AmeriCorps Impact Webinar 2 Transcript_01.18.2023 Page 1 of 16

Katy Hussey-Sloniker: Welcome to the National Service: Novel Strategies to Measure the Return on 

Forestry Risk Mitigation. Today's webinar will discuss the portfolio of work 

associated with calculating return on investment on national service, the novel 

strategy specific to return on investment calculation associated with forestry 

risk mitigation and the grantee perspective in both participating in this study 

and how this work contributes to their value proposition within the community. 

Our presenters today are Dr. Lily Zandniapour from the Office of Research and 

Evaluation at AmeriCorps, Scott Scherbinski, program director for Nevada 

Conservation Corps Great Basin Institute, Ben Miller, project manager for the 

ROI studies project at ICF, Dominic Modicamore, technical lead for the return on 

investment studies project at ICF, George Voigt, economic analyst for the return 

on investment studies project for ICF, with special reflection from Benjamin 

Olsen, deputy Regional Administrator, west Region AmeriCorps and facilitated 

Q&A session with Dr. Emily McDonald, a research analyst with the Office of 

Research and Evaluation. There'll be plenty of time at the conclusion of the 

presentations to ask our panelists your questions. Please be sure to place them 

in the chat. Dr. McDonald will be collecting your questions for the Q&A time 

block towards the end of the webinar. And now, here to welcome us is Dr. Mary 

Hyde, director of the AmeriCorps Office of Research and Evaluation.

Mary Hyde: Thank you, Katy. And thank you for everyone who's decided to take some time 

today to learn about the Nevada Conservation Corps and an innovative research 

strategy used to empirically demonstrate the monetary and social return on 

investing in AmeriCorps and programs like the Nevada Conservation Corps. I 

want to spend just a few minutes contextualizing this work in this webinar. Next 

slide please. For those who may not be familiar with AmeriCorps, we are a US 

federal agency that is the nation's largest grant maker for national service and 

volunteering. Our mission is to improve lives, strengthen communities and 

foster civic engagement through service and volunteering. There are six national 

service programs that partner with organizations at the state and local levels. 

National service program participants work with local volunteers on a wide 

range of community driven initiatives and projects. These diverse projects help 

ignite and sustain civic life in America. Next slide please.

The agency, its office of research and evaluation and our partners have built a 

body of evidence for this collaborative work. Evidence building is part of our 

legislative mandate and is aligned with the foundations for evidence-based 

policy making Act of 2018, or the Evidence Act. The Evidence Act encourages 

federal agencies to use a learning agenda as a tool for building relevant and 

actionable evidence. Our agency's learning agenda, or as we have named it, the 

strategic learning and evidence building plan, compliments, aligns with and 

supports our agency's strategic plan to provide a roadmap for generating 

credible, relevant and actionable information about organizational 

effectiveness, operational performance, and the outcomes of national service 
AmeriCorps Impact Webinar 2 Transcript_01.18.2023 Page 2 of 16

programs. Evidence generated from the learning agenda informs our leadership 

on the extent to which our agency is achieving its mission at the organizational, 

programmatic and operational levels and maximizes agency performance. 

Today's webinar is part of a series designed to facilitate learning within 

AmeriCorps and with external audiences, drive awareness and understanding of 

AmeriCorps work and available resources and build capacity to use evidence to 

inform practice.

Disseminating our content through webinars like this is the first step in 

transferring knowledge, promoting learning across stakeholders and interacting 

with practitioners and end users to create supportive learning environments. 

Our second step involves you. We want AmeriCorps programs and our evidence 

to be used for the benefit of communities. It's that simple. We believe 

AmeriCorps is a powerful example of how to mobilize service and community 

action. Next slide please. With that, I'd like to introduce to you all Dr. Lily 

Zandniapour, who is a research and evaluation manager in the AmeriCorps 

office of Research and Evaluation. Dr. Zandniapour is an economist by training 

and has been with the agency for a little over 10 years now. Dr. Zandniapour has 

spearheaded the use of targeted return on investment studies to build evidence 

for AmeriCorps and our partners. Lily.

Lily Zandniapour: Hello everyone. Thank you, Mary, and good afternoon all. It is a pleasure to be 

with you today with my colleagues at AmeriCorps and also with representatives 

and colleagues from our partner agencies and organizations. Next slide please. I 

want to sort of take us back to where Mary ended and start with the agency 

learning agenda that Mary referenced as you see it is on the AmeriCorps 

website and can be looked at. This learning agenda really includes lots of 

questions that the agency and the staff want answered around our programs 

efficiency, effectiveness. And so there are lots of questions in there and sort of 

the approach that the agency uses to answer those questions. Some of these 

questions are short term based, some of them are for medium and long term. It 

includes questions tied to new or priority policies and programs, as well as some 

evergreen questions that the agency would like to answer through research and 

evaluation. In that vein, one of the evergreen questions that is on the learning 

agenda on page 11 is how can AmeriCorps empirically document the social and 

economic returns on investment in national service strategies and in 

interventions?

