Written Testimony of CEO Wendy Spencer on the President’s Fiscal Year 2016 Budget Request
FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE: Apr 22, 2015
Below is the written testimony of CEO Wendy Spencer on the President’s fiscal year 2016 budget request for the Corporation for National and Community Service as submitted to the House of Representatives Subcommittee on Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies.
Chairman Cole, Ranking Member DeLauro, and Distinguished Members of the Subcommittee,
Thank you for the invitation to testify today. It is an honor to appear before you to present the Administration’s fiscal year 2016 budget request for the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS). I appreciate the opportunity to tell you about our work to improve lives, strengthen communities, expand economic opportunity, and engage millions of Americans in service to meet pressing national challenges.
We are grateful for the funding Congress provided in fiscal year 2015 to support our mission. And I am personally grateful to the Chairman and other members of the Subcommittee for meeting with me to discuss the work our national service and social innovation programs are doing in your districts and ways to expand those efforts.
I appear before you today with a great sense of pride and optimism about the contributions of our national service members and volunteers, their impact on national challenges, and our agency’s vital role in strengthening citizen service and community solutions across the country.
In 2014, we engaged approximately 270,000 Senior Corps participants, 75,000 AmeriCorps members, and millions of community volunteers in solving local problems. Our Social Innovation Fund leverages substantial non-federal support for the growth of evidence-based programs that improve the lives and build the economic independence of low-income individuals.
As CEO, I am privileged to work every day with a talented team at CNCS and alongside extraordinary, mission-driven leaders in our field as well as the passionate, committed individuals who serve in our programs. Here are a few I have met.
- Elizabeth Oliver joined AmeriCorps VISTA after learning about the plight of homeless veterans as a college student. At age 20, she moved to Salt Lake City to begin a year of service with The Road Home, Utah’s largest homeless shelter. Elizabeth worked with Mayor Becker’s office to identify and recruit new landlords who were willing to house veterans. As a result of her efforts, 97 homeless veterans gained housing. Her work was central to Salt Lake City becoming one of the first cities to end chronic veteran’s homelessness – an achievement that has inspired 355 other mayors to commit to ending veteran homelessness this year.
- On May 20, 2013, within hours after a devastating tornado struck Moore, Oklahoma, AmeriCorps and Senior Corps arrived on the scene. FEMA Corps, a branch of AmeriCorps NCCC, immediately deployed nearly 50 members to conduct damage assessments. Senior Corps RSVP volunteers answered disaster hotlines, served food at shelters, and assisted survivors. When I was there shortly after the tornadoes, I saw in action the 187 AmeriCorps and Senior Corps participants who, over the next two months, collected and distributed 475,000 pounds of donations, conducted 651 damage assessments, and mobilized 3,000 volunteers. Last month, after another tornado struck Moore, our members were back in action, supporting call centers, conducting intakes, and coordinating volunteers.
- Chrysalis, a Los Angeles nonprofit supported by our Social Innovation Fund grantee REDF, is dedicated to creating a pathway to self-sufficiency for homeless and low-income individuals. It operates an evidence-based, social enterprise program that provides transitional jobs to adults facing employment barriers. Chrysalis helps people like Eric gain skills to re-enter the job market. Eric spent 15 years living on Skid Row, going in and out of jail, struggling with substance abuse. In 2013, he knew he had to change. He tried for months to find a job, but with his background, no one would hire him. Then he came to Chrysalis and found transitional employment. Now Eric is off the streets, off drugs, and employed full-time. A recent evaluation found that one year after accepting a social enterprise job through organizations such as Chrysalis, workers like Eric had their average income monthly income grow by 91 percent while their income from government benefits dropped from 71 percent to 24 percent.
- Forty-four AmeriCorps members serve with Operation UNITE, a nonprofit started by Congressman Hal Rogers in 2003 to address the scourge of prescription drug abuse in his rural Kentucky district. AmeriCorps members provide math tutoring, teach drug prevention, and lead anti-drug clubs in 42 schools. Last year AmeriCorps members tutored 2,150 students, mentored 3,200 students, and mobilized 2,100 volunteers. Operation UNITE’s performance measures showed that the math test scores for the students tutored by AmeriCorps members increased by 34 percent and when I traveled with the Chairman to an elementary school in Staffordsville, we heard over and over from principals and teachers how indispensable AmeriCorps members were to helping at-risk students increase test scores, improve behavior, and get on track to graduate.
