Jason Catanese always knew he wanted to make a difference. He pictured himself becoming a lawyer, maybe even president one day – until he spent two years doing public service as a teacher and never looked back.
“It was something that I was excited to do, and was really finding my purpose,” he says. “This is something I wasn’t just going to do for two years, but it was going to be something that was going to be part of me for the rest of my life.”
Each year, thousands of people like Catanese, a Teach for America alumnus who became a middle school teacher in Arizona, enter public service programs throughout the country, often after graduating college or high school.
National public service requires a commitment of time and labor, with most organizations paying participants stipends of varying amounts and sometimes additional grants.
AmeriCorps, the federal agency established in 1993, may be the best-known national service and volunteer organization with programs in all 50 states.
It offers hands-on experience for an average term of 10 months to an estimated 60,000 participants annually in programs such as the NCCC, for young adults working on everything from energy conversation to disaster response, its VISTA program to help end poverty, and programs working with nonprofits in states.
A survey of AmeriCorps participants found 86% of those members said their public service furthered their professional goals.
“I like to think of national service as a kind of civic apprenticeship. By that I mean something that combines work-based learning and career development with that motivating social purpose that can be so important to success in life,” says Shirley Sagawa, a long-time national service program executive who now sits on the AmeriCorps board. She is also a member of the WorkingNation Advisory Board.
“These programs are tried and true. We really ought to be thinking harder about national service as a way to get people into fields where we actually need more workers. so many of the helping fields,” she adds. “Whether it’s health care, education, public safety, disaster response, or nonprofit work more generally, all of these could be targets if we invested more significantly in programs like AmeriCorps,” she adds.
California Service Corps: Larger Than the Peace Corps
In California, the state has added programs of its own to make up the California Service Corps, which it touts as the largest state service corps in the nation and larger than the Peace Corps. The state is currently recruiting 10,000 people for paid public service work including disaster response, teaching and community engagement.
While the Service Corps has several programs, the California College Corps, started in 2022, is touted as the first of its kind. It offers low-income college students $10,000 in tuition assistance in exchange for 450 hours of community service, amounting to roughly 15 hours a week. It’s seen as a way to create economic opportunity and address social challenges.
“We wanted to create a program that both, we think, will strengthen our democracy, will strengthen our society, and also help our students pay for school and launch careers,” says Josh Fryday, California’s chief service officer, who leads California Volunteers within the governor’s office. Fryday also is a candidate for lieutenant governor in 2026.
Demand for California College Corps is high, with 11,000 applications last year for 3,500 slots, Fryday says. He adds that the state works with more than 40 colleges and universities on the program.
California’s College Corps is funded through 2026 and Gov. Gavin Newsom is hoping to expand it. However, future funding is uncertain because there are calls for cuts in the state’s upcoming budget.
Service Can Develop Enduring Career Skills
As currently constructed, College Corps focuses on three areas, Fryday says: food insecurity, climate action and environmental work, and tutoring and mentoring students. Students have supervisors and mentors, and receive training in each of those fields to prepare them for the workforce.
“One of the things that we’re hearing from employers that is very encouraging,” he says, “is that our members are coming to them prepared with what we used to call soft skills but really now are the hard skills of our economy: … the ability to communicate, the ability to work in a team, the ability to be flexible and adaptable, the ability to work with people from different backgrounds and perspectives, (and) the ability to show up on time.”
Fryday sees a need for workers in jobs focusing on clean energy and sustainability, and also education because of a teacher shortage.
He cites cases of students who weren’t planning on a career in education now taking that route.
“When we expose students to different careers and give them the chance to actually dive in and learn and see what it’s like, it’s inspiring them to pursue that as a career, something that they’re passionate about, while also meeting a really important workforce need of our state,” he says.
College Corps Service Inspires Teaching Career Pathway
In one such case, Christian Contreras, 23, aspired to be a journalist. But when his passion for it waned, he focused on K-12 education as a College Corps member during his senior year of college. He currently is a graduate student pursuing a master’s degree in educational counseling, and working as a student success coach at Pasadena City College.
“I love it so far,” he says.
The College Corps alum worked at an afterschool program, an experience that helped develop a career path while also lessening his student debt.
“I felt like it did a lot for my professional growth, in terms of building up my resume, developing those networking skills,” he says. “(It) helped me a lot, especially as I was in my last year of college and about to enter the workforce.”
