 

hold all of the cards. I think we don’t always see it 

that way and probably should. It’s the volunteers, 

it’s the individual citizen who gets to decide how 
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they’re going to spend their time. And volunteering, 

except for a fairly small slice of the American 

population, isn’t the top option. The top option is 

going to be more like Netflix. Holing up in your 

house, maybe talking to neighbors occasionally, but 

binging on Netflix is a lot more popular than 

actually engaging our communities. 

 That said, some folks do want to volunteer in 

community organizations, but it’s a buyer’s market. 

The volunteers are the ones that hold all the cards 

and if they don’t find themselves in a good situation 

they can just walk away and go find something else to 

do. So, it’s the nonprofit or it’s the congregation 

that is in the place of holding up their hand, 

putting their best face forward so they can attract 

the volunteers that are going to work best within 

their organizations. 

 So, that goes to what we call building a quality 

volunteer program. Noting that the quality of the 

volunteer program and the quality of the engagement 

that we have with volunteers is what determines how 
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the volunteers are going to see their experience. 

That’s that social contract. A volunteer can walk 

away at any particular point unless they find that 

they have a good experience and the organization is 

going to value their time. 

 That’s where we enter into a sort of a whole arena of 

volunteer administration and you are all familiar 

with this. Volunteer management, volunteer 

administration, volunteer resource managers. This is 

real work and it’s real administration within 

organizations of all kinds where if we’re going to 

work effectively with volunteers we need to do the 

legwork to define the volunteer roles, to figure out 

how to bring them in, do the work of recruiting and 

screening volunteers, make sure people are 

appropriately on-boarded and trained to do their 

work, to supervise and communicate with volunteers 

throughout their work with organizations, to assess 

their work, to recognize them so they feel good about 

their work and their connection to the organization 

so they keep on coming back. 
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 When we don’t do this work sufficiently individual 

volunteers can simply walk away. So, what do we know 

about volunteer management capacity? We only know 

what we study. And you can go back almost 20 years 

when the federal government started asking this 

question, what do we know about volunteer management 

capacity? And it came on the heels of President Bush, 

the younger one, his 2002 State of the Union address 

that he gave just a couple months after the terrorist 

attacks in New York City and Washington DC and 

outside of Pittsburgh. 

 And in that State of the Union address President Bush 

encouraged all Americans to go spend what would 

amount to two years of their life volunteering in the 

community, not all at once, but, you know, a little 

bit at a time, regularly go out and connect more to 

community. The field sort of had two pretty different 

responses to that. One was hey, wow, the president is 

encouraging people to go out and volunteer more, 

that’s awesome. We don’t get to hear that too much 

from the president. But, the second one, though, is a 

little bit skeptical. The field kind of pushed back 
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and said, you know, we have a hard time effectively 

managing the volunteers we already have, let alone if 

we had an army of new volunteers that came roaring to 

our doors. 

 So, the federal government heard that and they 

started asking questions about well, what is 

capacity? What could we do to encourage more 

capacity? So, the federal government, a White House 

office called the USA Freedom Corps, that was 

established by that President Bush, reached out to 

AmeriCorps. They had a different name at the time and 

said hey, you know, can you help us get up to speed 

on volunteer management capacity? And AmeriCorps said 

yeah, we can put money towards some research on that. 

Let’s see if we can find some more money and sure 

enough the UPS Foundation stepped up and they went 

looking for a partner in this. 

 That ended up being the Urban Institute, a think tank 

in Washington DC that just does this kind of work, 

that ended up being me because I was there at the 

time, and that ended up being the Volunteer 
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Management Capacity Study, the briefing reports that 

were published in late 2003 and in 2004. There’s a 

link there. I’ll share these slides a little bit 

later to the public briefing report that came out in 

2003, 2004. But, it was, you know, it got a fair 

amount of air play. It made a fair amount of impact 

at the time. 

 The thing is that’s almost two decade ago. People 

still will refer to it, but when they refer to it, 

like me, in class, I’ll say, ‘This is getting older. 

What has changed?’ We know some things have changed. 

So, several years ago we approached AmeriCorps to 

revisit this study. So, 2018, we laid a lot of 

groundwork. 2019, we collected data for the second 

round of the Volunteer Management Capacity Study. 

 Can I get to the chat right now? I will press go. 

There’s a link to the public report that I just put 

in the chat. It’s also linked there in the slides. A 

report that we released last spring. I keep saying 

we, this is Jeffrey Brudney, who is co-principal 

investigator on this study, a good friend of mine. We 
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were finishing up that briefing report that I just 

linked to and I’m speaking from a little bit today, 

last spring. Jeff wasn’t feeling very well when we 

were finalizing this. 

 It dragged him down a little bit, had an infection, 

went into the hospital. His wife brought him his 

laptop so he could keep working from the hospital, 

but he dragged down a little bit more and sad to say 

never made it out of the hospital. Last Easter Jeff 

Brudney died, which is lousy for the field. He was 

the preeminent scholar of volunteer management, 

volunteer administration in the world, but also a 

good friend of mine. So, it’s sort of a little bit in 

memoriam to be able to speak about Volunteer 

Management Capacity II knowing that Jeff Brudney had 

such a large hand in this particular study. 

 So, points of context. What did we learn from this 

study? Well, here’s something that seems to have 

changed since we first did our first round of 

Volunteer Management Capacity Study almost two years 

ago. So, this looks at the growth, and we heard about 
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this going on and this documents it a little bit 

more, the growth of interest in what we call episodic 

volunteering. Short-term assignments or periodic 

assignments rather than the long-term, regular super 

volunteers that we had more of back in the old days. 

 It’s good to be able to engage volunteers in shortterm assignments if that’s where they’re at, but 

they’re inevitably shallower. People spend less time 

working in organizations. So, I don’t know that it’s 

a good development, but it’s the context of where 

we’re at right now. You see that 41.7% at the bottom 

of this slide, those are short-term volunteers that 

are in face-to-face assignments. And I’m going to 

guess, if we did this now in the throes of the 

pandemic, we would find that episodic assignments 

have probably now eclipsed those long-term 

assignments. That’s important context for the hard 

work of volunteer administration. 

 Here’s another point of context, something also we 

noted back in 2003 in the initial round of the 

Volunteer Management Capacity Study, and that’s that 
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professional volunteer resource managers are a 

distinct minority. Meaning that the people that are 

doing volunteer resource management in organizations 

aren’t professionals. The professionals are down here 

in this slice, 23.8% of people that are working with 

volunteers in organizations. These are staff 

volunteer managers who are devoting at least halftime to volunteer administration. 

 Now look over to the right, the 41.4%, those are 

still staff volunteer managers, but they’re spending 

less than half-time. It’s something that Jeff Brudney 

and I have said for many years is unless you’re doing 

something half-time that’s not how you think about 

your job professionally. You know, if you say, ah, 

I’m a program manager. Oh, but, I also spend a little 

time doing volunteer management because nobody else 

in my organization is tasked with that particular 

job. If you’re doing most of your job as program 

manager that’s how you think about yourself, that’s 

where you get your training, that’s where you join a 

professional association. 
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 So, unless you do get up to half-time, become a 

professional volunteer resource manager, you don’t 

get the training and the professional development and 

the individual identity towards professional 

administration. I think that’s a problem for the 

field of volunteer administration. 

 Perhaps as a consequence we are short on volunteer 

management capacity in many nonprofit organizations 

or volunteer settings across the country. Most 

nonprofits have a problem recruiting volunteers. Now 

in the black here those organizations say they don’t 

have a problem either recruiting enough volunteers, 

or recruiting volunteers during the work day, or 

volunteers with right skills or expertise, but when 

you look in the green you see a third, a quarter of 

organizations saying it’s a big problem, and lots in 

the middle to bring us up to a majority of 

organizations who say at least they have some problem 

with recruiting volunteers. We think this is due to a 

lack of capacity to manage volunteers, to recruit, 

and later on to retain because volunteers know 
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they’re getting a good experience in that 

organization. 

