CNCS Research & Evidence Webinar Series Transcript 

March 21 National Service Employment Webinar 

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OPERATOR: Welcome and thank you for standing by. All 

participants are on “Listen Only” until the question 

and answer of today’s conference. To ask a question, 

press Star-One on your touchtone phone, record your 

name, and I will introduce you. This call is being 

recorded. If you have any objections, you may 

disconnect at this time. I would like to now turn the 

call over to Dr. Andrea Robles. Ma’am, you may begin. 

ANDREA ROBLES: Okay, thank you so much. So hi, everyone. 

Thanks so much for joining us today – especially for 

those you in the middle of a spring snowstorm on the 

East Coast, which is what we’re in right now. My name 

is Andrea Robles and I work for the Office of 

Research and Evaluation at the Corporation for 

National and Community Service. And for those of you 

who are listening to one of our webinars for the 

first time, I want to mention that our office 

objectives are to support our agency’s mission by 

building knowledge on civic engagement, volunteering,

and national service. We conduct in-house research 

but also fund research through competitive grants to 

researchers, scholars, and dissertators at 
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March 21 National Service Employment Webinar 

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institutions of higher education and we also support 

research and evaluation of our programs and grantees. 

Just to strive to share and use our research findings 

in several ways, including research reports on our 

evidence exchange (that you can find on our website, 

an annual research summit, and a quarterly 

newsletter. Our webinar series is another way to 

share cutting-edge research like what you will hear 

from today. And today, we are especially fortunate to 

hear about two exciting studies that were conducted 

by two of our 2015 Research Grantees. 

But before I move into introducing our speakers for 

today, I’d like to cover a few housekeeping details. 

As the Operator said, all participants will be in 

listen-only mode until the question and answer 

session following the presentation. As mentioned 

earlier, this webinar is being recorded, and we will 

post it online after the presentation, probably in 

about a week or two.
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So I believe that takes care of our housekeeping 

items. For today’s webinar, we will have introductory 

comments by Dr. Peter Levine, who is the Associate 

Dean for Research and Lincoln Filene Professor of 

Citizenship & Public Affairs in Tufts University’s 

Jonathan Tisch College of Civic Life. That’s quite a 

mouthful. His most recent book is We Are the Ones We 

Have Been Waiting For: The Promise of Civic Renewal 

in America.

This will be followed by two presentations: One, from 

our Tufts University grantee, entitled “The Impact of 

National Service on Employment Outcomes,” which 

includes Peter Levine; Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, 

Director of the Center for Information and Research 

on Civic Learning and Engagement, also known as 

CIRCLE; Jodi Benenson, who is an Assistant Professor 

at the School of Public Administration at the 

University of Nebraska, Omaha; Noorya Hayat, who is a 

Researcher at CIRCLE at Tufts University. 

The Second presentation is from our 2015 Arizona 

State University grantee, AmeriCorps: Transformation 
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through Service and the Presenter will be David 

Schlinkert, Morrison Institute, Arizona State 

University. And he is a Policy Analyst. And finally,

we will have some concluding remarks from Chester 

Spellman, who is Director, for AmeriCorps State and 

National 

So after the speakers’ presentations, we will 

conclude with a Q&A. For those of you who are 

listening in for more than one webinar, one of our 

goals is to be able to make our research and findings 

accessible and useful to academics as well as 

practitioners and our grantees. So please feel free 

to ask any questions or provide comments. We will 

also be sending out a post-webinar survey, so please 

let us know your thoughts on this webinar or any 

ideas for future webinars. 

So now, I will hand this over to Dr. Peter Levine. 

Thank you. 

PETER LEVINE: Thanks, and sorry to give you a tongue 

twister of a title there. Actually, we all have 

complicated titles, so it’s incredible. Hi, everyone, 
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welcome to the webinar. I’m just going to make a 

couple of quick remarks and then actually turn over 

the substance to my colleagues. So these remarks are 

kind of about the importance of the overall topic. 

And one way in would be to say that in 2013, the 

Corporation for National Service itself, the Research 

Department, put out a really important study called 

“Volunteering as a Pathway to Employment,” which is 

easy to Google. We can probably share the link. And 

it was a study that found that basically people who 

volunteered were much more likely to get jobs if they 

didn’t have a job at the time that they volunteered, 

than comparable people who didn’t volunteer. In fact, 

volunteering seemed to boost your chance of getting a 

job by 27%, a big increase.

And it makes sense conceptually because volunteering 

is work. You know, you’re working for a goal. You’re 

working with other people. You’re accountable. You’re 

delivering something. And it puts you in networks and 

connections with other people and it’s something also 

that you can say you’ve done. So there are a lot of 

ways in which volunteering helps the person who 
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volunteers. Of course, volunteering also helps the 

people who receive the service and that’s usually 

foremost on the volunteer’s mind. But it’s important 

that volunteering also helps the person who 

volunteers and it’s an important reason for programs 

like the Corporation for National and Community 

Service and its various programs because they’re 

doing a double good thing by helping both those who 

are served and those who serve. 

But that report also raised a bunch of questions. It 

didn’t just answer everything because questions 

included: Under what circumstances do people get jobs 

after they’ve volunteered? How exactly? Does it 

matter how they present the service that they’ve 

undertaken? Also, what kind of service, and, in 

particular, what about AmeriCorps service because the 

volunteering study was much broader. It was any kind 

of volunteer service. But what service in an 

AmeriCorps program? 

So the Corporation made several grants to external 

researchers like us to pursue some of these questions 
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and both of these presentations today will be 

relevant. And so, actually, that concludes my framing 

comments because then I want to turn things over to 

my own colleagues to talk about our study. So that’s 

Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg, Jodi Benenson, Noorya Hayat, 

and they’ll be talking about the impact of National 

Service on employment outcomes. So take it away, 

guys.

