Michael Smith on AmeriCorps and The Future of Service

This episode of the Getty Smart podcast is part of our new Pathways campaign. What is something you used to think that you’ve changed your mind about? It’s time for us to do that with all things learning. Previous Getty Smart campaigns have laid the groundwork of networks, place, purpose, and innovation. Our latest effort, the new Pathways campaign, will serve as a catalyst for an unbundling education

to allow for new learning models that are sustained by supporting guidance and embedded in scalable systems. In partnership with ASA, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Stand Together and the Walton Foundation, the new Pathways campaign will question education status quo and propose new methods of giving students a chance to experience success in what’s next. Find out more at www.gettysmart.com backslash new pathways.

Michael, why does service matter? Well, Tom, thank you for allowing me to be on this podcast with you today. It’s wonderful to catch up and have an opportunity to talk about AmeriCorps and service and civic engagement. You know, when I think about why service matters, I think about a couple different things. If I were to nerd out a little bit, I would say it goes back to what Alexis de Tocqueville saw.

When he came around and he saw Americans through barn raisings and through farm plantings and Americans who didn’t have a whole lot of resources, but were there to take care of each other and saw that there was something that was unique about this American experiment. And I think we’ve seen that after oars. We certainly saw it, you know, 9-11 is coming up after 9-11.

Even during the pandemic, we see when the going gets tough, America gets tougher. And instead of going inward, we help our neighbors. We help those that are in need. And I think that is something that is beautifully American and it helps to really build and strengthen communities. But for me, I also think about it more personally.

I grew up in a low-income black community. My parents were both 16 years old when I was born. My mom sent me to the local Boys and Girls Club for what she considered to be cheap daycare. And I literally would not be sitting here today as a presidential appointee if it weren’t for our neighbors who I could knock on their door, if it weren’t for those volunteers at the Boys and Girls Club

who became second moms and aunts and uncles, if it weren’t for Mr. Barry that took us out on camping trips or Miss Carol who took us to the farm from time to time or Sharon who helped me to write my first letter to get an internship. And so when I think about my life and so many others, this idea that we are willing to serve each other, to help one another, to think beyond ourselves, I think that is what really makes our community strong. You’re listening to the Getting Smart Podcast and I’m Tom Vander Erk.

And today I’m joined by Michael Smith, he’s the CEO of AmeriCorps, the federal service agency that connects individuals and organizations to the nation’s most pressing challenges. Michael, welcome. Thank you, it is wonderful to be here. I was recalling last night and doing some research that AmeriCorps has been around since 1993,

but I don’t remember what the origin story was. Why was the organization formed? For what purpose? Sure, I think it’s hard for many people that were there at the founding to imagine that we turned 30 years old next year. But AmeriCorps was created by President Clinton to do a couple different things. One, to pull together some programs that were using people power to make a difference in communities that had been around and were just in different places and maybe not doing the most they could.

For example, Vista, which is now AmeriCorps Vista, which was created under President Johnson, Foster grandparents, where we have low income, mostly women that are working in early childhood settings, the retired seniors volunteer programs, even the legacy of President Roosevelt’s Community Conservation Corps. All of these things were existing, so President Clinton said, let’s pull them in under one agency that could help to use people power. The other really interesting thing that was happening during the early 90s is President Clinton was really inspired by some of these

new social entrepreneurs that were starting organizations like City Year and Teach for America and public allies that were saying, we think that somewhere in between volunteering and nonprofit work, there’s someone that might want to give a year of their life to make a difference in communities. We just need a little resource to take that to the next step. And so the agency was formed to invest in those great social enterprises. And today we now have 250,000 AmeriCorps members and senior volunteers that are serving in 40,000 locations.

We move more than $1 billion a year to thousands of nonprofits to support work that is making a difference at the grassroots level all across the country. Michael, I want to give you my quick origin story. A year after the program started, I became a public school superintendent here in Washington State. And we were one of the first school districts to win an AmeriCorps grant. And we had an extraordinary director here and quickly had volunteers in all of our elementary schools.

And this is a high mobility, high poverty, high English as a second language community. And within months, I would say the AmeriCorps volunteers had just lit up every single school and were providing extraordinary service, tutoring and supporting teachers and connecting families to services and running after school programs. And I think the community was astounded that a couple dozen young people with insightful and energetic leaders could make such a difference. And as important as their service to schools was, it was equally exciting to watch the change in those young people.