CNCS’S CORE PRINCIPLES
These stories happen every day and are made possible by the funding that Congress provides. These examples illustrate our focus on a set of smart, common sense principles:
- Empowering Citizens to Solve Problems: Our agency was created on a fundamental idea – that our nation is stronger when we harness the ingenuity and can-do spirit of our people. AmeriCorps members and Senior Corps volunteers are dedicated citizens who work hard in tough conditions. They make an intensive, sustained service commitment. Because of this, they can serve as the backbone for engaging community volunteers and helping nonprofits and local governments tackle their most pressing challenges. AmeriCorps and Senior Corps participants take on complex assignments, recruit and manage volunteers, assume leadership roles, and deliver powerful results.
- Expanding economic opportunity: By helping seniors live independently, or keeping students on track to graduate, or connecting returning veterans to jobs, CNCS’s programs increase economic independence and build family stability. National service is also a pathway to education and employment for those who serve. Since 1994, AmeriCorps members have earned $2.87 billion in education awards to reduce student loan debt or pay for college, further education or training. AmeriCorps members gain valuable skills including leadership, project management, and problem-solving that all employers look for. As part of their service, many AmeriCorps members also receive valuable certifications such as First Aid, CPR, teaching, disaster response, and firefighting. Employers recognize the valuable skills that participants build through national service: since it launched last fall, 200 employers, who together have more than one million employees, have become Employers of National Service. Employers that participate in this initiative commit to specifically recruit AmeriCorps alumni to develop a talent pipeline into their workforce. These employers, including Disney, Comcast and NBC Universal, CSX, and the States of Montana and Virginia, know that AmeriCorps alumni are dedicated, talented, and mission-driven, and they want more on their teams.
- Supporting Local Control and Community Solutions: National service recognizes that many of the best solutions come from outside Washington. Funding and decision-making is often pushed to the state and local level. Governors play a key role in deciding where national service resources go, with two-thirds of AmeriCorps funds currently overseen by Governor-appointed State Service Commissions. Local organizations selected for CNCS funding are responsible for recruiting, selecting, and supervising their participants. These participants serve at more than 60,000 locations – schools, food banks, homeless shelters, youth centers, and veteran’s facilities – helping organizations expand their impact through direct service, by mobilizing volunteers, and by strengthening the capacity of the organizations where they serve. National service bolsters — not displaces — the civic, neighborhood, and faith-based organizations that are essential to our communities.
- Leveraging Resources Though Public-Private Partnerships: Each year, CNCS programs generate more than $800 million in outside resources from businesses, foundations, and other sources. Businesses that provide matching support include leading companies like Google, Walmart, Target, Comcast, Bank of America, Cisco, Microsoft, and Home Depot – along with thousands of small businesses, community foundations, and local agencies that see national service as a smart, cost-effective investment. This local investment strengthens community impact and increases the return on taxpayer dollars.
2016 BUDGET PRIORITIES
The President’s 2016 Budget builds on these core principles and our decades of experience in engaging citizens in national service, social innovation, and volunteerism. The request of $1.18 billion will support CNCS and its thousands of state and local partners in meeting community needs with higher levels of impact, evidence, accountability, and efficiency. These investments are possible because the President’s Budget reverses sequestration, which means that there are resources available for national service and other important initiatives.
Within our budget, we have three key priorities: expanding service opportunities and community impact; funding what works using evidence and competition; and ensuring accountability and efficiency.
EXPANDING SERVICE OPPORTUNITIES AND COMMUNITY IMPACT
The first priority is to expand service opportunities and increase our impact on local and national challenges. The budget supports approximately 90,150 AmeriCorps members to address the priorities that Congress identified in the Serve America Act: disaster services, economic opportunity, education, environmental stewardship, healthy futures, and veterans and military families. Within this increase, the budget proposes three new initiatives that build on past success to meet emerging needs:
- Opportunity Youth: The budget would provide opportunities for 13,000 youth from underserved backgrounds to serve as AmeriCorps members during the summer. This will give more underserved youth the opportunity to meet community needs as they develop job skills, explore potential career paths, and earn a stipend and education award they can use for college. To maximize outcomes, the budget proposes legislative language to lower the AmeriCorps age limit to 14 for this initiative.
- Encore Initiative: The budget proposes 4,000 Encore positions to encourage more retired Americans to apply their lifetime of skills and experiences to solve community problems through AmeriCorps service. This will move toward the Serve America Act goal of having people over age 55 account for 10 percent of AmeriCorps members.