JODI BENENSON: Great. Well, thank you, Peter. This is Jodi 

Benenson and I’m going to kick us off with a little 

bit of background on one of two studies that we are 

going to be talking to you about today. And then, 

Noorya is going to is going to be talking a little 

bit about the second study that we did. 

But first, I want to make sure to acknowledge our 

fantastic research team, who without their work and 

support, we would not have been able to share these 

results with you today. So this is a great team and 

we’ve been supported again by CNCS and a variety of 

other educational institutes and centers out there 

and people. 
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Peter did a really nice job of providing some 

background around why it’s important to pursue this 

line of research and this particular study. You know, 

he noted CNCS’s 2013 study that found strong 

evidence, right, that people without jobs have better 

odds of becoming employed if they volunteer. And 

there’s this other research out there that shows 

among young people, teenagers and other young adults 

who participate in community service, actually have 

much better education and employment outcomes than 

their peers, especially at-risk young people who have 

participated in programs like Youth Build or the 

National Guard Challenge and other types of programs 

out there. 

But, as we know, correlations do not prove causation 

and young people who serve may have personality 

traits or other factors -- there are other risk 

factors at play, like social capital that Peter 

mentioned, that may also play into why somebody may 

have these sort of outcomes out there. And there’s 

also been some research that’s been done by CIRCLE in 

collaboration with the National Conference on 
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Citizenship that has found that communities with 

higher levels of civic engagement actually recover 

their employment levels more rapidly after the 

recession of 2008 and 2009 than communities who were 

similar except in their civic engagement levels. 

But something that we are really focusing on for this 

study is that there is some evidence out there that 

hiring managers see volunteering as a relevant 

experience to consider when making employment 

decisions. And Deloitte’s does a volunteer impact 

survey every year and what they do is they survey 

human resource executives. Basically, what they find 

is that respondents say that volunteerism provides 

benefits to the organization and that field-based 

volunteering can potentially increase a job 

candidate’s chances to be hired.

However, this is where the challenge comes in. You 

know, much of the research in this area is based on 

surveys of managers who make think they want to hire 

who have some sort of volunteering experience, even 

though volunteering may or may not matter in reality. 
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So the purpose of our study is really to employ a 

randomized field experiment to answer this broad 

question that you can see here in red. What is the 

effect of listing AmeriCorps on one’s resume on 

receiving a callback for a job? And the outcome that 

we are most interested in in the first study that I’m 

sharing today is the likelihood of being selected for 

an interview by a real hiring manager. And, again, 

although the existing research is very significant on 

this topic, this randomized study using resumes is a 

crucial next step because it is a very stringent 

method. We know that when we are taking surveys or 

when respondents are taking surveys around 

volunteerism, they may get a more socially desirable 

answer. And also, we want to make sure that we are 

uncovering potential biases that may be at play as we 

are evaluating the likelihood of a callback for a 

job.

So what we did was we used a method that has been 

used in previous research that has successfully used 

resumes and job application materials to uncover 
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labor market biases and discrimination related to 

factors like race, gender, disability, and other 

factors that have not actually yet investigated the 

impact of national service. And that’s where we come 

in.

So what we did was we randomly assigned resumes and 

cover letters based on national service and other 

factors. And we identified two metro areas. We 

applied for real jobs using resumes and cover letters 

that we created in Boston and Chicago and we applied 

it for jobs in two fields. These fields are sales 

jobs and administrative jobs. And what we did was we 

defined resume and cover letter criteria. And we did 

was we essentially randomly assigned resumes and 

cover letters based on national service and other 

factors, as you can see here, like education, the 

quality of the resume, race, and gender. And we 

wanted to make sure that half of the resumes and 

cover letters had national service on them and the 

others did not. And we’d be more than happy to go 

into the details about how we differed the national 
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service and the non-national service job descriptions 

in the Q&A portion. 

And what did from there, as I mentioned, is we 

created resumes and cover letters and created a 

search and application process, where we applied, 

again, for real jobs using websites like Indeed.com, 

Career Builder, Simply Hired, and Idealist.org. And 

we applied for jobs in both the nonprofit and private 

sectors. Overall, we collected two waves of data. We 

applied for 2,010 jobs in Boston and Chicago during 

those two waves of data collection during the Summer 

of 2016 and the Summer of 2017. And what I’m going to 

do is share a little bit about what we found. 

So, as you can see here in Figure 1, of the 2,010 

jobs we applied for, we received callbacks from 409 

jobs or 20% of jobs. And you can see that here in the 

blue color. And as you see in the little note below, 

we consider callbacks to be an interview requested 

and this is either a callback we received via an 

email or over the phone. But it could also be 

somebody showing high interest or showing low 
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interest or somebody who may, for instance, ask for 

some additional materials or for a follow-up, a 

survey to be filled out, etc. But the majority of the 

callbacks that we received, 86%, were interviews that 

were requested from these fictitious applicants. 

It should also be noted that of the job applications 

sent, the callback rate was 20% for both the jobs 

where we used resumes that had national service on 

them and where we used resumes and cover letters that 

had no service on them. So there was not a 

significant difference between the resumes and cover 

letters and when it comes to callbacks based on 

national service overall. 

But we wanted to dig a little deeper into these 

findings and so what you can see here in Figure 2 is 

what we do is we do a deep dive into the 409 

callbacks we received or that 20% that we saw on the 

previous slide. And what we can see here is -- you 

know, we were really interested in looking at labor 

market characteristics like whether or not the job 

was something in the for-profit or nonprofit sector 
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in Chicago or Boston or a judge that was an 

administrative or sales job. And we were also very 

interested in looking at whether or not the 

candidates had a high school degree on their 

application materials or a college degree. And what 

we find is that there is a significant difference 

when it comes to these different types of 

characteristics. We can see there’s a big gap between 

callbacks when it comes to high school versus 

college, for-profit versus nonprofit, etc. 

