City Year
City Year is a program for 17- to 24-year olds to do 10 months of full-time community service to their community and country. Corps members work in 17 cities across the United States and in Johannesburg, South Africa.
History
Begun in Boston by Harvard Law School students Michael Brown and Alan Khazei in 1988 with private funds, City Year sought to bring young people from the community together in a year of service to the city. Initially, corps members focused their efforts on community rehabilitation, beautification of neighborhoods, and building a sense of community throughout Boston. Over the years, the organization has opened sites, branches of the same City Year organization, in 17 cities throughout the U.S. In early 2005, the first international site was opened in South Africa. In fall of 2007, a Los Angeles site will be inaugurated.
Relationship to AmeriCorps
Although City Year was started with private funding and still maintains many of its efforts via gifts from organizations such as Bank of America, CSX, Comcast,Timberland,[1] Pepperidge Farm, and T-Mobile, the program also began sustaining its corps members via public funds during the George H.W. Bush administration. City Year also receives support from local and national nonprofits, such as the Case Foundation, which brought City Year to Washington, D.C., in 2000.
While he was still Governor of Arkansas, Bill Clinton visited the Boston site, and that experience partly inspired him in his first term as President to create the AmeriCorps national service program as a way to fund City Year and other similar organizations. All AmeriCorps members earn an education award while performing service, which can be used to fund education or training or to repay student loans. City Year is now a member of the AmeriCorps network, along with thousands of other non-profits. The money received via AmeriCorps allows City Year to support its 1,000 corps members annually.
References
- ^ James E. Austin, "Strategic Collaboration Between Nonprofits and Businesses" Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly 29 (2000), p. 73 "To illustrate the progression along the CC, we turn to the evolution of the 10-year-old alliance between City Year, a nonprofit dedicated to promoting community service through the mobilization of an urban youth corps, and Timberland, a manufacturer of boots and other apparel."