 We focus to a large extent on practices. That’s 

become a mainstay of the Volunteer Management 

Capacity project. We ask about adoption of particular 

practices. What about practices related to 

recruitment and placement? Well, not too bad. The 

green are those organizations that have adopted a 

particular practice to a large degree and you got 

over half of organizations, shoot, going on almost 

2/3rds of organizations saying they match volunteers 

to appropriate tasks or jobs. Yay. Pretty good. But, 

only half that say they are always screening to 

identify suitable, screening for appropriateness of 

volunteers, and many fewer that have written policies 

and job descriptions, and more than 1 in 5 that don’t 

have written policies and job descriptions at all. 

So, some capacity here, but work to do. 

 What about supporting volunteers themselves? We asked 

five questions that had to do with support of 

volunteers. And yay, up on top regular supervision of 
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volunteers. I suppose it’s good on one hand that half 

of our nonprofit organizations say they’ve adopted to 

a large degree this practice of regularly supervising 

volunteers, but that leads another half that don’t do 

this. And the other practices are listed here: 

liability coverage, regularly recognizing volunteers, 

training volunteers and staff are adopted to a much 

lower degree. 

 You look at training for paid staff at the very 

bottom and it’s that staff that does the work with 

volunteers, you only have about 17% of organizations 

say that they’ve adopted that to a large degree, and 

nearly half that say we don’t do that at all. So, 

support practices not so great, work to do. 

 Communication practices are somewhat better, maybe 

because this is easier for people to do. This 

involves both communicating with volunteers about the 

work that they need to do or have been doing. Or 

communicating with other stakeholders, it could be 

the general public, it could be the board of 

directors, it could be funders. And here we see, 
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actually, lots of green where most organizations are 

saying that they’ve adopted these practices to a 

large degree. But, still too much black and enough of 

that middle category to give us pause about how well 

nonprofit organizations are communicating both 

internally and externally regarding their volunteer 

work. 

 The fourth group of practices that we investigated 

has to do with assessment. Knowing what your 

volunteers are doing, how many there are, whether 

they’re having an impact, and what it’s value is for 

the organization, and here we’re losing ground 

compared to where we were in 2003. We have not half, 

but a third of organizations, anyway, that say we 

don’t do these things at all. And less than that, or 

around a third, again, that say they’ve adopted these 

to a large degree. Which ones are those? 

 Well, they’re the larger organizations. They’re the 

ones that work with volunteers more. So, there are 

certainly some very good, well established 

organizations that work with volunteers and have very 
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good management practices. But, too many 

organizations in the rank and file that are handling 

a lot of our civic engagement that are not giving 

volunteers good experiences, and there’s turnover, 

and there’s happiness, and people are just going to 

go watch Netflix rather than keep working with our 

community organizations. 

 So, summing up. Volunteerism is that primary way that 

people engage their communities. People need 

engagement, organizations need engagers. So, both on 

the supply side and on the demand side volunteerism 

provides this great opportunity for connecting to 

communities. The thing is people walk away if they 

don’t feel like they’re getting a good experience. 

This is real work and organizations have to invest in 

management capacity if they expect volunteers to keep 

returning to do that work. 

 This is a tall order. This is hard work for our 

volunteer administrators especially if they’re not 

professionals, this is something that they’re just 

thrown into or that they are doing on the side. We 
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have increasing short-term shallow assignments. And 

during the pandemic we have a need to handle virtual 

engagements which have increased quite a lot and are 

not going to go away. What we see in this study, and 

it’s not changing anytime soon, is too few 

organizations investing in people and practices that 

lead to those happy, productive, committed volunteers 

that are going to stick around. 

 Lots of shortcomings. 1 in 5 organizations have no 

written policies or position descriptions. Half do no 

training of staff to work with volunteers. 1 in 3 

collect little to no information on what their 

volunteers bring to operations. So, there is 

substantial potential for increasing management 

capacity. 

 How do we do that? Let me give you three quick ideas 

on what we can do in our organizations to increase 

our volunteer management capacity. First, we have to 

recognize that our volunteer administrators usually 

aren’t the ones holding the purse strings. They’re 

not the ones that control resources. They’re usually 
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just not in a position to do that, but what we can do 

is advocate internally for resources. 

 That little circle at the bottom of our slide, those 

two arrows, that’s the key argument here. Too often 

boards, top management teams they don’t understand 

the value of volunteers or the work that goes into 

creating good experiences for volunteers. They say 

ah, volunteers are free. We don’t need to put any 

money into this, but that’s not true. The benefits 

you get from volunteers are the results of the 

investments that you do in volunteer administration. 

And those investments then return more benefits. It’s 

a positive feedback loop, and unless you’re in that 

positive loop, you’re just going to provide poor 

experiences for your volunteers. So, we must convince 

our boards, our top management teams, the people that 

control resources that these returns from volunteers 

only come from investments and the capacity to work 

with volunteers. 

 The second has to do with people. Let’s get more 

professional volunteer resource managers in place. 
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That means this has to be more than half-time if 

there’s only one person working in these 

organizations. Sometimes there’s a bunch of people, 

but unless it’s half-time, people aren’t going to see 

this as a professional job that then they seek 

development for. There’s a certifying body, the 

Council for Certification in Volunteer Administration 

has about 1,000 certified volunteer administrators in 

the United States and Canada. Let’s get more of those 

and let’s get our organizations to hire people who 

are trained, developed professional volunteer 

administrators. 

 Can we plug AmeriCorps members in here? Sure, we can. 

That was a conversation back in 2003 when we were 

doing the initial work. And AmeriCorps members do 

this work and I know there have been at least some 

movements in that particular direction. Great. But, 

let’s make sure that they get serious training in 

order to slot into these particular spots. My 18 year 

old daughter is smart and talented and beautiful, and 

if she gets a slot as an AmeriCorps member she’ll do 

a great job, but boy is she not at all ready to go in 
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and lead volunteers in an organization of any size. 

Everybody needs serious training in order to do this 

work well. 

 That’s people. The third piece are those management 

practices. You got to build a volunteer program if 

you haven’t or shore up what you have. You’ve got to 

adopt the practices that make sense for your 

particular situation. It’s not an accidental thing 

and it’s treated as accidental management too often. 

We have to be strategic in how we build approaches to 

recruitment, to placement, to support, to 

communication with volunteers, and assessment of 

their work. 

 The formula that Jeff Brudney created is simple. He 

defined volunteer management capacity, which became 

the namesake for this 20 years of work that we’ve 

done, has two pieces. It’s the people that you invest 

in to do volunteer administration in your 

organizations and it’s the practices we adopt in 

order to properly manage them. If we do these two 

things well people will come, and be happy, and work 
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and work productively, and stay in our organizations. 

If we don’t they will simply walk away, find a better 

volunteer assignment to do, or go binge some Netflix. 

Don’t let that happen. Thank you. 

 I am Mark Hager. You can get me at 

Mark.Hager@asu.edu. I’ll be happy to field questions, 

but first we want to hear what Matthew has to say 

about his work on AmeriCorps volunteers. 

MATTHEW: Alright, good afternoon, everyone. And Mark, 

thanks so much for that great presentation. My name 

is Matthew Hudson-Flege. I’m a Research Assistant 

Professor at Clemson University. My full-time day job 

is running Furman College Advising Corps, which is a 

small AmeriCorps program serving high school students 

throughout the State of South Carolina. This 

afternoon I’m going to be talking to you about my 

research over the last few years trying to better 

understand AmeriCorps members – who they are, why 

they’re motivated to serve, and how we can better 

recruit and support them. 
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 So, what is the challenge that I’m trying to address 

in my research? Every year there are more than 75,000 

Americans serving in AmeriCorps helping our their 

communities in various capacities. Well, we know that 

this group of AmeriCorps members is very diverse in a 

lot of ways, but particularly in terms of their age, 

their education level, and why they’re serving in 

AmeriCorps. So, the question is how can AmeriCorps 

program leadership and others better understand these 

diverse groups of member, recruit them, and support 

them throughout their AmeriCorps service? 

