Building confidence. Improving lives. Strengthening communities. These are all intangible benefits often attributed to volunteering. At the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS), we engage millions of Americans in national service through AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, and the Volunteer Generation Fund. Our Office of Research & Evaluation (ORE) channels our passion for volunteering with a commitment to gathering evidence. By combining those two fields, we have developed the State of the Evidence Report which shares meaningful insights that not only reinforce those intangible benefits of volunteering, but reveal concrete benefits as well.

Everyone has their reason for serving in a CNCS program, and while it is often an expression of compassion and support for others, volunteers also benefit from service. Volunteers in general are 27 percent more likely to find a job after being out of work, and that number jumps to 51 percent for volunteers without a high school diploma. Looking specifically at AmeriCorps, a Tufts University resume-based experiment study found that 24 percent of resumes listing AmeriCorps service experience received a call back for an interview, compared to 17 percent of resumes without a service record; a statistically significant difference.  

These benefits extend well beyond young job seekers too; the Senior Corps program demonstrates measurable health and psycho-social benefits for older Americans. Forty-six percent of new Senior Corps volunteers report improvements in health and wellbeing after one year of involvement. Additionally, 63 percent of Senior Corps members who reported “often” feeling alone also reported decreased feelings of isolation after one year. 

At the community level, CNCS programs and their members create positive change with real numbers that reflect their contributions to society. The University of Texas at Austin found national service programs strengthen the overall health of communities. In fact, citizens express fewer negative sentiments in communities with AmeriCorps programming. Effective CNCS-funded organizations also increase the return on taxpayer investment. Reading Partners, an AmeriCorps grantee, reported $980 in cost savings per student for their tutoring program, a higher return when compared to schools operating similar programs on their own.
  
CNCS’s commitment to evidence and evaluation enables us to measure the success of our programs and measure the value of national service both quantitatively and qualitatively. It is our goal to share the benefits of evaluation (and volunteering!) with our wide network of peers and other organizations. We even encourage and assist organizations to get started with evaluation. Since 2015, CNCS has used program effectiveness evidence to make grants that train and employ workers, build infrastructure, educate children and improve health – and we will continue to foster research and evaluation elsewhere.

For now, we invite you to check out our State of the Evidence Report for data and insights from a year of CNCS program evaluation. We hope you enjoy!