And in the course of their year or two of service with us, how they would grow into confident professionals. And many of them chose to go on to teach and to serve in really important ways. And so my early AmeriCorps experience was just extraordinarily positive. And I think that was relatively widespread. But anyway, had to share that super success story with you.

I’d love to have you talk about more about what AmeriCorps is doing today. So in addition to working in schools, which is still a big part of what you do, tell us some of the other programs that you have launched. I would love to. By the way, I love that story because it really does exemplify the great work that is happening in communities all over the country. And the secret sauce of AmeriCorps is we can make a difference on local challenges while also providing a transformative experience for the AmeriCorps members themselves.

In some ways, I think the program might even be more valuable for the servers than those served. I mean, that’s definitely a double benefit that it is a life changing experience for the people that choose to enter service. And it comes back full circle. It’s benefiting the community during your year or your two years of service. But we find that so many AmeriCorps members, especially those that are in schools, end up becoming principals, administrators, running education nonprofits, starting education nonprofits.

Our folks that are doing climate work stay in the climate field. So the benefit, it’s a double benefit that comes back to the community. So what other kind of program you have a lot of different service programs and it’s not just young people, you know, doing it after high school or after college year. What else? What else is in the portfolio? AmeriCorps is actually made up of four sub programs.

I talked a little earlier about our history and bringing together some of the things across the government. So we have our AmeriCorps state national program where about half of the dollars that we move goes through our state commissions and states are really responsible for making sure that we stay connected and local in that, you know, we’re not just sitting in D.C. Making all the decisions and our national direct program still funds things like city year and public allies and teach for America. So, you know, college possible some of these organizations that you know really well receive a large share of our their budget through AmeriCorps. We also have our AmeriCorps VISTA program, which is responsible for helping to build capacity either in municipalities or in nonprofits that are working on poverty solutions.

And so they might be helping to do fundraising or doing strategic plans. It’s often a one person in a nonprofit or a city or a small group of people. We have our AmeriCorps in triple C program, which stands for National Civilian Community Corps, where we have thousands of AmeriCorps programs that are doing a response to urgent needs and communities while also getting a once in a lifetime leadership development experiment. So you’re paired with with 15 folks that you never know, you get a van and you are told this week you are helping to muck and gut houses after a hurricane two weeks from now you might be serving in a hospital to run testing and vaccination lines because of COVID. Two weeks after that you might be building a house with Habitat for Humanity.

And then lastly we have our AmeriCorps seniors program. So a lot of people when they think about AmeriCorps, they think about college age young people, which it’s a fair share of folks, but we actually have about 150,000 AmeriCorps senior members and volunteers. We have our foster grandparents that are in early childhood settings. We have our senior companions that are usually peers making sure that our seniors can age in place and thrive while doing so. And we have our retired senior volunteers program, which is a volunteer program that are doing a variety of different solutions, whether it’s meals on wheels or senior tax or just checking in and keeping in touch with our seniors.

Michael, I saw last week you had an announcement about a public health AmeriCorps. What is that? We’re so excited about Public Health AmeriCorps. And part of the reason I’m excited about Public Health AmeriCorps is I think it really represents the future of where the agency is going. So Public Health AmeriCorps is a new $400 million partnership with the Centers for Disease Control. And what we’re trying to do is address both urgent public health needs that are taking place in communities across the country, but also hopefully supercharging the pipeline of folks from underserved communities that are staying in public health careers. And so we are doing a big call to action right now. Do you want to do public health work now? Do you want to get the training that you need in partnership with CDC and local partners?

Then do the work on the ground and then we’re putting you on a path to a job in public health. A couple of weeks ago, you announced that national partnership for student success in partnership with a department of education. This is a massive effort to try to respond to the big learning gaps, particularly from but not exclusively from the pandemic that we continue to put into action. That we continue to battle. What is the national partnership for student success? Thanks for asking about it. The national partnership for student success is a groundbreaking collaboration between AmeriCorps, the Department of Education and the Everyone Graduate Center at John Hopkins University. What we’re trying to do is over three years, we’re going to make sure that 250,000 Americans are supporting our educators and helping students succeed. It is exactly right. It’s responding to the fragile challenges that we saw coming out that were exposed by the pandemic, but certainly started before.