And our approach to answering this question has been through conducting

targeted return on investment analysis using past evaluation studies and any 

other relevant existing and credible empirical research that allows us to 

measure and estimate programs returns per dollar invested or what is called 

ROI. Next slide please. Many of you may already be familiar with the concept of 

return on investment, but I just wanted to remind everyone that return on 

investment studies estimate the amount of benefits that a program generates 

for each unit of cost. An ROI estimate tells you what the payoff is for each dollar 

of investment and you can think of ROI as the bang for the buck. To develop an 

ROI study, researchers capture program benefits and monetize them, and many 
AmeriCorps Impact Webinar 2 Transcript_01.18.2023 Page 3 of 16

of these benefits are tied to programs outcomes and impacts. Costs too must be 

measured, including contributions from various funding streams.

ROI estimates also typically account for what we call opportunity cost. That is 

benefits that the stakeholders forego in order to invest their time and resources 

in a particular program. Return on investment analysis really takes evaluation 

one step further. The ROI approach uses the evaluation findings on program 

impacts and information on program cost to really measure the value of this 

social intervention as peg to its cost. It is a form of performance measure that 

adds another lens to an outcome or impact evaluation, which looks at the 

effectiveness of the program or intervention in achieving its intended or desired 

outcomes. What is unique about this notion of return on investment is that it 

allows you to compare values across multiple programs and build an evidence 

base for an intervention to support decision-making.

As I mentioned earlier, what we want to do basically with this initiative for 

measuring return on investment is to really develop and advance our evidence 

footprint in this area and build on the collective investments that we have done 

along with our partners grantees in really measuring the effectiveness of 

programs, building the evidence base and ensuring that what is done with the 

invested dollars of our AmeriCorps are really bearing fruit for the American 

people. If we could go to the next slide, please. You may be familiar with ROI 

research that has looked at the ROI of national service before. There's been two 

ROI studies that have been conducted on national service outside of what we 

will discuss today. There was a 2013 study that was conducted by Columbia 

University. It looked at youth and senior based national service in the US and it 

was commissioned by Voices for National Service and the Aspen Institute. 

Another study was conducted in 2020 by ICF, our partners actually, and it 

looked at return on a collection of more than two dozen AmeriCorps programs 

combined. And that, again, was sort of commissioned by Voices for National 

Service. Starting in 2019, AmeriCorps began our ROI studies project. It is an 

initiative to estimate return on investment for specific programs that rely on 

national service.

What we did was to form a partnership with our colleagues at ICF and their 

team of experts through a multi-year contract to review the portfolio of ROI 

ready programs that employ national service, select a set of programs every 

year for a deeper look at ROI feasibility and develop four studies per year to 

build on that portfolio of programs that we have ROIs for. This has involved both 

ICF working with us, sharing with us results of the feasibility study, checking 

with our grantees to make sure that they're ready to participate in this initiative, 

and also drawing on a lot of information and research that ties into the work 

that we sponsor.

If we could go to the next program, there is the link, as you see, to a landing 

page on our evidence exchange, which is the repository of our library of 

research that is open to the public. This landing page gets you into all of the 

studies that we have commissioned to date on a return on investment study. I 
AmeriCorps Impact Webinar 2 Transcript_01.18.2023 Page 4 of 16

encourage you to take a look and see what we have there. Thank you so much. 

To date, we have looked at 12 programs and connected studies on them. These 

have been subjects of these more in-depth ROI studies. We have looked at 

many more to check their feasibility to see if they're ready. But we've tried to 

keep the portfolio of projects that we have looked at to be representative and 

diverse and cover the footprint of the agency in terms of its investments.

We have investments in multiple focus areas, education, health, environmental 

stewardship, disaster services, economic opportunity, veterans and military 

affairs. We've tried to really target these studies to reflect the diversity of our 

programs and we are lucky in that we have had the ability to do around three 

studies to date that are in the cross-section between environmental 

stewardship and disaster services. And what you see on the right side of this 

screen is a fact sheet that we have produced that captures sort of the top line 

findings from these studies for those who want to look very closely at sort of the 

high level and they're not as interested in some of the in-depth aspects of these 

studies, but there are the full reports on our website that show you the full 

analysis of what ICF has conducted. It also has a portfolio of research briefs that 

try to communicate the results of these studies in a shorter format that can be 

used to circulate and share with others.

We have been very grateful to have the partnership of our grantees in this 

effort. This is very important and we are really grateful for their participation 

and interest in partnering with us to do this work. Typically doing these studies, 

for programs, there is some level of risk involved because you're really kind of 

putting the program up for scrutiny, especially if you are going to share those 

results with the public. And so it takes quite a bit of courage, openness to 

learning and willingness to really look at the evidence regarding how the 

program operates, the value it generates and so forth. We are really blessed to 

be able to do this with our partners and are grateful for that. If you could go to 

the next slide.

Thank you. Today we are featuring the study with the Nevada Conservation 

Corps. What you see here is a snapshot look at the research brief that was 

prepared by ICF based on this study, which is that shorter piece that I was telling 

you about and the cover for the full report and just a tad bit, although I'm going 

to kind of sort of pass it on to my colleague to talk more about this, but Nevada 

Commission Corps is an environmental and disaster prevention service focus 

program and we are really lucky to have them be part of this initiative and to be 

here to share their experience with us and with you. I will now turn it over to 

Scott Scherbinski, program director for Nevada Conservation Core, a program of 

the Great Basin Institute to provide you with an overview and background about 

the corps and situate this study and the experience of engaging in it as it relates 

to NCC, and sorry about that, CC, and its work. With that, I'll pass it on to Scott.