 So, in order to tackle this question we looked at 

data from a few different sources. First, I analyzed 

quantitative data from two large surveys that are 

nationally representative of AmeriCorps members. The 

AmeriCorps Longitudinal Study was an effort that 

tracked AmeriCorps members over an eight year period 

from 2000 to 2008. And then the AmeriCorps Alumni 

Outcomes Survey looked at a few different cohorts of 

AmeriCorps members who served in the late 2000 oughts 

through early teens, so a bit more recent data there. 
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 Both of those studies, I’ll note, were funded by 

AmeriCorps’ Office of Research and Evaluation, and 

they’re available on what they call the Evidence 

Exchange which has these two studies as well as 

numerous others. So, a great resource if you’re 

interested in studies and other information about 

AmeriCorps. In addition to the quantitative work, I 

also interviewed several AmeriCorps alumni from 

around the country to kind of get a little deeper 

understanding. So, I’m going to present some kind of 

key findings from this research. 

 And I’ll also note that my research for this 

particular project is focused on young adult members 

around the age of 18 to 25. So, certainly know and 

appreciate that there are AmeriCorps members of all 

ages making valuable contributions. I think I saw 

several introductions in the chat from folks from 

RSVP or other AmeriCorps seniors programs. So, 

certainly not to take away from those programs in any 

way, but it’s something I learned very quickly when I 

delved into the world of research is you have to kind 
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of narrow your audience. So, this particular research 

is focused on that young adult demographic. 

 So, the first thing that I really encountered when 

doing this work was trying to identify how we can 

sort of group to better understand AmeriCorps members 

based on their age, their education, and their 

motivation to serve. What I found was four sort of 

distinct profiles of AmeriCorps members and I’ve 

named them as followed: public servants, gappers, 

wanderers, and young idealists, oh my. So, who are 

these people and why do they join AmeriCorps? 

 First, we’ll talk about public servants. Public 

servants are recent college graduates, they’re going 

to be in that 22 to 24 age range and they have a very 

high level of public service motivation. Meaning in 

college they were active as volunteers or in 

different advocacy efforts and they have an interest 

in civic engagement. They’re really joining 

AmeriCorps to serve as a springboard towards a career 

in the nonprofit sector, the public sector, or the 

general helping sectors. 
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 They’re looking at AmeriCorps as a way to gain 

experience, maybe get their foot in the door at a 

nonprofit organization, or to really prepare and 

build their resume for graduate school in these 

related areas. Public servants in the datasets that 

I’ve looked at represent about 1/3rd of young adult 

AmeriCorps members, so a pretty sizable group. What 

does this look like in real life? I’ll point out 

Andrea Rosado, who is an AmeriCorps member I worked 

with in my past work. 

 She was a graduate of the University of Notre Dame, 

was a pre-med student, but was very active in service 

and volunteerism throughout college. She wanted to do 

AmeriCorps to gain more hands-on experience with 

underserved communities and she also wanted to take 

some time to be intentional about applying to medical 

school. She ended up serving a year with Vincentian 

Volunteers of Cincinnati, which is a small 

residential AmeriCorps program in Cincinnati, Ohio, 

where she was able to work in a charitable pharmacy 

really gaining experience working one on one with 
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patients, before she ultimately went on to medical 

school. 

 The next group I’ll talk about are who I call the 

gappers. Gappers like the public servants or recent 

college grads, in that 22 to 24 age range, they, 

though, have a more low to moderate level of public 

service motivation. So, not quite as active in 

volunteerism, don’t necessarily have a set interest 

in going into the nonprofit, public, or helping 

sectors for their career. They’re joining AmeriCorps 

to discover new career pathways, maybe they got to 

the end of college and decided hey, this major really 

wasn’t for me. 

 Or they do have a good sense of where their career 

will take them, but they’re looking for somewhat of a 

break between college and really launching full 

fledge into their career. Like the public servants, 

gappers represent about 1/3rd of all AmeriCorps 

members. As an example, I’ll cite Ariel CochraneBrown. So, Ariel, when she was a senior at UNC 

Chapel-Hill she had been majoring in PR and 
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marketing. And she had a little bit of an identity 

crisis senior year and decided hey, I’m not a PR girl 

after all, this isn’t really the field that I want to 

go into. What am I going to do now that I’m about to 

graduate? 

 An older sorority sister of Ariel’s was serving as an 

AmeriCorps member with College Advising Corps at the 

time, told Ariel about the program, and she thought 

hey, this looks like a chance to do something 

meaningful for a year. I’ll have a job so my mom 

won’t be mad at me and it’ll give me time to sort of 

assess where I’m at and where I want to go with my 

career. 

 The next group that I’ll talk about are wanderers. 

So, wanderers are high school graduates who may have 

a year or two of college or work experience. So, 

we’re thinking like 19 to 21 year olds. But, they 

haven’t really quite found their right fit either 

academically or with work. They don’t know sort of 

what their career direction is going to look like. 

Like the gappers, they have a lower or more moderate 
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level of public service motivation, and they’re 

really joining AmeriCorps to find a sense of 

direction for their career and purpose in their 

lives. 

 Wanderers represent about 17% of young adult 

AmeriCorps members. So, a much smaller group than the 

two previous groups. I’ll note most likely because of 

the issue of having a bachelor’s degree. While some 

AmeriCorps programs are open to high school 

graduates, other AmeriCorps programs like College 

Advising Corps, many AmeriCorps VISTA positions are 

only open to folks who have a bachelor’s degree. So, 

that’s somewhat limiting the pool of non-college 

graduates. Excuse me. 

 As an example of a wanderer I’ll talk about Alex 

Harvey. Alex had grown up in sort of rural Arkansas. 

He spent two years at the University of Arkansas 

studying business, but he just really was not, his 

heart wasn’t in it, he didn’t really feel like he fit 

in as a college student, didn’t know where he was 

going, and he was also very interested in living life 
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in the big city, but he didn’t know quite how to get 

there from where he was. So, what Alex did was 

literally Google ‘what to do when you don’t want to 

move back in with your parents.’ 

 When he did this AmeriCorps came up and he researched 

it for opportunities. He ended up serving a year with 

SBP, which is an organization in New Orleans that 

works with housing for families who have been a 

victim of a natural disaster. One thing I’ll note too 

about wanderers is that wanderers as a group are more 

racially, gender, and economically diverse than 

AmeriCorps members as a whole. 

 The final group I’ll talk about are young idealists. 

So, young idealist are recent high school grads, 18 

to 19, with a very high level of public service 

motivation. They’re joining AmeriCorps because they 

really want to make an impact in the real world or in 

their community right here and now. Almost identical 

in size to the wanderers, they make up about 17% of 

AmeriCorps members in this young adult age range. 
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 As an example, I’ll actually tell my own AmeriCorps 

story. So, believe it or not under that helmet and 

massive head of hair that’s me at 19 back in 2002, 

when I actually heeded that very call that Mark 

talked about from President George W. Bush in the 

wake of 9/11. Like many Americans at the time, I had 

a real sense of patriotism and a desire to serve, but 

my interests were much more in community service. 

 So, I found out about AmeriCorps N triple C, which is 

a team-based, very hands-on AmeriCorps program. So, I 

spent a year with a team of fellow young adults 

doing, you know, really great community work right 

after I graduated high school before eventually going 

on to college. 