But once we add in national service, you can see here 

if you look at the blue, those are the resumes that 

have national service on them and the red are those 

that do not have national service on them. There’s 

actually not a significant difference once we add in 

service here just overall. For instance, you can see 

that callbacks for both service and non-service 

resumes hovers around about 16% for students with a 

high school degree and the couple of college students 

with national service on their resumes is a little 

higher, but not by much. And we also see a higher 

number of callbacks in the nonprofit sector jobs in 
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Boston and sales jobs from applicants with national 

service on their resumes being a little higher, but 

not significantly higher. Though it is really 

important to point out those trends. 

And what I want to do is specifically take a moment 

to look at one of these factors, which is education. 

As seen in the previous figure, one of the biggest 

difference we saw when it came to callbacks was 

around education. And so if we do actually dive in a 

bit further and look at education and control for 

factors such as race, gender, the city, the sector, 

and occupation, we actually see that there is a 

significant difference when it comes to callbacks 

based on education. 

So here what we’re seeing is that the likelihood of 

getting a callback for a job is a little higher if 

you have national service on your resume for 

individuals who have been both have a high school and 

a college degree. So you can see whether or not they 

have service on their resumes, either yes or no. And 

you can see that for those in the little blue color 
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on the bottom, those who have the high school degrees 

and people who have a Bachelor’s degree or college 

degree, you can see it kind of tilting upward, which 

shows that there has been an increase in the 

estimated marginal means or really the callbacks 

based on those different categories. 

But what we do see there’s a large gap there. So we 

do see that the callback percentage is significantly 

higher for individuals who do have that Bachelor’s 

degree. And later on in our presentation, Kei is 

going to discuss, you know, the implications of this 

important finding for national service. Andrea is 

going to spend a little bit of time shortly talking 

about some different perspectives of education in our 

supplemental studies. 

But one thing I wanted to make sure to also mention, 

especially given the previous research that has used 

this particular type of field experiment and audit 

study to examine factors like race and gender, I 

wanted to make sure to just briefly touch upon some 

trends we have found based on factors such as race, 
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ethnicity, and gender. Because we did, as I 

mentioned, was we randomized the resumes and cover 

letters in how we sent things out based on racial, 

ethnic, and gender sounding names. And, although we 

applied for an equal number of jobs in these 

categories, callback percentage was different. 

So, for instance, the callbacks were higher for 

female sounding names than those with male sounding 

names. When it comes to race and ethnicity, the 

callbacks received, it was the highest for Latino 

sounding names, followed by Asian, White, and Black 

sounding names, which is consistent with the previous 

research that demonstrates that having a Black 

sounding name potentially could be a result of some 

sort of discrimination within a broader labor market. 

And then finally, we are starting to kind of break 

things down. The nice thing is we have a large enough 

sample that we can break things down by gender, race, 

and ethnicity. And we see that of the callbacks 

received, the callbacks were the highest for Asian 

males and Latino females, with Asian male sounding 
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names and Latino female sounding names. And the 

callbacks were the lowest for individuals that had 

Black and Asian sounding names and males with White 

sounding names. So we plan to dig into these findings 

a little further, but do find that these findings are 

consistent with previous research that looks at 

discrimination in the labor market. 

Next, I am going to turn it over to Noorya who is 

going to talk a little bit on our supplemental study. 

NOORYA HAYAT: Hi everyone. So, as Jodi mentioned, we 

received two grants from CNCS. And the second grant 

we received was a supplemental grant to understand 

the perceptions of hiring managers regarding 

AmeriCorps list experience. So this study we designed 

has three elements. The first element was that we 

sent out a survey to hiring managers. This included 

hiring managers and the employers of national service 

network as well. And we also purchased a private list 

of HR managers that we sent out the survey as well. 

So overall, we received around 72 responses from 

hiring managers across 26 states and the response was 

evenly divided between employers who were in the 
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Employers of National Service network and those who 

were outside the network. And around two-thirds of 

the respondents were from the nonprofit sector. 

The next element of the study was that we recruited 

hiring managers from the survey to have an in-depth 

interview about AmeriCorps service and their 

perceptions about it. And we ended up having 13 indepth interviews, 8 of which were from hiring 

managers and the Employers of National Service. 

The third element for the study was that we did a 

field experiment similar to what Jodi talked about. 

But this time we sent two fictitious resumes and 

cover letters, one with service and one without 

service, to each of the organizations in the 

Employers of National Service network if they had an 

open job. So overall, we reached 78 organizations 

among the Employers of National Service network and 

we sent two resumes, one with service and one without 

service to those organizations. Next slide. 
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So talking about our findings a bit. First, our 

results from the hiring manager survey shows that 

employers believe that most people pursue AmeriCorps 

service because they genuinely want to help others, 

learn about causes and communities, and grow as a 

leader. So you can see more than two-thirds actually 

employers see that most people pursue national 

service because they genuinely want to give back to 

their communities and grow as a leader. And this is 

closely followed by their perception that a lot of 

these people are young people and recent college 

graduates who really want to give back to their 

community. Next slide. 

So another finding we saw from our hiring manager 

survey was this graph that you see here where you can 

see that most employers, as Peter said in the 

beginning, thought that volunteering and AmeriCorps 

both really develop competencies like character, 

collaboration, interpersonal communication in 

candidates. However, you can see the red bars show 

that employers that actually chose AmeriCorps as an 

experience that develops these competencies, they 
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were more likely to choose AmeriCorps over 

volunteering as an experience that develops skills 

and competencies, particularly leadership, 

accountability, adaptability, and responsibility in 

candidates. And this was particularly true for a lot 

of non-profit employers.