Scott Scherbinski: Thank you so much, Lilly. Appreciate it. As mentioned, my name is Scott 

Scherbinski. I am the program director for the Nevada Conservation Corps with 

Great Basin Institute. I've been here at the institute for just about five years 
AmeriCorps Impact Webinar 2 Transcript_01.18.2023 Page 5 of 16

now. Got my start in conservation working with conservation corps programs in 

the Pacific Northwest, as well as down in Arizona. Went on to work with the 

National Park Service as a wildlife biologist for 10 years over in California and 

when this opportunity with Nevada Conservation Corps came open, kind of 

leaped up at the opportunity to help support a program that personally has 

been impactful to my life and my career and yeah. Excited to be back working in 

the corps world. Next slide please. Little bit of background about Nevada 

Conservation Corps. We are just one program that's nestled within the Great 

Basin Institute. 2023 marks the 25th anniversary of GBI. Started back in 1998 

truly as a field studies institute with education and outreach initially for college 

students and then rapidly expanding K through 12, working with educators, 

continuing working with college students.

NCC is just one program under GBI that started in 1999, and we've been funded 

through AmeriCorps since the inception of NCC. We currently are working 

across the state of Nevada as well as up Sierra Nevada range in the lower 

cascades in California with the primary goal focused of our current AmeriCorps 

grant is reducing the threat of wildfire across the west. Next slide please. 

AmeriCorps supports our members through a variety of activities. We are a 

fairly traditional crew based conservation core running small teams of five folks 

that typically deploy out of one of our field offices based in Nevada, either in 

Reno or Las Vegas. They head out and engage in a variety of conservation based 

work with an ever-growing collection of partners across all the major public land 

management agencies, as well as state and local municipalities.

The main focus of the work that we do is a reduction of a wildfire threat through 

fuels reduction. We also engage in [inaudible 00:21:18] of noxious weeds, both 

prior to and after wildfires move through. We support post burn restoration 

projects through seeding and introduction of native plants to areas that have 

burned to help them recover more rapidly. We also oversee the construction 

and maintenance of trails, specifically with the focus of trying to build those out 

in a way that helps support healthy recreation while reducing wildfire. We also 

have small teams that work in health and assessment teams that capture critical 

data on both conditions of forest health and range land health across our 

project areas. Next slide please.

The ROI and the focus of our evaluation results is from our previous grant cycle, 

although we are continuing the same evaluation through our current grant 

cycle. This study really focused on data collected in our 1920 grant year where 

we worked closely with our partners with AmeriCorps, our state commission, 

Nevada volunteers, the University of Nevada, their Center for Public Evaluation 

as well as the US Forest Service, Humboldt-Toiyabe National Forest to develop 

an efficacy evaluation to look at the impacts of our fuel reduction efforts. We 

did this in a couple of different ways. We collected data using the Browns Planer 

method on a total of 210 data points during a single grant year. We did this 

across all three grant years of this grant cycle. We also collected photo points 

that were also analyzed for the fire regime class, the FRCC, which really relates 
AmeriCorps Impact Webinar 2 Transcript_01.18.2023 Page 6 of 16

the risk of the ecosystem to uncharacteristic and uncontrollable wildfire 

behavior facts.

We had teams that went out prior to treatments, prior to fuel reduction efforts 

would collect data on 70 points that were within our treatment area. Those 70 

points were matched with an additional 70 points outside of our treatment 

area. Those comparison sites, we used ARC GIS mapping software to look at 

aspects slope and vegetation type to make sure that those sites were 

comparable. We collected data on the pre-treatment areas, the comparison 

sites, and then once the treatments were complete, we went back in and 

collected data on the points within the treatment area that we successfully 

treated. To evaluate the effectiveness, we looked at FRCC and then transferred 

all the raw data to UNR for analysis and due to fuels reduction, the FRCC rating 

on our treated plots decreased from 2.10 to comparison to other untreated 

sites that were 2.39 on a one through three scale.

The results of the stats run on our raw data also showed statistically significant 

difference in the pre and post treatment evaluation measures. As I mentioned, 

we are continuing this into our current grant cycle, very similar evaluation 

measure. It's slightly updated in ASI in the number of sites in number of years 

that we're collecting the data, but we are continuing to use the same evaluation 

method, which over time will give us a very broad six year efficacy of the work 

that we've been doing here in Nevada and California. And with that, I will turn it 

over to the folks at ICF that we partnered with to run through our ROI study. 

Thank you.

Ben Miller: Great. Thank you so much, Scott. Really appreciate your partnership on this 

study. It's been really a privilege for us at ICF to be part of this series. Lilly 

showed the link earlier to the full set of 12 studies that AmeriCorps has 

published so far and if you ever lose track of that link, you can just Google 

AmeriCorps ROI and you'll get to that page. I do hope you'll all check out the 

whole range of ROI studies that have been published so far. We're really excited 

to be here with you today. I'm Ben Miller, project manager for ICF's support to 

this project. I'm here with Dominic Modicamore and George Voigt. And in 

addition, our project director, Janet Pershing, and analysts from other ICF 

analysts and from BCT partners have been part of this important series. We're 

very excited about this body of work and to dig deeper into the NCC study in 

particular. Next slide please.

Before we go deep into the NCC study, we wanted to take just a step back and 

talk about our general approach to ROI studies generally. An important part of 

our process before we even get started crunching the numbers is logic modeling 

and a very careful review of the subject program to get as comprehensive a 

picture as we can of all the benefits and all the costs involved in the program. 

