A Spectrum of Service: Combining Paid Service and Volunteerism: Strategies for Effective Practice in School Settings

This is the second report in a series from P/PV's Spectrum of Service (SOS) project. P/PV has created a learning community by giving two-year grants to seven sites, supporting the expansion of efforts to combine the work of paid and unpaid service providers in enhancing youth's educational outcomes. Sites gather in a series of cross-site conferences to provide peer support and to exchange information and program data. This report shares the experiences of these sites as they endeavor to develop partnerships with, and work within, public schools to support young people's educational achievement, and describes the strategies that the SOS sites have used not only to combine the work of volunteers and paid service providers, but to do so in a public school setting

A Spectrum of Service: Combining Volunteerism and Paid Service: A Look at Roles and Relationships

Drawing on information generated through P/PV's Spectrum of Service (SOS) initiative, this report examines a variety of operational issues related to effective blending of paid service providers and volunteers, and how managers determine the roles that paid and unpaid providers play in order to achieve programmatic objectives. The promising practices described in this report illustrates the innovation strategies currently underway in the volunteer and service sectors, and provides a useful starting point for others who are interested in enhancing the effectiveness of a blended approach to service delivery

Making the Most of Volunteers

No one doubts the potential value of volunteers; the tougher issue is getting the most out of them. Unfortunately, volunteers are both scarce and much-needed in the human service field. This report summarizes P/PV's work over the years with organizations that use volunteers. The analysis discovered that three functions -- screening, training and ongoing management -- are key to maximizing volunteer value and minimizing damage. The report also links those functions quantitatively to the impact that programs achieved, and estimates their cost

Expanding Resources for Service: Strategies from State Commissions

In response to the passage of the National and Community Service Trust Act in 1993, state-level Commissions were created to direct federal funds to local service programs, monitor program progress and quality, and to determine the content and direction of service activity across their states. This report builds on a 30-month study of the implementation of AmeriCorps, the signature component of the 1993 Act, and describes what states and their Commissions are doing to realize the promise that service holds, while fulfilling their legislated mandate

Making the Most of Volunteers

Grossman and Furano discuss the elements that experience has shown need to be in place to allow volunteers to be most effective. Drawing from research on mentoring and youth service over the past twenty years, they explore effective volunteer practices, illustrating them with evaluation data and practical examples

After-School Toolkit: Tips, Techniques and Templates for Improving Program Quality

This toolkit offers program managers a practical, hands-on guide for implementing quality programming in the after-school hours. The kit includes the tools and techniques that increased the quality of literacy programming and helped improve student reading gains in the Communities Organizing Resources to Advance Learning (CORAL) initiative of The James Irvine Foundation. CORAL is an eight-year, $58 million after-school initiative aimed at improving education achievement in low-performing schools in five California cities. In addition to strategies, process and instructions, this toolkit offers a series of tools program staff can use to build the quality of their after-school program

A Spectrum of Service: Uniting the Efforts of Volunteers and Paid Service Providers: Current Practices from the Field

This report is the first in a series that examines approaches to uniting the efforts of paid national service participants and unpaid volunteers. It draws on the experiences of 14 national service programs that were represented at the Combining Service and Volunteerism Conference in Philadelphia in February 1998. This conference was the first major activity in P/PV's Spectrum of Service (SOS) project, a national initiative funded by The Ford Foundation to explore the ways in which programs can unite the work of paid and unpaid service providers in strengthening educational supports for children and youth. The report describes the origins of relatively new programs that systematically combine the work of paid and unpaid service providers, the challenges and strategies they have developed, and the six good practices that have begun to emerge from these early efforts

The Essential Connection: Using Evaluation to Identify Programs Worth Replicating

This publication describes how to use practical evaluation methods to identify social programs that are both effective and capable of being successfully transferred to new settings. It also provides guidance in making sound decisions about the suitability of investing time and money in program expansion