Next slide. So for our next element of the study 

where we did in-depth interviews, we had a 

comprehensive discussion with hiring managers about 

an AmeriCorps resume for an entry level position in 

their organization. We showed them a resume and had 

them walk through the resume with us and talk to us 

about their perceptions, what stood out to them, and 

why would they hire this candidate if they did. So 

our major findings showed that most employers 

preferred a candidate that had a skillset they could 

us and they did not really have to train that 

candidate. So they specifically looked for hard and 

soft skills that could match their organization. 

Another finding that we saw was that if the hiring 

manager was familiar with AmeriCorps service, it 

definitely stood out to them. And they would make 
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connections on how that experience would fit in with 

their organizations, what competencies fit and how 

they would ask questions. So they realized that 

AmeriCorps VISTA particularly because that’s a resume 

we showed them, had devolved more competencies than 

an ordinary position in the same organization would. 

We also found out that since most of our employers 

that we talked to were from the nonprofit sector, 

they did seek out a cover letter with the resume. And 

they wanted more details on both the cover letter and 

resume that showed how this candidate would fit in 

the organization through detailed skills and 

experiences and that would show the candidate’s 

personality, especially on how they would fit in 

their organization. So they looked for more of a 

narrative particularly in the cover letter. 

And, lastly, we found again, as Jodi mentioned in the 

first study, that a college degree was really 

important to employers and that trumped mostly 

candidates that did not have a college degree. Most 

employers said that an Associate or a Bachelor’s 
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degree signaled some qualities to them, such as 

professionalism, writing competence, determination, 

etc. So a college degree was used as a signal for a 

lot of these competencies that employers were looking 

for. 

We probed further as well on this and some employers 

did say that they would look at a candidate without a 

college degree if they had real life professional 

experiences and skills and could display employment 

maturity that would fit in with an entry level 

position in their organization. Next slide. 

So lastly, our field experiment was where we sent two 

resumes, one with service on it and one without 

service on it, to open jobs in the Employers of 

National Service Network. And this graph, as you can 

see, shows the total rate of callbacks that we got 

were 13% from the entire study. Next slide. 

So for this study, our major finding is that if a 

service resume was used, a candidate was more likely 

to get a callback. And, as you can see, the blue bar 
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shows that 17% of the time when a service resume was 

used, the candidate received a callback from an 

organization within the Employers of National 

Service. And 8% of the time, when a non-service 

resume was used, that a candidate received a 

callback. 

So I hand it over to our director, Kei KawashimaGinsberg, to talk about the implications from both 

our studies. 

KEI KAWASHIMA-GINSBERG: Thank you, guys. I think it was 

great and I hope you can hear me. Okay, so I’ll keep 

it pretty quick because I know you want to save time 

for Q&A and many of the things I’m about to say 

already came up so I’ll stay brief. But one of the 

major findings here I think is that the employers 

really rely very heavily on college degree, not just 

college experience, as a signal and assumption about 

what kind of implicit qualities and even characters 

are coming through the job candidates. And so I think 

there’s a lot of need for educating employers about 

what sort of skills and assets that the candidates 
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with really diverse backgrounds can bring, 

particularly with national service background. 

The second finding that’s not actually stated as much 

here is that the research team had a lot of trouble 

actually finding jobs that are publicly available for 

those who are without college experience earlier in 

the study, to the point we had to adjust the criteria 

at one point in the middle of the study. And what 

that tells us is that a) there is perhaps a different 

pathway for young people who do national service and 

not necessarily going to college for employment and 

economic security. So we’d like to find out more 

about that. We hear about those things and more 

anecdotally than entirely through the study. 

And another major finding that came through from 

Noorya’s findings is that building familiarity and 

relationships with national service employers through 

Employers of National Service really builds a strong 

pathway toward employment for the national service 

alums. I think this finding was very, very clear. So 

to us, it told us the value of investing in 
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relationship building with these major employers 

across the country. 

And, finally, I think, we really do need to further 

explore and understand what other ways young people 

who are getting national service experience are able 

to gain opportunities for employment. Because one of 

the things that was in the findings was that the 

national service alone wasn’t necessarily promoting

probability of employment, at least in the general 

rule, unless the employer was very familiar with 

national service. 

I’ll close there and thanks for your attention.

ANDREA ROBLES: Thank you. Well, thank you to the Tufts 

team and if you have any immediate questions, you 

could put it in the chat or please just state it for 

the Q&A. So now I’m going to turn it over to David 

Schlinkert from the Morrison Institute, our Arizona 

State University. David? 

DAVID SCHLINKERT: Hi, everybody. Let’s see if I can 

get this loaded up here. Here we go. The AmeriCorps 

Experience Transformation through Service. My name is 
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David Schlinkert. I’m with the Morrison Institute for 

Public Policy. I wanted to start off real fast and 

just and to say thank you to Dr. Robles and Roshney 

[sic] for supporting our research and ICF for putting 

on this webinar. I think it’s a great way to share 

our findings in a more public forum. And I also 

wanted to thank all of the public servants. I see 

there’s quite a few people online here and it was a 

great opportunity for me to work on this project for 

the last year because I got to see and listen to a 

lot of different people and their experiences. And 

from a lot of the feedback we got from the alumni and 

the supervisors, there’s quite a bit of dedication on 

the part of service members. So thank you for that. 

As everybody here knows, AmeriCorps been going on for 

24 years. It was built to create a culture of 

citizenship, service, and responsibility. And in 

2016, we did a study that wanted to look at three 

different research questions. Are AmeriCorps host 

sites hiring their own service members? Is the 

AmeriCorps program creating a pipeline to employment? 

