What Are We Doing?

The summer always seems to end before we are quite ready for it.

For many of us, the gap between one program’s exit and the next start date is closing rapidly. New members are applying. Staff are resetting. Training calendars are filling up. Somewhere, someone is revising a service site orientation deck that was supposed to be finished last week. 

As I was recording this, I realized it has been over two months since the last blog. As an advocate for sabbaticals and using your PTO, I know there are seasons when the work requires more output, and there are seasons that require enough quiet to understand what the output is actually saying.

This past year gave the national service field plenty of reasons to focus on survival. With funding uncertainty, shifts in language and expectations, and organizational instability, there was the very real challenge of keeping programs operating. And now, as we begin another year, I must ask myself and you, “What are we doing?!” “Who are we doing this for?” 

You’ve probably heard me exclaim that, “A compliant program is not necessarily one that is thriving.” A new program year gives us another opportunity to move beyond simply keeping the machine running. Programs have established and will continue to establish the habits, expectations, systems, and cultures that members will live within for the next several months. In other words, the formation and development process has already begun-whether we have designed for it or not. 

For me, it’s been a little over twenty years in and around national service, and more than a decade of intentionally building programs focused on leadership, resilience, civic engagement, and personal mastery. I see the throughline more clearly now than I did when I started. Back then, I thought I was trying to build national service differently. Though I still am, I think the deeper work has always been about the people inside it. 

In this series of emails or blogs, I want to spend some time exploring what national service produces beyond the service itself: What happens to the people who serve, what we are intentionally developing in them, what we have largely left to chance, and what becomes possible when we design the experience with the whole person in mind. 

Strangely enough, I have been reviewing a number of résumés during this hiring season, and I have to admit that I am extremely concerned. I am pulling from Idealist for an entry-level position, and it’s not that I think the applicants lack experience. In many cases, I am looking at candidates who have done significant work. They have served communities, worked across differences, learned new systems, and managed competing priorities, yet when all of that reaches the interview, much of it disappears.

An alum may have spent a year coordinating volunteers, communicating with community partners, tracking data points, facilitating programs, responding to changing needs. So why, when I review the résumé, does it reduce all of that to: “Assisted with program activities” or “Supported local volunteer drives?”

It is easy to conclude that we need to teach better résumé writing. Yes, but the more I have thought about it, the less convinced I am that the résumé is the real problem. The résumé may simply be the visible symptom of a problem that started much earlier.

If someone has spent a year doing consequential work and cannot explain what they learned, where they grew, what they became capable of doing, or what evidence demonstrates that growth, then perhaps we waited too long to help them make meaning of the experience. The problem began months before anyone opened a résumé template.

Seriously, what are we doing? What does national service actually produce?! For the most part, we know how to answer that question when we are talking about communities. We count the students tutored, families supported, volunteers mobilized, acres restored, meals distributed, etc., etc. Yet a service year that creates no meaningful value beyond completing the activities eventually risks becoming performative.

National service has always carried an obligation to demonstrate that public and philanthropic resources are doing what they were intended to do. Let’s remember that the person who serves is an essential part of the equation. Let’s also acknowledge that we have not always designed or measured that side of the experience with the same level of intention, beyond a CTI or a monthly training series. 

What happened to them? Who have they become as a result of our work? I do not mean only whether they completed their term, or earned an education award, or enjoyed the experience, or found employment afterward. I mean what actually changed in them because they served. How did their judgment develop? What did they learn about working with other people? What happened when circumstances became difficult? What did they discover about their strengths, and habits, and limitations, …their confidence, values, sense of responsibility...their ability to lead? What can they do now that they could not do before?

This is important for us as leaders and for members to know. The post-service job market has moved. NACE reports that 70% of employers now use skills-based hiring, while 7 in 10 of those employers use it at least half the time. The clearest sign of the shift may be what got displaced. How often are you seeing GPA on resumes nowadays? No one cares about the GPA if the person can’t actually do the job. 

Have you been skillfished? You may not be entitled to compensation, but you probably wish you had your time back. That’s part of the reason employers are moving toward demonstrated capability.

Skills verification is moving much closer to front and center. At the same time, alums and students may be unfamiliar with skills-based hiring, even as they are being evaluated by it and working hard to develop the skills it measures. Our corps members have exactly the kind of evidence this market increasingly asks for: real responsibility, real consequences, real communities with real names. Yet, too many have remarkably little language to describe what those experiences required of them because that language does not arrive automatically with a service year.

If a member spends ten or eleven months doing consequential work and cannot explain what they learned, where they grew, what they became capable of, or what evidence exists for any of it, then we waited too long to help them make meaning of the experience. The problem started months earlier, during onboarding, in supervision, and in the check-ins where we asked whether the assignment was done and then stopped. By the time someone opens a résumé template, we are working with whatever survived.

Every year, I get the calls in the final quarter of the service term for Life After AmeriCorps sessions like Bonds Before Business. “Can you come talk with our members about transition?” Of course! But when someone is three weeks from being sent an exit form, we are trying to reconstruct growth from memory, and memory has already thrown much of it away. The examples are gone. The reflections in the timesheets aren’t giving much. The hard week in February is flattened into “It was a good year.”

A better résumé is a downstream product of a better-designed experience.

This is the first of five pieces about what I have been thinking through this summer: what national service produces beyond the service itself, what happens to the people who serve, what we are intentionally building in them, what we have left to chance, and what becomes possible when we design the experience with the whole person in mind.

If I were to ask one of your members in week two, or even October, what this AmeriCorps experience is supposed to make them capable of, would they have an answer? Would you?

Shoot over a reply of what you would want to hear them say. Talk to you soon.

Be Well.

Be Blessed.

Be Brave.

Tray T.S. Deadwyler, CVM, CBC, CLC