It’s not just about helping students either. It’s also about helping our educators. You know this number better than I do, but I think the last time I saw there are 600,000 fewer educators now than there were before the pandemic started. And what we hear from our educators, it’s not just about salary, which salary should go up and we should certainly pay our teachers more. But we also hear is they feel alone or they feel like they’re being asked to do too much. And so we know that there is a role for volunteers and AmeriCorps members to do things like tutoring and mentoring and success coaches and college coaches and post-secondary transition coaches. And so what we’re doing is we are calling on Americans and there is a role for everyone to do whatever they can do to get the back of our teachers to help our students thrive. And we’re saying there actually is a lot of money that is already out there because of the dollars that have come with the Recovery Act that school districts, for instance, can use.

Or this is a way that employers can call their employees to action to providing them with opportunities to volunteer. Or you might be a grandma who says, you know what, I retired a little early, but I’m not ready to just sit in the rocking chair just yet. There is something that I can do to make a difference in schools. And so we are doing that call to action and we are going to support those that are going to support our students and our teachers. Michael, it seems like a massive undertaking to recruit and train and place 250,000 caring adults. How are you scaling up to do that? Well, we’re doing the work through existing partnerships. One of the great things about AmeriCorps is we’re serving in 40,000 locations already. We’ve been around for 30 years and as I mentioned earlier, some of our predecessor agencies have been around for 50 years or 60 years.

So we have a network of nonprofit organizations that are already doing this work. And so we are calling on them. We are calling on partners of Department of Education. We are calling on corporate America and we are saying there’s existing infrastructure that already exists and we’re going to help to make this very easy for you. We’re going to provide a very clear pathway so you don’t just have to scratch your head and say, where do I start? We’re giving you the pathway to get involved at the local level, no matter who you are. Michael, you lead a big, complicated organization with impact in a lot of different areas of life. I appreciate that you have made a focus on impact. Something that’s really important early in your leadership tenure. Why focus on impact and what are you doing to get clear about making a difference and being able to communicate that?

Well, we all know that saying the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting different results. Simply put, our kids and communities deserve the very best. And so if we are going to invest a dollar, whether that is a federal dollar, a state or local dollar or a private sector dollar, we should know what we’re going to get done, what’s going to get accomplished. So we have prioritized at this agency to invest in evidence-based supports. And that doesn’t mean every single organization that we work with has to have, you know, Mathematica coming in and doing a five-year study and a randomized control trial. What it means is you have to be on the evidence pipeline. You have to have a theory of change or a logic model. You have to do some pre-testing or post-testing. And what I’m proud of at our agency is we actually invest in organizations to help build up their evidence. And actually last year, more than 70% of our grants at AmeriCorps had strong or moderate levels of evidence.

So the challenge is too big. The urgency is too great to do anything other than making sure we are investing in what works. We appreciate that you’ve been able to serve at scale, not just in AmeriCorps, but in a number of great organizations, including My Brother’s Keeper. How did a kid from the Boys and Girls Club, when and how did service register with you as something important? And then when did you begin to see yourself in a leadership role in service? You know, I was just recently in my hometown of Springfield, Massachusetts, and I was visiting the Boys and Girls Club where I grew up. And one of my good friends, my peers, is now the executive director of that Boys and Girls Club. And I was going through and looking at the walls.

A lot of the murals are exactly the same. A lot of the rooms are still the same. And I was reminded that early on, I wanted to be like those folks that were my mentors, that were my coaches, that had made such a difference in my life. I remember having early conversations with Carol Rossin, who was the executive director of the Boys and Girls Club, saying, how do I get your job? And I remember having my first opportunities to serve at a very young age. At the Boys and Girls Club, they don’t wait for you to turn 18 to serve. You are going and distributing meals to seniors. You are doing the food distribution. You are working in the homeless shelters. You are making care packages. And so I learned at a very early age that I had something to give and I learned that there was something about serving my community.

And so I didn’t know exactly what that looked like, but I knew that I wanted to build a career in that space. I lucked out. My then mayor became my congressman. And my mayor was involved very, very much so in our Boys and Girls Club. And I remember seeing him at a event when he became congressman. He said, you should come intern in my office. And I met with one of my mentors and she helped me write a letter to him. And I ended up when I was 16 years old going to work for Congressman Richie Neal, who’s now chair of Ways and Means. And that opened my eyes to the intersection of community service and policy. And I’ve just been really fortunate to build a career that’s about giving back and building capacity in communities like mine.