And how are AmeriCorps programs contributing to their 
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host sites? And these bullet points are our main 

findings from the first year. It’s about 83% of host 

sites hired at least one member. And more than half 

of the positions were full-time. AmeriCorps found an 

employment pipeline either their host site and 

organization or other alumni. And AmeriCorps 

contributed in a host of ways to the organizations 

they were serving with. 

So this year we wanted to expand the study to see if 

what we found in Arizona was true across country. We 

looked at five different states: Nevada, Washington, 

Minnesota, Tennessee, and Massachusetts. This year we 

wanted to focus on some of the same issues, but we 

had three additional questions: What are the benefits 

for service members and organizations? What 

challenges face the AmeriCorps programs? And are 

AmeriCorps programs hiring AmeriCorps alumni? And, if 

so, at what rate? 

We did this through a mixed message research design. 

So we conducted 367 phone surveys with host site 

supervisors, 15 virtual focus groups, 10 of which 
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with present AmeriCorps supervisors and 5 with past 

alumni, and we conducted 18 phone interviews with 

state commissioners. 

Just as a quick disclaimer for the researchers in the 

audience, the survey data is not representative of 

each state because it’s a small pool in each of those 

states. 

So the major findings for the members, they found it 

a very transforming and rewarding experience. It was 

a great opportunity for personal and professional 

growth and they built a lot of opportunities in terms 

of career exploration and it was a catalyst for 

continuing education and giving back to their 

community. We’ll go through these more in detail.

One of the major findings: the stat was 87% of sample 

organizations have either hired their AmeriCorps 

member or helped them gain employment. I don’t know 

why the slides are jumping ahead. I apologize. Help 

them gain employment elsewhere and over 160 
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supervisors offered recommendations and/or letters of 

reference for their AmeriCorps members. 

So these next two slides are probably the most 

valuable of the presentations. A number of AmeriCorps 

members hired after their service term. On the left 

here you see 37% hired one, 39% two or three, and 

about a quarter hired four or more alumni, which is 

pretty substantial, between 2012 and 2016. Now the 

types of jobs created when sample organizations do 

hire former AmeriCorps members, they are most likely 

to be hiring into full-time positions compared to 

part-time. About 20% part-time, 58% full-time, and 

22% both.

And this is a proportion of new or replacing 

positions. So our host site is hiring somebody to 

fill a job that’s already existing or they’re 

bringing on increasing organizational capacity. And 

about 37% are adding positions. So this is helping 

generate more employees and more AmeriCorps staff 

members onsite. About 40% were replacing and 16% were 

both.
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So we have a lot of direct feedback from members and 

from supervisors and we’ll start with members. They 

found it an incredibly rewarding experience. They 

found that it made them a better person as you’ll see 

in the quote on the slide. And they felt that they 

could give back to their community, especially one of 

the biggest selling point was everybody loved working 

with kids. We heard that a lot. That really made them 

happy about what they were doing if they can 

contribute to changing kids’ opinions and helping 

them learn new things. 

The five biggest skills that members thought they 

picked up were critical thinking skills, increased 

their employment options, how to handle themselves in 

a professional workplace, how to plan their ideas and 

kind of set up a day-to-day work schedule and it 

helped change their perspective. Now this was 

especially true in members that were serving in 

underserved communities. It helped them realign how 

they viewed the world. 
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Now this next quote is a little long, but I think it 

kind of highlights the four steps that we kept 

hearing and we thought was a great progression that 

the AmeriCorps program provided for members. It 

helped them find their niche in the community, found 

a problem they were passionate about solving, 

encouraged them to go back to school to learn the 

skills they needed to work on that problem, and to 

gain the better knowledge of the situation and the 

more macro level factors that were involved in the 

problem they solved. And it led to people working in 

a field that was directly related with their 

AmeriCorps experience. 

So that’s kind of the four-part progression for 

members and this was indicative of a lot of the 

interviews we conducted. 

And supervisors played a pivotal role in AmeriCorps’ 

success and supervisors contributed in a lot of 

different ways to helping AmeriCorps members move on 

to the next phase of their career. The major ways 

they provided support were networking, helping them 
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make professional connections, forwarding specific 

jobs and connecting them to other employment 

opportunities. And then there was a lot of technical 

assistance, like help with resumes, references, 

interview preparation. And we had one supervisor 

comment that their second full-time job was writing 

letters of recommendation for members. And I thought 

that was great. 

Supervisors consistently said that without AmeriCorps 

members, they would not be able to do what they were 

currently doing. Their service provision is wholly 

based upon AmeriCorps members and organizations felt 

that this allowed them to expand and serve more 

people that the missions of their organizations were 

trying to serve. 

And this quote kind of highlights that. As far as 

thinking about how integral Corps members are to our 

work, I mean, they are completely there, 100% of the 

people who carry out the work that our organization 

is trying to do. And I really think that sums up the 
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sentiment from a lot of different supervisors when we 

interviewed them. 

The admiration for AmeriCorps members, supervisors 

felt that AmeriCorps members were high caliber. They 

had a dedication to service and they really wanted to 

help people. And I think this was very well outlined 

in the Tufts survey where I think it was 58% of 

people were just there to help give back to their 

community and really wanted to be a genuine 

influencer of public good. And I think that this 

directly speaks to that. 

So a lot of supervisors said that they kind of taught 

them two things: the networking really helped create 

like an AmeriCorps pipeline, a pipeline to 

employment. And it also taught members the importance 

of strong network connections. So if you work hard 

and you really go above and beyond, it will pay off 

because people are going to notice it and want to 

pick up your talent and skills. The ones you pick up 

through the AmeriCorps program and then be able to 

use those in the workforce. 
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Supervisors overall said they prefer to hire 

AmeriCorps members. Basically, what some of them 

would say is that it’s a yearlong internship. They 

get to learn about you, your strengths, your 

weaknesses. And they know from the beginning what 

your goals are, what you want to become, and they 

know that you’re in this for the public service and 

the public good. You’re not out to make money. They 

really want to see that you’re behind the mission and 

that you already understand what you’re going into. 