What you're seeing on the slide is some key stakeholder groups that we look at 

in terms of what benefits a program generates, and on the right-hand side, 

some sources of cost that we look to so that we get a complete picture on the 

cost side as well. Just running through our stakeholder groups. In some cases, 
AmeriCorps Impact Webinar 2 Transcript_01.18.2023 Page 7 of 16

there are direct program participants, for example, on a job training program 

and also family members that benefit from the activities of the program. That's 

not the case for NCC.

There are other beneficiaries for NCC's work, but for other programs, program 

participants and family members are an important group that benefits from the 

work of the program. In addition, we look at societal benefits or benefits to the 

wider community. Taking NCC for a moment, trail creation and trail 

maintenance is something that benefits members of the communities in 

Nevada. In addition, almost all of our ROI studies have incorporated the benefits 

to AmeriCorps members themselves because the research establishes that 

AmeriCorps members enjoy higher employment post service than a comparable 

group of people who don't have the AmeriCorps experience. That's 

incorporated into our studies, as well as government, in terms of reduced 

spending of various types and increased tax revenue in some cases that result 

from NCC or from other programs. On the cost side, we look at opportunity 

cost, as Lily alluded to earlier, as well as the actual program costs. The 

opportunity costs typically involve the cost to AmeriCorps members of the year 

they dedicate to their year of service and also funding opportunity costs 

because the funding used for a given program could be used for other purposes. 

We account for that.

We also get a comprehensive picture of the funding from private funders and 

government funders that makes each program happen. Next slide please. Now 

let's zero in on NCC in particular and look at the key stakeholder groups we 

looked at for NCC program benefits and what those benefits were. I mentioned 

AmeriCorps members that contribute to NCC enjoy additional earnings postservice owing to their reduced unemployment and also the increased 

educational attainment that they accomplish post-service and we account for 

the value of the post-tax living allowances that AmeriCorps members get. 

Government benefits from NCC in the form of increased tax revenue from those 

increased earnings of NCC AmeriCorps members and reduced spending by 

government on corrections, public assistance and social insurance that's 

connected to the increased educational attainment of NCC AmeriCorps 

members. Like many of the benefits we calculate, we use existing literature to 

document and rigorously calculate the amount of these types of benefits. And 

finally, and perhaps definitely last but not least, are the important benefits to 

society of the wildfire reduction benefits that Scott alluded to, the habitat 

improvement benefits and the creation of trails and the maintenance of trails 

that NCC engages in.

With that, I will turn things over to Dominic Modicamore who will talk to us 

about the results that we found from the NCC study.

Dominic Modicamore: Thanks, Ben. Good afternoon everyone. I'm going to talk about the various ROIs 

that we calculated for NCC. And as you can see from the slide, there's quite a 

few of them. If we wanted to focus on one ROI that is the most comprehensive 

and provides the clearest picture of what the ROI is for NCC, it would be the 
AmeriCorps Impact Webinar 2 Transcript_01.18.2023 Page 8 of 16

$20.66. How that's interpreted is for every dollar of cost to support the NCC 

program, there is a return of $20.66 from all of the funding included. And that 

would be returned to society, to AmeriCorps members, to government and the 

full impact of the program. That would be the ROI if you wanted to report just 

one. Clearly an impact that's pretty sizable for a program like this.

I'll just break out some of the various different methods we use for these ROIs. 

We calculate for all of the ROIs, calculated short term or medium term and a 

long term scenario. The short-term scenario is just looking at one year of 

impact, the year following the investment in the program. Medium term impact 

would look 15 years out. That represents the mid-range, assuming that after 15 

years the impact begins to wear off and goes back to the baseline. And then the 

long-term impact is a 30-year impact. The difference there is that we calculate 

the primary difference is that the wages and the earnings, and in this case the 

ecosystem benefits go out for 30 years. They're different than the baseline for 

30 years. Those are the short term, medium term and long term. In this case 

with ANCC and other environmental programs that we've measured, we also 

estimate ROI for a range of ecosystem benefits.

In this case, you can see we break it out again, a low, average and high based on 

the societal returns for the environmental impacts that these programs have. 

That's broke down as well. And then another way that we break it out is by the 

different funding streams. The first one is total benefits to per federal dollar. 

That's all of the benefits to society, government, and the AmeriCorps members 

for each federal dollar spent. The second way that we break out ROI is the total 

benefits per funder dollar. This includes the same as the one above, the total 

benefits to society, AmeriCorps members and also government over all the 

dollars expended to support the program. That's why I think that the 2066 ROI 

represents that total benefit and total dollars. That's the reason why I would 

focus on that one. And then the third way we calculate the ROI by funding 

stream is federal government benefits per federal dollar.

In this case we look at just the benefits to federal government alone and we 

measure that against the total funding by just the federal government alone. In 

this case, you could see that's the only ROI scenario that is under one. It's not 

returning the full investment to the federal government. And that's because it's 

primarily a program to benefit society. Society benefits from these 

environmental programs and they see the actual monetary return rather than 

the federal government. In this case, we see a very substantial return when 

society is included in the ROI because of the services that are provided by NCC 

and the work that they do benefits society for the most part. That that's a 

snapshot of the various ROIs that we calculated. I will hand it over to George 

Voigt who I worked with closely on this to discuss some of the novel approaches 

that we use to calculate these ROIs.