And that my story isn’t an accident, that we make sure that there are clear pathways to success for every young person, no matter who they are or where they come from. Michael, what’s your three minute case for why everyone should serve? Service is selfish. Maybe we won’t put that on a t-shirt, but we have learned so many different things. It is rewarding. It is rewarding to the people that serve. For instance, we found that folks that do AmeriCorps are 23% more likely to get a job than their peers. We found that 50% of AmeriCorps alumni found their next job through AmeriCorps. Our FEMA core program where the Federal Emergency Management Agency gets to deploy AmeriCorps members in response to disaster, they’ve hired 23% of our AmeriCorps members in the past 10 years, the most recent graduating class, 70% of them got jobs.

And so we find all sorts of benefits where this is a transformative experience. You are doing good work, you’re making a difference in your community, but I think you’re also changing your life and maybe potentially changing a life for you and your family. Michael, my last book is called Difference Making the Heart of Learning and I argue that schools should be about helping young people figure out who they are and what they’re good at and what they care about and finding and engaging in that first contribution of making a difference for a community. I think we found, Michael, that that active contribution, that active service is life changing. It is a fast path to building learner agency, that sense of self-knowledge and knowing how and where you can act on the world. And so we love your mission and would love to see more and more schools adopt that commitment to service and contribution. That’s right, Tom. One of the great things, the joy that I get traveling around the country meeting with AmeriCorps members is folks who find a spark. Actually, when we launched Public Health AmeriCorps, we were in Wisconsin.

And I met a doctor who was running the launch of the Public Health America program in Milwaukee. Ten years ago, he came to that public health clinic as an AmeriCorps member because he wasn’t quite sure if he actually wanted to do medicine. And he said, let me experiment, let me try. Fast forward, ten years later, he’s a doctor running the biggest expansion of AmeriCorps and public health that we’ve seen throughout the history of this organization. The flip side, I’ve also met AmeriCorps members who served in school for a year and said, you know what, I don’t really like kids. And I’m glad we gave them that experiment, that experience to test things out, to try something, to see what they’re good at, what they’re not, and then figure out a different way to serve their community and their country. So your message is to be of service, whether young or old, and you can help. Teeth that up, right? That’s right. Dr. King said anybody can be great because anybody can serve. And so we are looking forward, it doesn’t matter if you want to give one or two hours a week, or if you want to become an AmeriCorps member and give 1,700 hours a year, your community needs you.

Our kids need you. We, you know, when I think about my previous work, we used to talk about this idea that talent is distributed evenly, but opportunity is not. This role of people serving communities can begin to create that more equal opportunity for everyone. Yes, again, Michael, where can people learn more if they want to be of service? You can learn more at AmeriCorps.gov. You can use our fit finder if you want to become an AmeriCorps member and see what works for you. You can find one off volunteer projects. You can find out more about the National Partnership for Student Success. If you’re an educator, an individual, or a school district, and I would also say for school districts, we have a great guide at AmeriCorps.gov for superintendents and principals on all of the different ways that AmeriCorps could be useful to you. So AmeriCorps.gov, learn what you can do to provide service in this country.

We’ve been talking to Michael Smith. He’s the CEO of AmeriCorps, an extraordinary organization, the nation’s commitment to service. Michael, we love your heart for service and your commitment to leadership. Thanks so much for everything you’ve done in your career and for taking on this exciting role at AmeriCorps. It’s an important part to making America even better, right? Well, Tom, thank you for your lifetime of service and thank you for lifting up the way that AmeriCorps is getting things done for America. Thanks for being here this week. Thanks to Mason Pasha, our producer, and to the whole Getting Smart team for making this podcast possible. And until next week, keep learning, keep leading, and keep innovating for equity.

Thank you for listening to the Getting Smart podcast. The new Pathways campaign serves as a catalyst for an unbundling education to allow for new learning models that are sustained by support and guidance in embedded and scalable systems. The new Pathways campaign will showcase how learners can shine as difference makers and learning curators when opportunities are intentional, equitable, and personalized. Find out more about new pathways at GettingSmart.com backslash new pathways. Thanks to ASA, the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, Stand Together, and the Walton Foundation for their support in this campaign.