 Like the wanderers, young idealists are also a bit 

more diverse racially, in terms of gender, and 

economically than AmeriCorps members as a whole. So, 

that being said, if you’re an AmeriCorps leader and 

you are interested in having a core of AmeriCorps 

members who are representative of the communities you 
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serve, young idealists and wanderers might be 

particular groups of interest to you. 

 So, in just a minute I’m going to ask our sort of 

facilitators to open up an audience poll, but before 

I do that I just want to put this in context. So, 

this grouping of AmeriCorps members into these four 

profiles it’s not meant to be like a diagnostic tool 

to say okay, you’re this category or that category. 

Rather as we’re thinking about AmeriCorps members as 

large groups, how can we organize our thoughts on who 

they are and why they’re serving? 

 That being said, you know, when I speak to current 

AmeriCorps members or AmeriCorps alumni about these 

profiles very often they’ll tell me, ‘Oh yes, that 

profile or these two profiles really do speak to me 

in terms of who I was and why I joined AmeriCorps.’ 

So, I’m guessing that on this webinar, out of our 250 

or so participants, there’s probably a handful of you 

who served in AmeriCorps yourself. 
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 So, we’re going to launch a poll question and for 

those of you have served in AmeriCorps I’d like to 

know which of these profiles sort of best describes, 

and I know a couple might, but just pick one that 

best describes with you or if you thought no, none of 

these really describe me at all you can just say none 

of these. And we’ll leave the results up to see what 

we find. 

 Alright, I am not able to see the poll results. I 

don’t know if we can share those. Okay, great. 

Alright, so, yes, I was correct, quite a few of 

AmeriCorps alumni on the call, welcome. So, it looks 

like we had the largest group being public servants, 

followed by, it was 44 of you. 11 gappers, 8 

wanderers, and 7 young idealists. Oh yes, Mark, I’ll 

definitely talk to her and see what profile she fits. 

 So, alright, I was curious to do this, and this sort 

of bears out anecdotally, but what I found is that 

within the AmeriCorps world many people who are 

running AmeriCorps programs or working in different 

capacities who themselves were AmeriCorps members, 
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the large majority of them were in that public 

servant category, and that’s not surprising given the 

fact that, you know, you’re still working in this 

AmeriCorps world. But, I wanted to just pause and 

poll the group, because I think it’s really important 

to kind of keep in mind the proverb that we see from 

where we stand. 

 So, for those of us who work in the AmeriCorps arena 

who were members it’s a great asset because we can 

relate to our members in a certain way since we 

ourselves went through AmeriCorps, but it’s really 

important to stop and consider that, you know, our 

motivations for serving might be very different from 

the motivations of some of our members. So, we always 

want to honor that difference and take that into 

account when we approach them. 

 Alright, so, after developing these profiles, when I 

was doing interviews with AmeriCorps members, who 

kind of resonated with these different groups, I 

wanted to dive down into questions that could help us 

as AmeriCorps program leaders better recruit and 
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serve these diverse groups. So, one of the question I 

ask is, ‘Why did you join AmeriCorps?’ And I did see 

some different responses based on the profiles. 

 So, wanderers often times they strictly needed a job. 

They were looking for a job and that’s how they found 

this position. They also talked often about needing 

an opportunity for a new direction. Gappers also 

talked about, you know, approaching college 

graduation and needing a job. Many of them, though, 

were interested in the nonprofit sector, but because 

they hadn’t like majored in social work or done a lot 

of volunteering in college, they saw AmeriCorps as a 

way to sort of get their foot in the door in the 

nonprofit world. 

 Public servants often talked about preparation for 

graduate school and also an opportunity to refine 

their broader interests within the public service 

realm. So, they knew they wanted to be in nonprofit 

or a helping profession, but they didn’t know exactly 

what that would look like and AmeriCorps might 

provide that opportunity to really drill that down. 
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 Finally, young idealists really talked about wanting 

to make a hands-on impact right away and not just 

wanting to kind of continue in school. The one thing 

I’ll say about all these groups is that they all were 

looking for an opportunity to do meaningful work. So, 

even though I mentioned that wanderers and gappers 

maybe had a lower level of public service motivation, 

they all had an interest in doing meaningful work 

that would impact their community and all saw 

AmeriCorps as a way to do that. 

 Some interesting food for thought, though that came 

up within my discussions about this question. One, is 

that many AmeriCorps members I’ve spoken with 

actually didn’t know they were joining an AmeriCorps 

program until very late in the interview process or 

even until their first day on the job. So, while if 

you’re joining a program like AmeriCorps N triple C 

where it’s very, AmeriCorps is in the name, many 

folks who served for state and national programs 

they’re not like looking for AmeriCorps positions, 

they’re just looking for a job and finding it, and 
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only did they later on realize oh, this AmeriCorps, 

what is that? 

 Another thing I found is that for those who were 

familiar with AmeriCorps or had heard of it, many 

folks have a very narrow impression of what 

AmeriCorps is based on their own personal experience 

knowing someone who served. So, for example, if they 

had a roommate or friend or sibling who served in 

AmeriCorps N triple C or AmeriCorps VISTA, that’s all 

that they know about AmeriCorps. There’s definitely a 

lack of an understanding and appreciation for the 

broad range of opportunities that are available for 

AmeriCorps service among college and high school 

seniors. 

 So, another question that I asked is, you know, 

looking back at yourself before you joined 

AmeriCorps, what type of a recruiting message would 

have resonated with you at that time? Wanderers 

talked about emphasizing technical and job skills 

that you can learn in AmeriCorps as well as the 

education award and the healthcare benefits. Again, 
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they were often just kind of looking for a job with 

benefits at the time. 

 Gappers really emphasized the career opportunities 

that can come about through AmeriCorps service as 

well as, again, the education award and health 

benefits. Public servants focused on the career and 

personal growth opportunities that are available as 

well as the education award, as many public servants 

are planning to go on to graduate school. Finally, 

the young idealists talked about messages related to 

real hands-on and impactful opportunities as well as 

how AmeriCorps can support their broader career 

growth. 

 Something that I heard a lot from people across all 

profiles, though, was really a desire to hear 

authentic stories from quote unquote “people like 

me.” So, they want to hear stories about people who 

were in their shoes or were in a similar situation 

who served in AmeriCorps. And they often had kind of 

an aversion to overly polished marketing campaigns. 

Even when I asked the question, what kind of 
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recruiting message would be effective? They kind of 

bristled at that and said well, it shouldn’t be about 

like recruiting message, it should just be about 

telling the story about people like me who did it and 

then I’ll see if it’s for me. 

 So, once you have someone onboard, I’m definitely 

interested in within these different profiles how can 

we best support AmeriCorps members? So, I asked them 

what types of training and other member support 

opportunities were helpful for you? And what sort of 

training, you know, wasn’t there or could have been 

expanded upon? Here, interestingly, I did not really 

see a clear differentiation between answers based on 

what profile folks were in. 

 Across the board folks talked about, you know, new 

hard skills such as construction or different 

technology being really helpful for them later in 

their careers. They talked about sort of on the job 

training that was provided from more experienced 

AmeriCorps members who maybe started before them as 

being particularly effective. And they also talked 
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about how many of the program staff had an open door 

policy and were very supportive, and that was 

something that really stuck out as helpful member 

support efforts. 

 Things that they pointed out as gaps or being needed 

were better direction on how to use the AmeriCorps 

Education Award, sessions on how to really prepare 

for life after AmeriCorps, and throughout the year a 

little more attention to their professional growth 

and development as they’re going through this 

AmeriCorps experience. 

 So, how can you take these different profiles of 

AmeriCorps members and apply this knowledge to your 

work working with AmeriCorps members? Lots of 

different directions that you could take it, but I 

wanted to share a couple ways that I have used this 

in my job managing a chapter of College Advising 

Corps. 