George Voigt: Thank you, Dominic. Before we dive into some of the specific methodological 

aspects of this study, I just wanted to take a moment to quickly review some of 

the ways that we're generating benefit valuation. And the key distinction on this 
AmeriCorps Impact Webinar 2 Transcript_01.18.2023 Page 9 of 16

slide is going to be between market and non-market benefits. And you can think 

about those in the context of NCC as a market benefit being something like 

property damage that has a dollar value attributed to it for reparations. And a 

non-market benefit would be something like the carbon sequestration value of 

the trees that were burned. And so one of the challenges that we face is trying 

to come up with values for all of these non-market benefits that are attributed 

to the actions that NCC generates in it. Next slide please.

To start off, we want to cover the big headline thing that NCC does, which is the 

wildfire reduction benefits. And to start with that, what we did is we looked at 

all of the area that NCC treats on an annual basis and we used their evaluation 

studies and the literature to estimate an effective reduction in burn areas from 

these sort of uncontrolled wildfires and then broke it down into three main 

areas that we were able to attribute values to. The first being these ecosystem 

services that range based on the type of ecosystem that was treated, and you 

can see there's a pretty large range there from just below $400 to almost $3,000 

per acre based on the existing ecosystem services. And that's what causes a lot 

of that range in ROI valuation that Dominic was talking about. And then the 

second area that we were able to look at were some of the human health 

benefits associated from sort of the release of air particulates following a burn.

And the last area was trying to place a value on some of the actual carbon 

dioxide emissions where we utilized the social cost of carbon and some 

estimates on how much carbon would be released following an acre of this 

forest land burning. Next slide please. And so then the next aspect of activities 

that NCC engages in are these habitat improvements where we're able to 

quantify on a per acre basis the value of these ecosystems that are restored and 

apply those values based on the data that NCC was able to provide to us. Next 

slide please. And one of the new things that we looked at doing during this 

study was trying to discount these environmental benefits over time as 

regrowth occurs following wildfires. We were able to find some existing 

literature that documented those regrowth patterns over time. And so all of our 

environmental ecosystem service values are discounted over the period of the 

short, medium, long term based on these regrowth patterns. Next slide please.

And the last main aspect that we've touched on a couple of times is this trail 

maintenance and creation benefit. And so again, thanks to NCC, we have some 

great information about the number of trails that they were able to maintain 

and create on an annual basis. And we, through the literature, looked at some 

health and recreational use value costs per mile of trails and were able to 

attribute these social benefits to this portion of NCC's activities. And in a similar 

line with the last slide, we did try to incorporate some of the upkeep costs on an 

annual basis, which for subsequent years after the first, resulted to about 50%

of the annual benefits for this portion of the activities. And so with that, I'll hand 

it back to Ben Miller for the program perspective discussion.

Ben Miller: Great. Thank you, George. And we wanted to invite Scott back. Scott, really 

appreciate your partnership and your agency's partnership in doing this study 
AmeriCorps Impact Webinar 2 Transcript_01.18.2023 Page 10 of 16

and we wanted to bring you back to talk a little bit about how this study fits into 

NCC and your ongoing work and what's ahead for NCC. Thank you for being with 

us, again. You haven't had that much time with this study, it was published late 

last year, but it has the potential to help Great Basin Institute articulate the 

value of what NCC does. To start, was eager to get your thoughts on how you 

might use this study in the future as NCC continues and grows and moves 

forward.

Scott Scherbinski: Yeah. Thanks, Ben. Appreciate it. Yeah. I think the obvious tool for this study 

would be to outreach to new partners to kind of highlight the benefits of the 

work that we do beyond our narratives and put some more of the hard numbers 

to it, which is a huge help. And then I think more timely in what we've 

experienced, especially in 2022, has really helped to inform recruitment. I think 

AmeriCorps programs across the country obviously really struggled with 

recruitment in 2022. I think this is a great tool to highlight, hey, you have the 

opportunity to come work with us and not just earn a living allowance and earn 

an educational award, but make a true impact to the communities that you're 

working in. And know a lot of folks, we do recruit nationwide, but there's no 

avoiding during the fire season the news of the catastrophic wildfires out here.

And so putting a little bit more of a point on the impacts that our individual 

AmeriCorps members, as well as that our teams are having on that. I think will 

be a really interesting tool to see how that plays out during this field season. 

The other things that GBI and NCC are really interested in looking at this study 

more closely is as a way to potentially use as match for some of our agreements, 

and especially some of our agreements that do have significant match 

requirements that we, as a relatively small organization, sometimes struggle to 

meet. And I think the other thing, I know that this is a much greater and wider 

conversation with environmental service programs, AmeriCorps environmental 

service programs and specifically with conservation cores across the country are 

using this as a tool to make a case that some of the match requirements on our 

grants and agreements maybe should be ad adjusted in the light of the impact 

of studies like this that hey, can we hold these up and have waivers for match 

because of all the work that we're doing on the wider landscape as opposed to 

very individual focused project areas or project partners.