All of these bubbles we kind of touched on here. But 

if you look at the top left and right, this is kind 

of the start point for host site supervisor and 

alumni and this is kind of the process that leads to 

the employment of service members through the 

AmeriCorps network. So take one of these, for 

example, the personal and professional development of 

alumni. They get the career exposure and exploration. 

They have access to the resources and the networks of 

the supervisor and then they get plugged into these 
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networks and are able to find employment upon leaving 

the AmeriCorps program. 

We left a little time at the end of each of the 

surveys to talk a little bit about feedback. We’ll 

start with the members and then do a slide on the 

supervisors. Feedback and evaluation -- a lot of the 

service members felt that their direct supervisor 

might be in touch with them, but they wanted more 

feedback. They wanted to be able to give their 

opinion to people higher up in CNCS. And I told them 

that’s what this project was. So they were all very 

excited that this was going on because they wanted to 

feel like what they were learning could be 

disseminated to other organizations and other alumni 

or other members that were starting out. 

The two in the middle here, the blurry job duties and 

inconsistent communication -- I think a lot of this 

is just due to starting a new job and being there for 

one year. I think there’s sometimes AmeriCorps didn’t 

know where they really fit. Were they supposed to be 

a volunteer, an intern? Do they meet with staff? How 
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do they get to know the lay of the land? And I think 

a lot of that is due to just starting a new job. 

And then the last one is stipend and housing. They 

found it very difficult, especially in urban areas, 

to be able to make it work on the stipend that’s 

given. And in rural communities there was a lot of 

issues with housing in terms of getting people like 

if the organizations didn’t provide a lot of support, 

it was difficult for them to find housing and be able 

to afford it on their own. 

The main challenge for AmeriCorps supervisors -- we 

used qualitative analysis and this is the number of 

times that these issues were referenced in an 

aggregate. So the first two here that you see going 

all the way up to 40 references each was the stipend 

recruitment and vettings. And those are very similar. 

So the supervisor would say the recruitment and 

vetting is they would get quality candidates but it’s 

hard to entice them with the stipend the way that it 

was. And then right around 22, you see fiscal 

management compliance as the third highest, not 
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complaint, but area for improvement. They said it was 

sometimes very challenging to keep up with all of the 

requirements for the AmeriCorps program. And it was 

very onerous on them to try to keep up with 

everything that they needed to be completing to keep 

their program running. 

So we actually opened up the end of the interviews to 

recommendations from the individuals themselves. And 

a lot of service members or alumni said that they 

encourage peer-to-peer collaboration networks. And 

this I think was due to generate more institutional 

legacy. So if you have a turnover of an AmeriCorps 

member every year, it’s difficult for a new person to 

come in without that overlap to say, “This is what’s 

been done. This is what we’re trying. This is the 

direction we’re heading.” So I think some members 

felt like they were recreating the wheel every year 

and this would be a good way to either get them 

talking to members in other organizations or be able 

to speak to alumni that have already come out of the 

program in terms of what works best and what they 

could do to start off in their role. 
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Increased stipends according to cost of living. This 

I put in there -- I know that federal grants are what 

they are and that’s probably not going to change, but 

they said maybe cost of living adjustments for people 

living in larger cities because it was especially 

difficult. And facilitate direct communication 

between communities and state commissioners. And when 

you talk to state commissioners, they do do a lot of 

this. But I think members wanted to see more of an 

effort or wanted to have more direct communication 

with people higher up at CNCS. 

And I know we’ll do Q&A at the end, but I wanted to 

put these two questions out there for people to think 

about. Do these findings reflect your experiences 

with the AmeriCorps program? And there are other 

benefits and challenges that we did not address in 

this presentation. 

So if you want more information, please feel free to 

email me directly. I can send the report to you and 

that’ll wrap it up for us. Thank you very much.
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ANDREA ROBLES: Thank you so much, David. So now I’m 

going to turn it over for some remarks with Chester 

Spellman who’s Director for the AmeriCorps State 

National. Chester? 

CHESTER SPELLLMAN: Thank you so much. Good afternoon, 

everyone. Thank you for having me and thank you for 

participating in this call. I’d also like to thank 

our speakers for presenting and for conducting this 

very valuable research. And I would also like to 

thank Dr. Mary Hyde and the CNCS Research Evaluation 

Team for their leadership. In AmeriCorps State 

National, we really appreciate the strong partnership 

that we have with the Office of Research and 

Evaluation. I’ll just make my remarks very brief. We 

want to leave time for Q&A. But really just say how 

in AmeriCorps State National, we’re very excited 

about the research from Tufts and Arizona State 

University. This research on the employment of 

members is of, obviously, great interest to us and is 

extremely relevant just in the work that we do here 

internally. But also for our rentees and the broader 

national service field. 
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One of the things that stood out to me during this 

call is just that as I’ve been traveling, I’ve been 

in my role for a little over six months now and as 

I’ve been traveling the nation and meeting with 

members and programs. I’ve heard a lot about just 

this topic of employment anecdotally and it’s great 

to have the research to really just confirm and 

backup what has been shared with me just from 

individual members. 

So again, this is really exciting and we look forward 

to supporting in AmeriCorps State National Dr. Hyde 

and working together to just highlight this exciting 

research. So thank you for having me. 

ANDREA ROBLES: Thank you. So, Lauren, do you mind going 

back to that original slide with those two questions? 