 So, first when it comes to recruiting. When I’m 

interviewing a perspective member or talking to 
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someone at a career fair often I’ll ask them 

questions about, you know, who they are, what their 

interests are to really try to say okay, am I talking 

to a public servant here, am I talking to a gapper 

here? And that knowledge is really going to help me 

pick out which of the program highlights, both in 

terms of the work and the benefits and where you can 

go after a year of College Advising Corps, it’s 

really going to help me tailor what I’m going to 

share with that perspective member that I think 

they’ll be most excited about. 

 Also, I know many AmeriCorps members or AmeriCorps 

programs will try to match an applicant or 

perspective member with a current member or alumni so 

they have someone they can ask questions to. And when 

I’m doing that I’m definitely trying to think in 

terms of these profiles, and if I have a perspective 

member that I really see as a public servant I want 

to match them with one of my current members or 

alumni who was in that similar situation because I 

think they might have a little bit more in common to 

share. 
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 And then in terms of member support, what I really 

drew from doing these interviews is that the type of 

support that’s needed is very individualized. It 

really depends on the person. So, something we’ve 

done with College Advising Corps at Furman is put in 

place personalized professional development coaching. 

So, we actually have a professional development 

consultant who we brought in on a limited basis to 

work one on one with our members throughout the year 

to help them not only be as effective as possible as 

AmeriCorps members, but really work with them from 

day one to identify how they can grow in this year 

and where this year of service will help them in 

their long-term education and career trajectory. 

 So, finally, I’d like to leave you with a resource. 

My colleague and I, Janna Pennington, this past fall 

we released a book called Joining AmeriCorps which is 

really informed by this research and my work with 

AmeriCorps. It’s a book that’s geared towards 

perspective AmeriCorps members to help them identify 

if they should serve in AmeriCorps, how to find 
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different AmeriCorps positions and apply, and then 

when they do join AmeriCorps how to make the most of 

the experience. 

 It’s also a resource for AmeriCorps programs, of 

state service commissions and others who would like 

to have a helpful recruiting tool that they can give 

to perspective members. And then for using, with 

their AmeriCorps members themselves, we actually have 

many hands-on worksheet activities about how to make 

the most of the AmeriCorps year and how to prepare 

for life after AmeriCorps. And these activities can 

be used by program staff in a sort of facilitated 

setting with your members. So, if you think this 

would be helpful this book is available at 

JoiningAmericorps.com, which is our website, or at 

Amazon. 

 So, thank you very much and I look forward to a 

spirited question and answer session. My contact 

information is here. Please don’t hesitate to get 

with me. And at this point I will pass it back to 

Mary. 
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MARY: Thank you, Matt. Thank you, Mark. Yes, the chat is 

firing up with tons of questions. But, before we get 

to everyone’s questions in the Q&A segment I would 

like to have Jennifer Bastress Tahmasebi, the Deputy 

Director of AmeriCorps State and National, offer some 

remarks and reflections on what has been shared with 

us here today. Jennifer? 

JENNIFER: Thank you, Mary. So, I would love to thank Dr. 

Hager, Dr. Hudson-Flege, Dr. Mary Hyde, all of my 

colleagues in our office of Research and Evaluation 

who put research and evaluation front and center at 

our agency every day. I also would like to 

acknowledge and honor the late Dr. Jeff Brudney for 

his work and contribution to this space. And I want 

to thank everybody who joined. I see a lot of 

familiar names, a lot of familiar organizations, some 

new ones. We’re so glad that you have joined us this 

afternoon. 

 I do want to say a special hello to Debbie Cox-Roush 

who has been a lifelong volunteer in many different 
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ways, was a colleague with us here at the agency, and 

is now continuing to do wonderful work with 

Samaritan’s Feet. And Dr. Hager, our fingers are 

crossed for your daughter. 

 I’ve been asked to give some reflections. I love 

research and evaluation. I especially love research 

that can be consumed and immediately put into action, 

which is what both of these two research studies are. 

I love the groupings of public servant, gappers, 

wanderers, young idealists. I think it puts a frame 

around what program operators have known in their 

bones about when they’re recruiting and when they’re 

running programs, but it provides a crispness and a 

precision to allow people to be better recruiters. 

 The takeaways. I was struck by the fact that the 

storyteller tradition is alive and well and very 

meaningful. That recruitment engages people the best 

with one on one experiences being shared. And I also 

think another takeaway is it highlights our 

collective work that we have together to end 

AmeriCorps being the best kept secret in this 
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country. We all need to think about ways in which we 

can continue to respect the A and lift it up 

alongside and in partnership with all of the amazing 

organizations that partner with AmeriCorps. 

 And it provides a great through line, this research 

to the research of Dr. Hager. AmeriCorps will be 

creating a position that oversees the agency’s 

volunteer grant making work. The linking of our days 

of service grant making, which compromises the 9/11 

grants, the Martin Luther King Day of Service grants, 

as well as our Volunteer Generation Fund, and all of 

those grant programs both cover episodic volunteering 

as well as long-term volunteering, it’s an important 

step for our agency in a more thoughtful and 

strategic approach. And with the benefit of the 

American Rescue Funds, we will, for the first time, 

be able to open up the Volunteer Generation Fund to 

all nonprofits and organizations. 

 I think in reading the report from Dr. Hager, one of 

the things that struck me is it may be a great place 

for our agency to start as we focus in in a different 
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way on grant making related to the volunteer 

management sector and it’s contained in the end of 

his report, which is three things that have not 

changed much so far this century and then three 

things that have changed quite a bit. It’s a great 

frame for us to potentially support, strengthen, or 

challenge the volunteer management sector by 

investing in changing what hasn’t changed or 

strengthening the new aspects. So, thank you, Mary. 

MARY: Thank you, Jennifer. I think we’re going to hand 

this over to Melissa to start diving into some of the 

questions. And Jennifer, really appreciate your 

reflections. 

MELISSA: Hello, good afternoon. I’m Melissa Gouge. I’m 

an Analyst in the Office of Research and Evaluation. 

And I’m going to be facilitating what looks like is 

going to be quite a lively question and answer 

session. I see a number of questions have already 

been added to the chat and I’ve been keeping track of 

those. And as you continue to ask questions, keep 

dropping those in the chat. You’re also welcome to 
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provide comments, reflections, and resources as well, 

and we’ll be able to pass those along and share them. 

 And the very first question we have is from one 

panelist to another. Dr. Hager has a question for Dr. 

Flege. You have the floor Dr. Hager. 

MARK: Well, thank you. I love to throw curveballs when I 

can. So, Matt, I’m going to introduce the world to my 

18 year old daughter, who I mentioned earlier has 

applied for AmeriCorps. Why don’t you chat with her a 

few minutes? Give her a couple of questions and 

diagnostics. And then let us know where you would 

place her among those categories. So, I’ll have Zooey 

sit down, you’ve already heard her dad describe her 

as smart and talented, but what else do you need to 

know, Matt, in order to put her into a category? 

ZOOEY: Yeah. I’m Dr. Hager’s daughter. I guess I’m here 

for the questions. 

MATT: Hey Zooey, I’m Matt. It’s nice to meet you. So, 

what AmeriCorps program did you apply for? 
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ZOOEY: I applied for N triple C. 

MATT: Alright, I’m an AmeriCorps N triple C alum myself. 

I did it right out of high school. So, I had a great 

experience. So, tell me like what kind of things 

you’ve been into as a high school student? 

ZOOEY: Well, when I was in high school I did a lot of 

robotics, I was pretty active on the team there. 

Unfortunately it shutdown due to our head moderator 

leaving. So, over time I moved over towards more 

theater, behind the scenes sort of stuff. So, I’ve 

always enjoyed more technical kind of working with my 

hands. 