Ben Miller: Great, thank you. We worked early on to identify a range of benefits that we 

could rigorously measure and monetize that many of those built on the 

evaluation work that GBI has done on NCC. But there's one benefit that we've 

talked about that we weren't able to incorporate just because the data wasn't 

there to make that possible, and that was the workforce development aspect of 

what GBI does in terms of training people with a set of skills related to the work 

of ncc. Do you want to talk about that dimension since that is one thing that 

unfortunately was kind of left out of the analysis but is nonetheless potentially 

really important?

Scott Scherbinski: Yeah, it's huge. A main part of the NCC program within the Great Basin Institute 

as a larger organization, as well as with our partners, is really to act as a 
AmeriCorps Impact Webinar 2 Transcript_01.18.2023 Page 11 of 16

stepping stone for folks that are new to conservation. I certainly benefited from 

that when I got my start in conservation. I struggled for a long time and wasn't 

until I worked for a conservation goal program that I kind of got that jumpstart 

into that. I think that is a big benefit that is not captured. We have several folks 

within our organization that got their start with the NCC as a crew member on a 

crew and have matriculated up through our ranks to our senior leadership 

levels. And beyond that, we're getting more and more interest. I know I've 

mentioned the recruitment struggles that AmeriCorps more broadly and 

certainly our program specifically had in 2022. The federal agencies were not 

immune to that either. And I think more and more they are coming to us with 

programs and projects that specifically are tailored to be as a pathway to get 

folks from AmeriCorps into public service.

An exciting partnership that we're going to try to launch this year is with 

professional trail building organization and try to partner directly with them as 

this means of, hey, come work with us, get that initial experience and then go 

on to a professional career path beyond what we're doing.

Ben Miller: That's great, thank you. We have time for one more question and that is what's 

next for NCC? What's coming up this year for the program?

Scott Scherbinski: Yeah. There's a couple big areas that we're pretty excited about that do 

definitely play directly into the spirit of our AmeriCorps grant. One is just last 

week we launched a year long prescribed burn and fuels reduction crew in the 

Lake Tahoe basin working with the forest service up there. Really excited about 

that program. Again, the direct hope of that is not just the initial benefit of 

reduction of fuels to what is really a crown jewel of our country, but also to 

provide that pathway for those members that are participating in that program 

and into jobs of the forest service, whether it's wildfire or forestry. We also just 

signed our agreement with AmeriCorps to become an AmeriCorps disaster 

response team. And so we're anxiously and rapidly trying to get ourselves up to 

speed so we can deploy on some disasters nationwide and continue to support 

the larger societal efforts to recover us from what we continue to see on a 

nationwide basis.

Ben Miller: That's great. Well thank you, Scott. Good luck on those frontiers andScott Scherbinski: Thanks, Ben I appreciate all the [inaudible 00:49:45].

Ben Miller: Being part of the webinar today. Next slide please. I wanted to hand it off to Ben 

Olson, deputy regional administrator for the Western region, for Ben, your 

reflections on today's webinar.

Ben Olson: Yeah. Thank you, Ben. Appreciate the introduction. And yeah, first off, really 

want to thank Scott and the staff of the Great Basin Institute for their incredible 

work leading the Nevada Conservation Corps and partnering with AmeriCorps 

on this ROI analysis. As a regional office, we work to support providing technical 
AmeriCorps Impact Webinar 2 Transcript_01.18.2023 Page 12 of 16

assistance to grantees across the region and one of our key and primary roles is 

conducting outreach, really engaging with potential partners. These can be local 

nonprofit organizations, municipal governments and a variety of local 

stakeholders to really discuss how can AmeriCorps really be a primary tool for 

helping communities solve some of their most pressing issues. And I think 

studies like this really help not just demonstrate the efficacy of AmeriCorps and 

effectively leveraging taxpayer dollars, but really educating communities on 

what an incredible tool AmeriCorps can be. I mean for all of our states across 

the west region, wildfire threat is a very serious concern. And mitigation 

strategies and tools and programs such as AmeriCorps that can be leveraged in 

such a way is something that communities really want to learn about and want 

to know about.

But when they're considering, when we talk to local organizations, they're 

considering do we [inaudible 00:51:17] the AmeriCorps program, do we go in 

another direction? We need to be able to demonstrate impact and we need to 

be able to be able to speak to that competently and in a way that really shows 

that this has been effective elsewhere. And I think it's studies like this that really 

drive that point home and make our job easier as we talk to, whether it be 

again, local nonprofits, state leaders. I actually, yeah, been in a number of 

rooms with state officials where they have looked at ROI as a method of 

determining do we want to make investments? And we share kind of on a 

personal anecdote, before I came to work for the agency, I actually helped run 

an AmeriCorps program out in Arizona and was invited at one point to join the 

Tucson Mayor's Poverty Commission, which is a group of local leaders, mostly 

executive directors of nonprofits and private philanthropy, a lot of heads of 

foundations really looked at series of ROI studies.

This was focused on poverty, so a different issue area, but really trying to see 

what, with limited resources, this group had, what are the most effective 

strategies for moving the needle on poverty and a few different angles on that. 

From that, they actually identified a couple different strategies, one of them 

was developing community schools, and it was by aligning the AmeriCorps 

resources of our program with those strategies deployed in other communities 

that had a demonstrated ROI that helped us leverage such a few $100,000 

dollars to help scale up our programs and really grow in this fairly successful 

program model in Tucson. I know there's been lots of cases across the country 

around different issue areas where both, I mean impact evaluations have also 

been very effective, but I think ROI analysis really, as was kind of highlighted 

earlier, helps compare different types of programs and interventions to look at 

their efficacy on a given issue area and I think is easier to discuss and more 

compelling to people who might not have as in depth of a background looking at 

program evaluations generally.

