Description

Youth Service America is designing a new national AmeriCorps program focused on expanding opportunities for and reducing barriers to youth participation. We invite your organization to apply to host an AmeriCorps member(s) for the 2024-2025 academic year.

Successful applicants will create or expand opportunities for a team of youth leaders to engage their peers in service, civics, and leadership development programs. AmeriCorps members will engage, train, and support these youth leaders in identifying the barriers to youth participation in their community, creating and implementing program strategies to address those barriers, and organizing opportunities for and recruiting their peers to participate in community-building activities.

All proposed programs need to:

-Provide opportunities for youth to serve as leaders.
-Engage youth leaders in creating new opportunities for youth from low-income families and neighborhoods, young people of color, and youth who are often served but not usually asked to serve to participate.
-Integrate service, service-learning, civics, and/or leadership development into youth programming.
-Address one or more of the four barriers to youth community participation (detailed in Program Overview).
-Integrate youth voice and youth leadership within program decision-making and implementation.
-Engage youth in one or more National Days of Service (9/11 Day of Service, MLK Day of Service, Global Youth Service Day, or the Civic Season: Juneteenth – July 4th).

YSA will apply for an AmeriCorps National Direct grant in December 2023 and will include a list of proposed Host Sites. Final selection and placement of AmeriCorps members is contingent on funding being received. We expect to be notified of funding in April 2024, and will then finalize Host Sites in May 2024. AmeriCorps members would start in late summer 2024 and serve for the 24-25 academic year.