MATT: Gotcha, great. And, so, you’re looking to join 

AmeriCorps N triple C right now. Do you have an 

interest in going to college after a year of 

AmeriCorps or are you not really sure about 

continuing your education? 
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ZOOEY: Well, I was actually, prior to the pandemic, I was 

thinking about doing college directly after high 

school. That was the plan, really, but then of course 

all of 2020 through 2022 happened, and unfortunately 

kind of threw my plans off. So, I was looking for 

something else to try out and kind of get a better 

handle on what I might enjoy, what kind of things, 

once I do go to college, I’d be interested in maybe 

majoring in. And this seemed like a good way to get 

more experience in the world, you know? 

MATT: Awesome, great. Well, Zooey, it was great meeting 

you. If I had to put you in one of my AmeriCorps 

member categories I’d probably say you’re leaning 

towards a wanderer. So, you mentioned wanting to join 

AmeriCorps to help find some direction in terms of 

what you might be interested majoring in, what other 

types of interests that you have. And I’ll say 

AmeriCorps N triple C is the perfect program for you 

because instead of having one job for the whole year, 

you’ll have probably four or five different projects. 

You’ll get to work with young adults from all over 

the country, some of whom have already been to 
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college. So, I wish you the best in your application 

and I hope that you’re able to make an impact in that 

year and it helps set you off on an exciting next 

phase of your journey. 

ZOOEY: Alright, thank you. It was nice meeting you. 

MATT: You too. 

MARK: Holy cow, Matt! I wouldn’t have guessed you were 

going to go that route, wanderer, huh? I was going to 

say he’s going to put her over in some category, who 

knows? But, you know, I think that’s exactly right. 

The way you described you categories, the way I know 

my own daughter, having talked with her for more than 

two minutes, yeah, I think wanderer is right where I 

would put her as well. So, your instrument is 

validated. 

MATT: Alright, appreciate it. 

MELISSA: That was fantastic. Thank you so much, both of 

you. Now, Matthew, if you have a curveball you’d like 
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to throw back just throw that in the chat too, happy 

to facilitate that. [laughs] And we’ll move on to the 

next question. We’ve got an audience question. Matt, 

does your subset include alumni from all of 

AmeriCorps’ programs? And if so, do you find the 

motivations to be similar between all of the programs 

you looked at? 

MATTHEW: Yeah. So, the dataset does have AmeriCorps 

members from VISTA, N triple C, and state and 

national programs, so, a pretty good representation. 

I have not done an analysis to see whether those 

profiles stacked up differently across those, but 

that’s definitely one on my list of sort of follow-up 

questions to pursue. 

MELISSA: Perhaps a follow-up study is in order. 

MATTHEW: Absolutely. 

MELISSA: And the next question we have is for Dr. 

Hager. Do you have additional research planned 

knowing that the pandemic has significantly impacted 
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how people volunteer? Do you have additional thoughts 

that are related to your three recommendations about 

how to build broad support among senior nonprofit 

leaders for investing in volunteer engagement? 

MARK: I dropped a link into the chat after Melissa asked 

that question. There was a follow-up project 

unrelated to the VMC 2 project that I was talking 

about today, but was a supplement that AmeriCorps 

exclusively funded. A separate project entirely that 

looked at technology use by volunteer administrators. 

And as the timing work out, during the pandemic when 

technology use ended up being really important to 

know about and to use in engaging volunteers in more 

remote environments. 

 So, that’s actually gotten a lot more play because 

it’s a sexier topic than the VMC 2 project that I 

talked about today. So, there’s a link there to my 

partner, which is the Council for Certification and 

Volunteer Administration, that’s housing the release 

of both the public report, and a recent podcast, and 

two or three practice oriented articles related to 
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engagement with volunteers remotely, and use of 

technology during the pandemic. 

 But, Melissa’s question was broader than that too. 

She’s pointed sort of my first recommendation which 

is that we need to get to the people holding the 

purse strings and advocate internally for more 

resources in order to build both the people and the 

practices in organizations to achieve volunteer 

management capacity. And she sort of caught me. I 

mean, VMC 2, the survey really isn’t about that. It’s 

about the practices and the people, and less about 

this question about internal advocacy. 

 I just know that’s an issue. It’s something that we 

started talking a little bit in VMC 1 and then the 

field has just talked about it, right. I’ve got my 

fingers a little on the pulse, maybe a little off the 

pulse, and occasionally on the pulse of what the 

field of volunteer administration is talking about. 

And this comes up constantly. How do we get more 

resources? How do we get people to understand the 

need to invest more in volunteer management capacity? 
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 Have I researched how we do that? No. I just know 

it’s a thing, it’s a thing that has to happen in 

order for us to get the people and the policies in 

place to be able to have effective management of 

volunteers. What I will say though, Melissa, is given 

that the field is talking about it, it shows up in 

textbooks. For example, there’s a textbook that 

certification body uses to train people towards the 

test in volunteer administration and there’s an early 

chapter in there that’s only about how do we advocate 

internally to show our boards and our colleagues and 

our executive director the volunteers are important 

and they need to invest in volunteer administration. 

 So, it’s my point number one, although it’s not 

something I’ve studied specifically. People talk 

about it and there are many places to get guidance on 

that issue. 

MELISSA: Yeah, thank you. While we’ve got you, you 

alluded a bit to your pandemic research and dropped 

the report into the chat so folks can read up on 
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that. Would you mind just giving us a little bit more 

of a taste of the pandemic research that you’ve done 

and maybe just some of the highlights of your 

findings? 

MARK: Right on. This is great. So, you got to go back a 

couple of years. And Melissa writes me. She says, 

‘Hey, we have more money than we can spend. So, 

you’re a grantee. Why don’t you propose something?’ 

She didn’t just write me, she wrote everybody, she 

wrote all the grantees, I’m sure Matthew got this 

email as well. ‘Hey, do you have something else as a 

supplemental project?’ And I’m like ah, a prospect 

for more research money, that’s awesome. I didn’t 

have an idea. 

 I went to bed that night and while I was sleeping my 

brain worked on this. This never happens to me, I’ve 

heard of this happening to other people before. When 

I woke up the next morning the project was full blown 

in my head. The dream said you call this Technology 

Evolution in Volunteer Administration. So, it’s pound 

TEVA. And what I’m doing is for the first time 
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talking to individual volunteer administrators. I 

don’t do that. I’m an organizations guy. Like VMC 2, 

it’s about studying organizations, not really 

studying individual people, but in this case it’s 

studying individual volunteer administrators. 

 We got the Council for Certification and Volunteer 

Administration aboard. They have about – I mentioned 

about 1,000 CBAs in the United States and Canada. We 

surveyed all of them about CBA technology use. We 

followed up with them, many of those in focus groups 

so that we could hear stories about how they were 

thinking about their technology use in the pandemic. 

So, both with really great survey data and some thick 

stories in the focus groups. There’s a public report 

at the link I dropped into the chat. And now 

reporting out at Engage, which is a field publication 

for volunteer administration, another at Nonprofit 

Quarterly about equity and access issues related to 

social media and the pandemic, and another 

forthcoming in Nonprofit World about an issue of 

volunteer administrators not controlling their own 
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social media and how that’s a problem with actually 

engaging their public. 

 So, lots of interesting threads coming out of a 

project that became suddenly relevant. When I 

proposed it to Melissa and her crew there wasn’t a 

pandemic. Like, ah, that’s sort of interesting. Boom, 

a pandemic comes along. Everybody goes remote and 

technology becomes really relevant. And so as I said 

in the chat, I’m actually more actually about the 

TEVA work than what we get from VMC 2. VMC 2 is 

awesome. VMC 2 is awesome, right, except we collected 

all the data in 2019 and everything changed in 2020. 

 So, we call it sort of a benchmark for where we were 

pre-pandemic, but really all the big questions now 

are about the pandemic and TEVA helps us to speak to 

that a little bit. 