I think the approach this study took of really breaking down looking at the 

specific program benefits to different stakeholder groups really helps us in 

framing and discussing with local partners what the benefits would be running 

an AmeriCorps program, and by having these individual ties to different 
AmeriCorps Impact Webinar 2 Transcript_01.18.2023 Page 13 of 16

program benefits really lets us listen to local stakeholders, understand what 

they see as their interests, and really emphasize the points where we know 

AmeriCorps has a benefit and can really back that up. The other piece and yeah, 

really building off of what Scott was sharing earlier, being able to speak the 

benefit to the members and their fact that this does, serving with AmeriCorps 

programs, leads to longer term increased wages, decreased unemployment 

really hopefully can help on the recruitment front, I think that's, Scott, just a 

critical challenge so many of our programs have faced. We do have staff 

position dedicated to help with recruitment and I think as people consider 

serving, certainly they are committing to a lower living allowance amount for 

the year. Emphasizing those longer term benefits, I think it can be helpful on 

that front as well.

I think as we've seen more and more of these ROI studies come out, it really 

helps us frame when we're talking with our state commission partners at the 

state government level. They many times did some work in Minnesota. They 

were very effective at using their both evaluation and ROI research to help 

leverage additional state investments in these programs to really help bring 

these programs to scale and replicate programs that had a really significant 

return on investment. I think there's wide varieties of ways we can use this 

research in the field, again, to really help bring successful models to scale, to 

share ideas and promote learning across the region and to help on the 

recruitment front. Yeah. I want to thank everybody involved in this. I think it's 

incredibly important analysis and we greatly appreciate the effort on this front. 

And I will, yeah, hand it back off to Emily.

Emily McDonald: Yes. Thank you so much, Ben. Hi everyone. Thank you for joining. My name is 

Emily McDonald and I'm a research analyst at the Office of Research and 

Evaluation where I have the pleasure of working on these ROI studies. I'd like to 

welcome back all of our panelists to start our Q&A session. You can feel free, a 

few people already did, to put your questions in the chat, I'll be monitoring that 

or you can always raise your hand and I can invite you to come off of mute. 

Sharon wrote, I'm curious to hear more about the methodology for how you 

estimated cost benefits of ecosystem services. Also, when you were estimating 

future discounting of ecosystem services based on regrowth, did you take 

climate change into account? Can the ICF team speak to this?

George Voigt: Sure, I'm happy to take that one. When we were looking at ecosystem service 

values, one of the things that's particularly challenging is that the literature is 

limited in regard to what values have been monetized, what values are 

attributable to a source population. And so what we try to identify are studies in 

the literature that effectively are similar in geographic scope to the project 

region that we're looking at so that there's an applicable transfer of value from 

the study to our project. And then additionally, we want to make sure that in 

their methodology the quantification of these ecosystem services is robust. 

Looking at peer reviewed literature from credible journals is our go-to location 

and then we sort of disaggregate further and further out to see if there are 

specific questions that we still have that can be answered. And to your point 
AmeriCorps Impact Webinar 2 Transcript_01.18.2023 Page 14 of 16

about the discounting of ecosystem services, we haven't looked at climate 

change specifically in this study. I think it's something that we're very aware is 

going to be a pressing issue moving forward, and as soon as we have robust 

quantification methods for incorporating that sort of landscape change into 

some of these models that we're running, we certainly will do so.

Emily McDonald: Thank you. We have another question. I love the perspective of potentially using 

the studies to match waiver potential as your work involves conservation on 

public lands. I'm curious if other federal agencies have heard of this study and 

the findings and reached out to learn the ROI process and about the program. 

Lily or Ben, would you like to speak to this?

Ben Miller: I'm not aware of which agencies have been in dialogue about this study. It has 

been recently published. I'm not sure that we know yet. But Lily, have you 

heard?

Lily Zandniapour: I think we have been sort of tapped for information by different federal 

agencies, not necessarily in this specific area, but folks who are trying to start 

off doing ROI work and sometimes just the first steps of getting into this space is 

a little difficult. We try to share how we've approached this work and try to 

make it a little bit less intimidating just to encourage folks to start doing this 

work. And also hopefully we can leverage everything that we have and have 

more connections with other agencies that are working in the specific areas 

where we have done this work to think about potentials that we can see in the 

area, as Ben mentioned, of scale up of initiatives, perhaps using national service 

as a facilitator of those scale up in areas where we see synergies with the work 

that we are doing and other federal agencies are engaged with, also 

philanthropy really, hopefully we can make these connections.

Both to get the studies out and to use them as basis for partnerships, for 

program development and expansion. Really that's our goal with this initiative. 

And I just want to say that the partnership with ICF has been particularly 

generative, really insightful, and the team of experts there have been just 

fabulous to work with. I think that there are lots of potentials there. I still see 

this as an emerging area of work, so we have to do quite a bit to get the 

information out there. These webinars are one way that we try to do that, but 

hopefully we have more strategic approaches in the future to get the 

information out and sort of reach our goals with this work.

