Reinventing Youth Corps for the 21st Century

A Forum — June 15, 2001

The New Deal established the first conservation corps in America to provide jobs for young people left unemployed by the Great Depression. Today, service and conservation corps in 34 states and the District of Columbia continue to employ young people, but they have become primarily stepping stones to postsecondary education and careers. In 1998 the National Association of Service and Conservation Corps (NASCC) launched a Corps-to-Career initiative to provide long-term service for youth after they finish the initial corps experience and to facilitate the transition to post-corps education and employment. Three years into the initiative, corps from across the country have overhauled the way they serve young people. The American Youth Policy Forum invited the president of NASCC and several local directors and corps members to come to Washington to speak with policymakers about the lessons they have learned from the Corps-to-Career process.

Kathleen Selz, President of NASCC, began the program with a brief history of her organization and a description of the national Corps-to-Careers initiative. Founded in 1985, NASCC supports local youth corps across the country so that they can better serve young people and their communities while restoring and protecting the environment. Corpsmembers are young adults ages 16-25, who work for a wage or stipend on conservation projects while enrolled in academic and career development classes. There are more than 23,000 corpsmembers in 110 corps across the country. The majority of corpsmembers work six to nine months at a corps site and then move on to enroll in school or take a full-time job elsewhere. With the advent of the Corps-to-Career initiative, corps began to offer eighteen months of follow-up support to their alumni. The follow-up includes individual case management, home visits, employer interviews, telephone contact, alumni events, and other structured post-program activities.

This long-term follow-up has allowed the corps to track alumni with a national database called "Track ‘em" that provides information on employment and academic achievement of program alumni. Benefiting in part from a growing economy as well as additional support from the corps, the percentage of corpsmembers at seven pilot sites going directly into employment or education increased from 44% to 54% (1998-2000). Over the same time period, the proportion of alumni earning at least $7 an hour rose from 51% to 73% and the proportion of alumni earning at least $13 an hour rose from 2.8% to 12.8%. These figures from the national database offer a general sense of Corps-to-Career’s influence, but Selz also brought local directors and corpsmembers to talk about how this initiative has affected them individually.

Lori Godorov, Development Director of the Work Group (New Jersey Youth Corps of Camden County) and David Archie an alumnus of the Work Group talked about the recent changes in the New Jersey youth corps inspired by Corps-to-Careers. The youth in Camden, New Jersey clearly need an alternative pathway to higher education and careers. According to Godorov, the high school dropout rate in Camden is an astonishing 76%. Of the young people enrolling in The Work Group corps program, almost one-third have been involved in the criminal justice system and a similar proportion never even made it to high school, having dropped out in junior high. Nearly half of the corpsmembers in Camden are parents. Yet despite the obstacles faced by this group, 80% of the young people who enroll in the program complete it and of the program graduates, 85-90% enter employment, education, or the military after they leave the corps. Before the Corps-to-Career initiative, Godorov says that they knew they were having an impact on the youth while they were in the program, but they were unsure what happened after they left. With funds from the Job Training Partnership Act (JTPA) they had begun to do follow-up, but in JTPA, follow-up simply meant a call for data collection. Corps-to-Career focused their attention not only on tracking their alumni, but also providing support services after they left the corps.

In New Jersey, corspmembers work at the corps site for up to nine months and then they enter the "second stage" of the program. The second stage begins with a phone call from staff on the first night after corpsmembers start school or a new job. This initial contact is followed by regularly scheduled check-ins for two years. There is also a thirty-day employer and employee evaluation for corpsmembers who have begun a job, and there are alumni activities such as workshops and time to hang out with old friends at the corps headquarters. While Godorov lauds the efforts of NASCC in guiding the Corps-to-Career initiative, she says that some of these activities have been difficult to fund. Even though the Workforce Investment Act includes support for twelve months of follow-up, Godorov says that WIA funds for this purpose are actually hard to come by.

David Archie, an alumnus of the Camden corps, testified about the importance of the Work Group’s follow-up services in helping him get a job and turn his life around after dropping out of high school. Archie was unhappy in his traditional Camden high school, so he simply left. After spending some time away from school, Archie learned of the Work Group through a friend and went to check it out. He joined in September of 1998 and was surprised to find that the staff treated corpsmembers "like their sons or daughters." At the Work Group, Archie had access to computers and "career gear," nice clothes and a briefcase suitable for interviewing. He spoke with pride about attending computer classes and landscaping the intersection where the highway enters Camden, so that people got a positive first impression when they visited his hometown. Unlike a traditional high school, the Work Group provided Archie and other corpsmembers with job placement assistance and support after he landed his current position as a health educator with the local chapter of Planned Parenthood. Explaining why he chose the youth outreach position, Archie said, "Seeing that people cared about me showed me that I could care about others."

The effect of the Corps-to-Careers initiative in Ohio was just as powerful as it was in New Jersey. Sally Prouty, Director of the Ohio Civilian Conservation Corps, remarked that Corps-to-Careers had three direct benefits for her program. It gave them a framework for evaluating the impact of the Ohio corps, fostered partnerships with other youth service agencies, and prepared them to apply for grants and awards, gaining them recognition from the National Youth Employment Coalition and the Department of Labor. The focus on results has inspired an additional emphasis on staff development, so that much of the Ohio corps staff is now attending local universities to become licensed to teach vocational education.

Bryon Skeel, a current corpsmember in Ohio, echoed the other speakers’ emphasis on the long-term support in the Corp-to-Career initiative and the youth corps more generally. Growing up with an abusive father, Skeel had never found encouragement at home. Homeless at 18 and selling drugs to support himself, Skeel finally wound up at the corps’ door in 1999 with what he admits was a bad attitude. Recognition for the work he did with the corps was the first positive reinforcement that Skeel had received from an adult authority figure in years. This feedback and the discipline of working for the corps inspired him to earn a GED after three months in the program. Since then, he has taken courses at the local community college and completed over 300 hours of voluntary community service. In the fall, with support from his friends at the corps and an Americorps education grant, Skeel will be attending college full-time.

Though it may be too early for a formal evaluation of the impact of NASCC’s Corps-to-Career initiative, preliminary data along with the stories of local people and programs provide some evidence that this long-term support and follow-up is making a difference.

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