MELISSA: Yep, absolutely. So much, thank you. We’re 

excited about all of your work and really excited as 

you keep your finger on the pulse of how things are 
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changing too and excited to see what happens in the 

future as well. 

MARK: Awesome, yeah. 

MELISSA: Yeah, so Matt, coming back to you. How many 

individuals were surveyed as part of your study? 

MATTHEW: Yeah. So, the AmeriCorps Longitudinal Study, 

and I’ll just point out too, I was analyzing data 

from bigger surveys that AmeriCorps had done. But, 

the AmeriCorps Longitudinal Study tracked 4,000 

individuals. 2,000 of them were AmeriCorps members, 

2,000 were people who applied for AmeriCorps, 

expressed an interest but didn’t ultimately serve. 

The Alumni Outcome Study, I want to say that was 

around 3,000 AmeriCorps alumni. So, pretty large 

datasets representing AmeriCorps members from 

multiple programs and all across the country. 

MELISSA: Absolutely. Thank you. So quite a robust 

sample. So now this question may be for folks across 

the panel to provide some ideas or just discussion 
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points on how do we find and recruit AmeriCorps 

members? What do we as an organization? 

MATTHEW: So, I can share kind of a couple more 

thoughts. And I saw one question in the chat as well 

about like what spaces should I be in to find these 

different profiles? So, you know, one thing I would 

say is that, as I mentioned, a lot of AmeriCorps 

members they’re not saying I want to join AmeriCorps, 

which program do I do? They’re saying I’m looking for 

a job. So, making sure that our AmeriCorps positions 

are on Indeed, are on all the main job boards, 

Handshake, that college grads are using. We want to 

make sure our AmeriCorps positions are seen by 

general job seekers who don’t necessarily know 

they’re interested in AmeriCorps, so that’s one 

thing. 

 Another thing I would say is that knowing that, you 

know, not everyone who joins AmeriCorps was like 

really hot on community service in high school or 

college, it’s important that we’re going to groups 

outside of like volunteer clubs or people who we 
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think are really going to be interested in 

volunteerism, but looking at more general groups. So, 

when I’m recruiting AmeriCorps members and I go to 

colleges, and I’m based at a university so I have a 

lot of student access, initially I would just go to 

the main service organization, other places where I 

thought really service oriented students would be, or 

students in majors for the helping professions. 

 However, in doing this research I’ve started to 

broaden that. So, I’ll go and speak to fraternities 

and sororities, or I’ll go speak to sports clubs 

because just because a student hasn’t already been 

highly engaged in service doesn’t mean that a service 

year with AmeriCorps might not be appealing to them. 

So I think it’s important to get outside of those 

just sort of predisposed service oriented young 

people. 

 The final thing I’ll say is that I think a lot of 

AmeriCorps recruiting is focused at the college 

level, but many AmeriCorps members either have not 

finished college or have never been to college, 
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particularly those young idealists and wanderers. So, 

thinking about how you can be in touch with school 

counselors at the high school level and career 

development facilitators and recruiting in high 

schools is something that can pay dividends both for, 

you know, current graduating seniors, but also if 

you’ve planted the seed with them as a high school 

student about AmeriCorps it might be something they 

revisit later down the line. 

MELISSA: Yeah, thank you. I think you would find that 

one of our Research and Evaluation managers, Dr. 

Robles, she might even say, I know that her kids were 

introduced during middle school, and as she says 

frequently, still wear the t-shirt. So, maybe it’s 

never too early to learn about AmeriCorps. 

MATTHEW: Absolutely. 

MELISSA: Would you say that there might be – Thank you 

so much for addressing these particular spaces where 

you might look. Do you think that there could be 
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additional specific spaces where, people in these 

different categories, we might look for them as well? 

MATTHEW: Again, I think making sure we’re hitting the 

high schools for those younger groups. I think that 

like people that are the kind of gappers and 

wanderers, those are people who probably going to 

find it on, just again, doing that general job search 

board. So, making sure that you’re there. And then I 

would like any of Mark’s thoughts on this too, but, 

you know, I think there’s the question of social 

media marketing and a lot of AmeriCorps programs do 

place ads on things like Facebook, Instagram. What 

are our opportunities now with TikTok being the 

predominant platform for AmeriCorps aged young 

adults? I think that, you know, figuring out how best 

to use the social media platforms is important as 

well. 

MELISSA: Yeah, thanks, Matt. And just as you were 

saying that, Star placed in the chat looking for 

positions on Indeed, LinkedIn, job boards, so that 

social media interface I think will continue to be 
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important as well. So, we’ve got another question 

here. Post-pandemic, looking at Generation Z, if you 

will, what are your thoughts on the pipeline for 

AmeriCorps and perhaps volunteers more broadly also? 

Increasingly be younger, perhaps not college 

graduates, or even enrolled in college? 

MARK: Matt, what do you think? 

MATTHEW: Yeah, so, college enrollment is definitely 

down as a result of the pandemic. I think at the same 

time it’s tempered, though, by a lot of people kind 

of sticking around home. So, I think that can lead to 

more recruiting for sort of place based programs, but 

I don’t think it’s representing a spike in like, you 

know, programs that you travel to. 

 I think the bigger question too will be now that, 

hopefully, there’s a sort of return to normalcy on 

the horizon, is that college enrollment decline just 

a short dip and it’s going back to the way it was? Or 

is it going to be a bigger trend where more and more 
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high school students are thinking nah, there’s other 

options beyond going right to college for me? 

JENNIFER: I just wanted to put in a plug for nontraditional participants. Out of school youth, people 

that are underemployed, they could be young, they 

could be all different ages, those participants bring 

a wealth of life experiences. Some of them have 

packed in more experiences in their short lives than 

many of us have had in possibly my older person 

longer life and bring an incredible frame, and also 

there is something extremely powerful about people 

from the community serving their own community and 

flipping the script as being people that may have 

received services, they are now providing services. 

 Also, those members, in recruiting them and involving 

them and engaging them in AmeriCorps, also creates a 

legacy effect that affects future generations of 

members and of people engaging in the community in 

perhaps more productive ways. 
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MATTHEW: Jennifer, I’m glad you made that point and 

just to follow on that. So, within, you know, the 

research that I’ve done, definitely in that sort of 

wanderer and young idealist category, you do see a 

lot more people who are representative of the 

communities AmeriCorps is serving. And I think, as 

you said, Jennifer, it’s extremely important and it 

carries a great benefit to the work that they can do, 

the contributions they can make to the communities 

they’re serving in with the knowledge that they have, 

and the contribution they make to the broader 

AmeriCorps team based on their experiences. So, great 

point. 

 And certainly as, again, as I mentioned at the 

beginning of my presentation, my research for this 

particular project really focused on that young adult 

age range, but, you know, so many AmeriCorps members 

are at different life stages and play an incredibly 

important role in the national service landscape. 

MELISSA: Yes, absolutely. Thank you for bringing that 

up. I got a little bit of context behind the next 
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question, so just bear with me for a moment. We’ve 

got Scott Peterson in the chat and he’s a CEO at 

Global Youth Justice working with over 1,800 youth 

led and volunteer driven youth teams, student, peer 

court and peer jury youth in trouble for 

misdemeanors. In order to try to avoid court, 

lawyers, and instead work with their peers in these 

roles. 

 And then the Youth Justice gives them one to fifty 

hours – I’m getting there. I’m having to go through 

the chat to find all of this. Be patient with me. 

It’s going to take me a second to find this one. 

Sorry about that, everybody. Scott, we may have to 

get back to your question. If you don’t mind adding 

it back into the chat, that way I can track it down. 

 And in the meantime - Okay, here you are. But, the 

office is episodic as they volunteer for a year, as 

crime doesn’t end. Is there anything, any type of 

research or data on this type of service that you 

know of? And Scott, if you want to drop a question in 
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the chat again, I may not have gotten that super 

clearly. 