- Resilience Corps: Building on the success of the President’s Task Force on Expanding National Service, the budget funds a new partnership with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration to enlist roughly 200 AmeriCorps members to support local leaders as they plan for and address the impacts of extreme weather and climate effects in their communities.
The Budget also supports opportunities for 270,000 older Americans to serve in Senior Corps programs as Foster Grandparents, Senior Companions, and RSVP volunteers.
CNCS will continue to seek partnerships with corporate and philanthropic communities and federal agencies to expand AmeriCorps and Senior Corps service opportunities. Recent partnerships have committed up to $35 million in additional resources to address national and local priorities, creating approximately 4,500 new AmeriCorps service positions. This approach stretches limited federal dollars.
FUNDING WHAT WORKS USING EVIDENCE AND COMPETITION
Our second priority is maximizing the return on federal investments by increasing competition and using evidence in budget, management, and grantmaking decisions.
Using Evidence to Drive Impact: CNCS currently operates two competitive grant programs that explicitly incorporate demonstrated evidence of effectiveness into funding decisions. These programs – AmeriCorps State and National and the Social Innovation Fund (SIF) – account for the largest share of CNCS program funding. The 2016 budget will continue the focus of these programs on competitive grantmaking that prioritizes evidence-based models. All SIF programs must be able to demonstrate a preliminary level of effectiveness before they are funded and then take part in a rigorous evaluation to strengthen their evidence base. The budget continues to allow the use of up to 20 percent of SIF funds to support Pay for Success projects. Pay for Success models leverage philanthropic and private dollars to fund services up front, with government paying only after results occur.
Through this budget, we build the capacity of grantees to use evidence and evaluation to strengthen outcomes, support the dissemination of effective practices to the broader nonprofit sector, and strengthen performance reporting by our grantees. We will continue to support research and evaluation on agency programs such as the recent evaluation of the Minnesota Reading Corps, AmeriCorps’ largest tutoring program. This rigorous two-part evaluation, conducted by NORC at the University of Chicago, provided compelling evidence that students tutored by AmeriCorps members achieved significantly higher literacy levels than students without such tutors. For example, the average kindergarten student with an AmeriCorps tutor performed twice as well as students without one. The study also concluded that the impacts were statistically significant even among students at higher risk for academic failure and that the Reading Corps model was highly replicable.
Increasing Competition in Senior Corps: The budget advances the adoption of evidence-based models by introducing competition into the Foster Grandparent and Senior Companion Programs and enhancing competition in RSVP. Competition increases the impact of federal appropriations by awarding grants to the highest quality grantees. In turn, competition encourages innovation, increases efficiency, and produces greater outcomes for both service participants and service recipients. If enacted, CNCS will provide technical assistance to current grantees to prepare for this change, as we did during the successful introduction of competition into RSVP. The Budget also provides opportunities for Senior Corps grantees who adopt evidence-based models to grow through AmeriCorps.
ENSURING ACCOUNTABILITY AND INCREASING EFFICIENCY
Finally, and most importantly, an overarching priority across all of our work is ensuring accountability and increasing efficiency in our program and financial operations. The strong stewardship of federal funds is a top priority for me in everything that we do. I am committed to using taxpayer dollars transparently and efficiently in achieving CNCS’s mission. To do this, we have built a culture of accountability among our staff and grantees and put systems in place to manage risk, fortify internal controls, and strengthen oversight and monitoring. To that end, we created an Office of Accountability and Oversight which established an Integrity Framework to prevent waste, fraud, and abuse of funds. This framework reflects an enterprise-wide approach to ensuring checks and balances that will enable us to remain effective, efficient, and accountable managers of the taxpayer dollars entrusted to us.
We are also committed to increasing efficiency and stretching our dollars to better support our programs in the field. Among other steps, we are enhancing IT systems, streamlining operations, making grants processes more nimble and user-friendly, and developing tools to work faster and smarter.
CONCLUSION
Mr. Chairman, for more than two decades, the Corporation for National and Community Service has tapped our nation’s greatest resource—the American people—to get things done.
Our programs empower citizens to solve problems. They bolster the institutions of civil society. And they expand opportunity through hard work and personal responsibility.
The 2016 budget will continue this smart approach by engaging millions of Americans in meeting critical community needs with higher levels of impact, evidence, and accountability.
Thank you again for inviting me today. I am happy to respond to your questions.