And that could be for both presentations as people 

have from the audience have something they want to 

say about either of those questions. But in the 

meantime, how about we open it up for some Q&A. So is 

the Operator there. 

OPERATOR: Yes, thank you. To ask a question, please 

press Star-One on your touchtone phones, unmute your 
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42

phone, record your name clearly after the prompt and 

I will introduce you for your question. Again, that’s 

Star-One to ask a question. If you need to withdraw 

your question, you may press Star-Two. Please standby 

for incoming questions.

ANDREA ROBLES: Okay, thank you. And in the meantime, we 

have a question so I’m just going to ask it of both 

sets of presenters. So the person says, “I believe 

that you said the study was limited to Boston and 

Chicago, two large urban areas. Are there thoughts 

about or plans to study how volunteering in national 

service increase employment outcomes in smaller 

areas, especially rural areas? 

KEI KAWASHIMA-GINSBERG: This is Kei Kawashima-Ginsberg and 

I can maybe jump in really quickly. We don’t have a 

study or data on that, but one thing we do have is 

that we know that in rural areas the nonprofit 

density scope is pretty low, meaning that unlike 

urban areas where one nonprofit that may not be able 

to create a hiring pathway for an AmeriCorps or they 

have for a year, maybe would approach another 

nonprofit in the same area. And that, I think, is 

pretty common given a few studies which is great to 
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hear. But in rural areas, I can imagine that might be 

slightly harder. And that’s one of the reasons why we 

said it’s important to sort of have a digital pathway 

for all kinds of use including rural area use stuff 

out there. 

ANDREA ROBLES: Thank you, any other thoughts from the 

speakers? Okay. Any Q&A from --

OPERATOR: Currently there are no questions in the queue. 

Again, if you would like to ask a question, you may 

press Star-One.

ANDREA ROBLES: Okay. So Mary Hyde, are you on the line? 

MARY HYDE: I am. 

ANDREA ROBLES: Hi. So from our Director, any thoughts or 

questions that you may have? 

MARY HYDE: The only comment I would make is to sort of 

echo Chester’s closing remarks there and to just 

acknowledge how important this sort of circle of 

information is. So, you know, sort of having our 

researchers go out there, bringing it back to folks, 

asking the questions, giving the opportunity for this 

information to feed into the operations of AmeriCorps 

State National. And I know in Chester’s relatively 

short time here, he is incredibly receptive to 
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feedback from the field and I know he’s going to take 

this information and it will be taken seriously. So I 

think that is the objective at the end of the day, 

that we create this information not just for the sake 

of having it, but for also using it to improve member 

experiences and to improve the utility of it in 

communities who access the resource. So that’s the 

only addition I would make. 

ANDREA ROBLES: Okay, thank you. Operator, any questions. 

OPERATOR: There are no questions in the queue. 

ANDREA ROBLES: I would love to hear from the audience in 

terms of whether these findings reflect your 

experiences either as an AmeriCorps grantee and a 

staff member or if there are any former alum on the 

call. I mean, like Chester said, we hear this in the 

field in terms of the kind of professional 

development and employment opportunities that come 

people’s way. But this research is able capture that 

in a more systematic way. So, David, you mentioned 

when you were doing the focus groups and I asked of 

the Tufts group too, that there was energy around 

what people had learned and their time. Can you talk 

about that a little bit more? 
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PETER LEVINE: Yeah, so we’re talking about what they 

learned during their service term? 

ANDREA ROBLES: Yeah, and how they felt it helped them in 

terms of their future prospects. 

PETER LEVINE: I think it depended on the individual. I 

think that the slide that Tufts put up that showed 

the different categories which had as they went --

there was college experience, wanting to get a job. 

You got a little bit of all of those. And some of it 

was people just kind of figuring things out. I think 

some of their slides show the people that just had a 

high school degree. It was something to do that led 

to something more and made them passionate about 

something. So I think the impetus for joining change 

is very varied. But once people are in, I think they 

kind of find their niche. It’s very exploratory and I 

think you see a lot of direction come out of it. 

So someone that may not have had a career goal is all 

of a sudden, “Oh, hey, I really am passionate about 

this. I want to go back to school.” And I think 

that’s where the transformation in our title came 

from is it was members, whether they had a defined 
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goal or not, were able to leave with something 

tangible, like kind of a purpose. And I think that’s 

what everybody’s looking for out of a job. So it was 

a very defining moment for a lot of people. 

ANDREA ROBLES: And at Tufts, I know you spoke to the 

Employers National Service. Anything distinctive as 

well besides what you’ve presented to us?

PETER SCHLINKERT: Other folks might want to weigh in 

but I’ll just say, I think, you know, big picture 

here what we see is that the best -- I mean, people 

might disagree, but my read is the best pathway for 

AmeriCorps and the strongest and most impressive 

pathway for AmeriCorps deployment is sort a little 

bit inside the family. It’s Employers of National 

Service and it’s the former AmeriCorps directors of 

the program you’re in. In big crowded labor markets 

like Boston and Chicago there’s some advantages than 

just merely the brand. But there’s also a lot of work 

for everybody in the field, including us to do, to 

kind of strengthen the pathway there. Because while 

there are some advantages, it’s also ways in which 

education, for example, is trumping service. So I 

think there’s a lot of good news here but I also 
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think there’s a set of things we can make progress on 

in terms of the big labor markets. But my colleagues 

might have more to add on that, more specifically on 

the Employers of National Service part. 

NOORYA HAYAT: I can add because for the Employers of 

National Service study, when we talk to a lot of 

employers, it echoes what Peter said. We showed the 

employers knew about AmeriCorps or an AmeriCorps alum 

that really jumped out to them. So they really 

understood what 1700 service meant, what kind of 

commitment and dedication this kind of candidate 

would bring. And they would really, you know, focus 

on that.