 And we’ve got about five more minutes or so in the 

chat. So, if there’s a question you have not had an 

opportunity to ask yet or something, somehow we 

missed you, you’re welcome to drop your question in 

the chat. In the meantime I’ll ask Dr. Hager, as 

episodic volunteering grows or perhaps at a minimum 

stays stagnant, do you see an increasing role for 

national service to meet these more in-depth 

opportunities over the long-term? And if so, how do 

you think we can help nonprofits see the leveraging 

of national service for their volunteer programs? 

MARK: Yeah, I saw that question in the chat. I’m not sure 

that I have any good answers for it. I guess we can 

think about national service, domestic national 

service like AmeriCorps serving two different kinds 

of populations. And if we think about the members 

themselves then yeah, I mean, those are long-term 

assignments. I mean, you’re going to define a longterm assignment being virtually full-time over the 
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course of many months to a year to longer than that, 

that’s long-term, and that’s a great role for 

AmeriCorps, and a great service for the people that 

fill into those slots. 

 The thing is that’s a small slice of America. There 

aren’t – In the scheme of things there aren’t that 

many AmeriCorps volunteers. So, yeah, they’re serving 

those members, but the question is does that serve 

the greater slices? The greater slices are those 

other individual people that are out in the 

communities that we might engage. And for them I 

think we just have to engage them where they’re at. 

And where they’re at seems to be an interest in 

shorter term, shorter term episodic kinds of 

engagements. 

 And I think that AmeriCorps, the national service 

like every other person or body that’s interested in 

facilitating civic engagement in the United States, 

has got to think about how do we sort of meet people 

where they’re at? But, then also how do we encourage 

people towards longer, deeper kinds of civic 
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engagement experiences? So, I think anything we can 

do is good, in that vein is good, it’s just I don’t 

think that’s where America seems to be right now. 

MELISSA: Yeah, across your whole body of work, Mark, 

have you looked into specifically volunteer 

recognition efforts and seeing what kind of value it 

may have in the management of volunteers? 

MARK: Well, recognition is one of those management 

practices that we ask about. We ask about a dozen of 

them in VMC 2 because management practices ended up 

being the bread and butter of the Volunteer 

Management Capacity Study. Let me press a link into 

the chat. This exists somewhere else on the internet, 

but that’s straight out of my Dropbox folder. 

 That’s one of the AmeriCorps briefs that we did on 

the original study. And if you looked at figure 6 in 

that report you would see how various organizational 

characteristics including the extent to which 

recognition has been adopted as a management practice 
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in a given organization, how does that influence your 

ability to retain volunteers over time? 

 It turns out it matters quite a bit, for those that 

don’t want to look at the slide. There are things 

that harm retention, there are things that help it. 

There are three things that help it: recruiting, 

having volunteers recruit others one on one, that 

personal-social helps to retain volunteers over time. 

Believing and showing that volunteers bring benefits 

to your organization. So, you’re very positive about 

the benefits that they bring, that’s associated 

organizationally with retention of volunteers over 

time. And then there are several management 

practices. 

 Training and professional development for volunteers 

helps retain. Screening volunteers, matching them 

through assignments helps to retain. And to your 

question, having, adopting the practice of 

recognizing what volunteers bring to organizations 

helps to retain them over time. So, empirical support 

in some of the things that we’ve put out before. It 
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really emphasizes the value of recognition in 

organizational outputs regarding volunteers. 

MELISSA: Alright, thank you so much. So, we’ve ended 

our Q&A time here and just want to ask you if you 

each have any final comments, anything you want to 

mention, anything you want to emphasize, and we’ll 

start with you Mark. Is there anything that you’d 

like to wrap up with, any final thoughts? 

MARK: Oh, thank you. No, no big summative thoughts. You 

know, this point about the importance of volunteer 

management capacity, the fact that we’re not as good 

at it as we need to be to really engage America’s 

volunteers, and what we can do to do it better. It’s 

not a new story. It’s not something that just came up 

out of VMC 2. There are specific research things that 

came out of VMC 2 that people can certainly dig into 

in the report that we’ve posted into the chat or I 

can share otherwise. 

 But, this theme of the importance of volunteer 

management capacity has been around a long time. I 
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just happen to be that guy that’s really out beating 

the drum on it. And every chance I get, I want people 

to think about the importance of capacity for 

increasing our civic engagement going into the 

future. 

 What the future looks like is hard to know. I was 

lamenting a few minutes ago about how the pandemic 

suddenly rendered a lot of VMC 2 obsolete. You know, 

in a moment in time what this sector looked like in 

2019, but I’d love to return to this again say in 

2024, five years later when you’ve worked through a 

pandemic, how different is volunteer administration? 

What do we do differently now? What do we do in the 

pandemic that we’re going to leave aside or that 

we’re going double-down on going forward? So, there 

will be a VMC 3, maybe, in the future. I think it 

will tell us a lot of new things about what the 

sector looks like. 

MELISSA: Yeah, thank you, Mark. And Matt, if you’ve got 

some final thoughts. And we do have another, if you 

don’t mind perhaps wrapping your final thoughts 
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alongside this final question about the idea of gap 

year and hearing maybe from other communities that 

may not be the best way to frame it. So, what are 

your thoughts on that as you wrap up your 

presentation? 

MATT: Yeah, absolutely, and a great question from Lisa. 

So, I think definitely the term gap year, at least 

for me, evokes a wealthy European college student on 

holiday in South America or something, and that’s 

sort of I think the perception that’s tied with gap 

year. So, I think most AmeriCorps programs and 

AmeriCorps related organizations typically use the 

term service year or year of service. But, I think 

the key is communicating AmeriCorps so that it’s 

clear it’s an opportunity for people from all walks 

of life and it’s something that’s economically 

feasible where you will learn, have a living stipend, 

and money for college. It’s not something that you 

need to be wealthy to do is extremely important. 

 I guess I would say and kind of my wrap up would be 

that just for those of you who work with AmeriCorps 
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members just understanding, appreciating the diverse 

walks of life that our members come from. And just 

always keeping in mind how we can use a knowledge of 

who our members are and why they’re motivated to 

serve to better recruit them and better support them 

in their year of service and beyond. And thanks to 

AmeriCorps’ Office of Research and Evaluation for 

supporting this work. 

MELISSA: Yeah, thank you so much for those final 

thoughts. And Mary, if you would like to hop in with 

some final thoughts right before we close this out. 

MARY: I’m just very grateful that Matt and Mark decided 

to share their research with us. I’m thankful for 

everyone who spent the last hour and a half learning 

with us. And I want to just highlight a point that 

Jennifer made in her reflections and that is I think 

some of the beauty of this particular body of 

research is that it really does talk about research 

based practices and it feels a lot more feasible and 

practical than perhaps the conversations that often 
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are about entire evidence based interventions that 

feel intimidating. 

 So, I feel like this opens the tent for evidence 

based practice in wonderful ways that are completely 

relevant and appropriate for our agency. So, thank 

you. 

MELISSA: Thank you so much, Mary. And we are wrapping 

right on time. I just want to thank Dr. Hager, Dr. 

Hudson-Flege, and Jennifer Bastress Tahmasebi for 

your presentation, your thoughts, and to our entire 

audience today for just a fantastic discussion. I 

also want to Larissa Crewalk and Jenelle Azore from 

ICF Next International and their whole host of 

colleagues who help make all this happen with 

technical support and lots of coordination. 

 We’re going to send out a post-webinar survey. Please 

let us know your thoughts on the webinar. Let us know 

your ideas for future webinars. If you have questions 

that went unanswered, you’re welcome to reach out to 

us at evaluation@cns.gov. We can forward any of those 
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questions to anybody else that might have an answer 

to them. And we want to just thank you so much and 

hope you have a wonderful rest of your day and a 

lovely weekend. 

MARK: Thank you all. 

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