Emily McDonald: Thank you, Lily. Ryan wrote, this is great. Thank you, Ryan. Regarding the 

methodological approach and some approaches to ROI analysis, there is a focus 

on isolating the incremental benefit or the benefits that would not have accrued 

in the absence of the investment, i.e., the delta. ROI is then calculated primarily 

in the context of that incremental slice. How much has that approach informed 

your work, and what are the challenges you faced if you do discover 

incrementality?
AmeriCorps Impact Webinar 2 Transcript_01.18.2023 Page 15 of 16

George Voigt: Sure, I'm happy to take this again and then I can pass it to Dominic for some 

other sort of high level comments. I think one of the ways that we have tried to 

incorporate this specifically with the NCC study is identifying that the baseline of 

post burn ecosystems is not that they remain barren for years into the future. 

And so the benefits need to be discounted. And so one of the ways that we've 

been trying to incorporate that active delta, that active baseline measure to 

compare your impact results to is a combination of the program level evaluation 

studies that are critical to identifying a statistically significant impact of the 

program and their activities, as well as within the literature. What are ways as 

we're building our model that we can actually incorporate some of that 

uncertainty into sort of what's happening over the 30-year period that we're 

modeling and also how robust is the certainty of our estimates within what 

we're generating.

Dominic Modicamore: Yeah. And also I think that this is one of the reasons why we do the three ROI 

estimates based on the length of time that benefits will accrue. We recognize 

that we try to be as robust as possible and use evaluations that are as robust as 

possible, but we do recognize that there could be some of that incremental 

differences that may not be completely related to the program. We do the three 

scenarios based on how long those benefits will accrue. That was our thinking 

behind developing the three scenarios.

Emily McDonald: Lily, did you raise your hand? Go ahead.

Lily Zandniapour: Yes, I just wanted to touch on this question also and say that we have tried, 

when possible, and that we have program impact evaluations that are done 

using very sophisticated designs that basically establish causal impact and show 

that the outcomes and impacts you see are attribute itself back to the program. 

To use those studies to make sure that we are accounting for that 

incrementality. Sometimes it's hard to do those types of studies in some of the 

spaces that we are looking at, especially in certain focus areas. It is more 

difficult to capture those incremental stuff that really can be attributed back to 

that specific investment. I think our strategy is to really go, if we can, to the 

most robust type of studies and that, in part, depends on the space and the type 

of intervention, the multitude of programs and contributors that are involved.

I think this is an important consideration, but it shouldn't debilitate us from 

trying to also look at different other novel ways of sort of approximating, so to 

speak. I think where those impact evaluations exist, these are easier, you can be 

more confident that this is exactly kind of that incremental impact capture. 

When there's not, it's a little bit more of an approximation. I also want to sort of 

put this out there that these types of measurements, it's not a one and done. 

You have to keep improving on them as better measurements become 

available, as better data sources become available. I think there's a lot of 

education to be done around that aspect in that you want to build a portfolio 

and then keep doing these measurements and hopefully you can make sure that 

readiness for it exists and we keep just improving those measurements.
AmeriCorps Impact Webinar 2 Transcript_01.18.2023 Page 16 of 16

But I think what is very encouraging is that ICF has helped us with their 

independent lens to really do the best and use more novel strategies that we 

never really even dreamed of being able to implement in these studies. That's 

really exciting and I think opens new frontiers, which is really great.

Emily McDonald: Great. We have time for one last question. Do you have any additional tools, 

literature or resources that you can share which other conservation course can 

use to make their own ROI estimations?

Ben Miller: One resource that comes to mind is the study itself.i If you go to the ROI page of 

americorps.gov, you'll find research briefs and the full studies. And each full 

study has a lengthy appendix that really breaks down the methodology step by 

step. And I think that for another conservation corps program, reading that 

appendix in detail would likely get you pretty far in terms of taking a similar 

approach to measuring your own program's ROI. Other colleagues may have 

additional resources to share about.

Dominic Modicamore: The only thing I would add is that we measured specific activities that NCC does, 

so there could be variations in the program design and so forth. But I think 

looking at that appendix, I agree it would get you pretty far developing your 

own ROI methodology.

Lily Zandniapour: ICF has also done an ROI of the Washington Conservation Corps, which is 

another study that can be referenced, and we are sort of building on that

trajectory and hopefully we'll have more and more to share in the future.

Emily McDonald: Great. Thank you all so much and we hope you will explore the rest of our ROI 

studies. I'm going to hand it back over to our learning officer, Katy HusseySloniker. Katy, are you with us?

Katy Hussey-Sloniker: Hi, I'm here. We're now at the close of our webinar. We would like to thank Dr. 

Zandniapour, Scott Scherbinski, the ICF ROI project team of Ben Miller, Dominic 

Modicamore, and George Voigt for their presentation, Ben Olson for his 

thoughts on this topic and Dr. Emily McDonald for her facilitation. To our 

audience today, our hope is that you found the topic informative for your 

thinking and that you learned from our discussion. Also, thank you to our 

Mathematica and Guardian of Honors colleagues for their technical support and 

coordination. This webinar and support materials will be posted on the 

americorps.gov website under impact webinars within the coming weeks. 

Please feel free to share with your colleagues and networks. We will also be 

sending out a post-webinar survey, so please let us know your thoughts on this 

webinar and any ideas for future webinars. If you would like to reach out to the 

Office of Research and Evaluation, feel free to use evaluation@cns.gov. Thank 

you and have a wonderful day.