On the other hand, if they didn’t know about if or we 

asked them in the interview of how a colleague who 

doesn’t know about National Service would look at 

this resume, that’s where they were like hesitant of 

how this would apply even if they Googled it. How 

would -- they wouldn’t get the nuance of this 

AmeriCorps service that an alum or an Employers of 

National Service organization would. So that did come 

out in our interviews. 
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So I think a lot of outreach about service and how it 

can affect would be one way. And the other that Peter 

said, that college degree still trumps a lot of other 

credentials that candidates have, including service 

on their resume. 

ANDREA ROBLES: Thank you. So I have a few questions that 

have come in. One of the biggest employment benefits 

of AmeriCorps VISTA is noncompetitive hiring status 

for federal employment. What was the thought process 

behind not including federal employers in the study? 

And I think that has more to do with the Tufts study. 

JODI BENENSON: Yeah, this is Jodi. I can briefly touch 

on that. Really, it would be it was our ability to 

more easily apply for jobs in the nonprofit and 

private sectors without having to go through areas 

like background checks and things like that that are 

often required in the federal employment hiring 

process. And so it was mostly for that reason and for 

kind of ethical services in that area as well. 

Also, but I will say that many of the jobs we applied 

for, at times we would start applying for a job and 
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we’d have to kind of maybe stop halfway through if 

there was something that we did not feel aligned with 

our values as it pertained to the protocol that we 

put together for the Institutional Review Board. And 

so really, it was mostly due to the difference in 

requirements for federal employers compared to those 

in the nonprofit and private sectors. 

ANDREA ROBLES: So we have a comment: “My name’s Amy 

Roth. I’m an AmeriCorps alum who is now Deputy 

Director of Oklahoma AmeriCorps, the Oklahoma 

Commission. I also helped cofound and direct the two 

successful AmeriCorps programs in my state. 

AmeriCorps is definitely the catalyst for getting my 

Master’s Degree and for my career in the nonprofit 

national service realm.” So speaking to whether these 

findings reflect their experiences. 

OPERATOR: We do have two questions over the phone. Okay, 

the first question is from Amy Roth. Your line is 

open.

AMY ROTH: Oh, hi. No, I didn’t have a question. I just 

wanted to comment about how AmeriCorps has definitely 

framed my entire career and helped me to become a 

leader within my community and state. And I was able 
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to obtain my Master’s Degree as a result, which I 

don’t know if I would have done that had I not served 

in AmeriCorps way back in the 90’s. So it’s 

definitely been the catalyst for everything I’ve done 

in my career and I’m so appreciative for the 

opportunity to continue to serve in a leadership 

capacity through AmeriCorps. 

ANDREA ROBLES: Thank you. 

OPERATOR: Our next question is from Somata [sic]. Your 

line is open.

SOMATA: Hello, everybody. My name is Somata Hakim and 

I actually have a question and a comment. I wanted to 

share with you that I had done AmeriCorps about two 

decades ago and basically what I would like to say, 

so I’m an attorney by training. I’ve shifted careers 

and I’m now a culture strategy consultant. So part of 

my job is creating inclusive workspaces. And there’s 

a huge trend right now, not just from a nonprofit 

perspective, but also from a for profit perspective, 

looking at social responsibility. And what does it 

mean to have empathy in the workplace and how that 

relates to leadership. And this is something that I 

see in my job across all industries in Texas. So it’s 
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really interesting because I would say it all started 

for me when I did AmeriCorps. I worked in a program 

in Portland, Oregon and I was working with homeless 

population and [unint.] population, visiting people 

in their single room occupancies and really seeing a 

whole side of this world that I had never really been 

exposed to. And it was definitely a diverse 

population as well. 

So those kind of experiences really have come through 

for me and they’ve influenced my perspective in my 

legal career and the work I did there and also now as 

a consultant. I bring these stories and still to this 

day. So taking this research, definitely I’m going to 

be bringing that up when I’m talking to leaders and 

executives and organizations. 

On the other side of it as well, you know, 

millennials and the next generation are expecting 

organizations to be looking at a cause or at least 

contributing in terms of social responsibility in 

general. And the more people we employ that bring 

that experience and that lens at least of public 
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service and basically creating a more just and 

equitable work environment as a result of these 

experiences. I think that’s really important. So I 

want to thank you very much. I’ll be definitely 

bringing up this research in all areas of my work. 

My question was specifically about there was a slide 

that talked about trends by race, ethnicity, and 

gender. And I thought this was a really interesting 

slide for my work. So my main question on that is are 

these specifically when you were looking at callbacks 

for people who had college degrees? Or does this 

apply across those that had high school degrees and 

college degree and we divided that by race, 

ethnicity, and gender? Thank you. 

ANDREA ROBLES: Thanks very much. Tufts? 

OPERATOR: There are no further questions in the queue. 

JODI BENESON: Thank you. This is Jodi. I’m briefly 

answer that question. That’s a great question. And as 

I mentioned earlier those are preliminary findings 

and they were the holistic group. So it was 

everybody, the 2010 participants. And so I think a 

great next step will be dividing up these callback 
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findings by factors like education and some of the 

other labor market characteristics that we talked 

about. But thank you for that question. It’s a 

helpful reminder of why we need to be disaggregating 

this information further. 

ANDREA ROBLES: Well, thank you so much to all of you. It 

is already 3:02, but I want to make sure that your 

institutes are listed in the chat. We’ll have the 

recording up and if there are any comments or 

questions in terms of this webinar or for the future, 

like I said, if you have any ideas, please put it 

into the post webinar. So anyway, thanks, and have a 

good day, everyone. 

OPERATOR: This concludes today’s conference. Thank you 

for your attendance. You may disconnect your... 

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