While teacher salaries vary by state, the national average is $69,597, according to the National Education Association, a labor union representing teachers. It says California teachers earn the highest average salary: $96,160.
New York and Minnesota Build Service Programs
New York is taking a page from California, having recently launched the Empire State Service Corps. It enables students attending state schools to apply for paid public service work – 300 hours of service during an academic year.
Smaller programs target specific workforce needs.
For instance, a pilot program in Minnesota addresses a shortage of personal care assistants (PCAs) to work with disabled people by paying college students and offering them hands-on experience.
Jesse Bethke Gomez, executive director at the Metropolitan Center for Independent Living, which runs the Minnesota program, says PCA agencies currently employ 28 students, and his organization is recruiting from more than 28 colleges and universities. The goal is to scale up the program to potentially become a national model.
Teach for America: ‘A Massive, Life-Changing Experience’
Addressing workforce shortages, as well as improving education in low-income area schools, also motivated the launch of Teach for America (TFA) 35 years ago.
The nonprofit organization counts 65,000 alumni since its start with nearly 60% staying in the education field. Its current cohort has 4,601 corps members who commit two years of service. Before entering the classroom, they receive summer training, and are provided class tools and coaching during the school year, says TFA’s outgoing CEO, Elisa Villaneuva Beard, who spoke to WorkingNation before her scheduled departure as CEO in mid-April.
Though originally founded to serve Gen X, TFA is adjusting to meet the needs of today’s generation, Villanueva Beard adds. During the Covid pandemic, for instance, it developed a tutoring program called Ignite that pays undergraduate students for tutoring. There is outsized demand for the program, and plans to expand from 3,200 to 10,000 learning groups in coming years, Villanueva Beard says.
Tutors, she adds, are getting hands-on experience and seeing positive results with their students.
“Not only are these young people able to accelerate learning that is just critical now, more than ever, especially in urban and rural America, and really deliver big for kids,” Villanueva Beard says, their work also is “building a pathway into the corps.”
Seven percent of last year’s teaching corps came from Ignite, a number projected to grow to 15% in coming years.
TFA is making other adjustments to better support its corps members, such as providing financial coaching and mental health support. Corps members, now can identify regions where they want to be placed instead of just being assigned, Villanueva Beard says.
She stresses the importance of a person’s first job through TFA on their career trajectory.
“It has such an impact on sort of the values that they begin to cultivate and shape,” she says. “It’s like a massive, life-changing experience for our corps members. At least, that is what we’ve seen over and over again.”
From Service to Full-Time Career
One alumnus’ story underscores that.
Jason Catanese, a 7th and 8th grade math teacher in Phoenix, notes, “I’m a 2011 Phoenix Teach for America corps member and I have been in the same classroom and same school since I started.”
He also has served on the Arizona State Board of Education and is executive director and founder of Camp Catanese, a nonprofit that prepares underserved students for college and careers.
When Catanese first arrived at Pueblo de Sol Elementary and Middle School, he says, it didn’t offer algebra or geometry – so he started a voluntary, two-hour, afterschool program teaching algebra.
He expected 20 kids to show up. Instead, there were 86.
“It just showed that when we give opportunities to our kids, they were going to rise to those opportunities, and they would take advantage of them,” he says. “Since then, our school has become the largest advanced math program for algebra and geometry in the city of Phoenix.”
He adds that the number of students going to college has dramatically jumped.
“I saw in my students resilience,” he says. “I saw in my students grit. I saw in my students love for their families and their community. I saw so many positives. And the one thing that was maybe lacking was opportunities. And that was something that we could provide as teachers. That was something that we could provide as a school and a community.”
Expanding Service Work to All
Having impact in communities big and small is the driving force behind the nonprofit Lead for America, which aims to open national service to everyone from high school graduates to retirees and have them do service work in the places they call home.
“Not only do we have sort of young people who can … stay with Mom and Dad while they’re doing national service, but we actually have moms and dads who are serving in our program, which is what we need if we’re really sort of leveraging local connection and building on a foundation of local trust and relationship,” says Taylor Stuckert, interim CEO of Lead for America and executive director of the organization’s flagship program, American Connection Corps.
The American Connection Corps is part of an AmeriCorps program that focuses on addressing digital divides. In some communities, Stuckert says, that can mean a focus on broadband infrastructure – but that is not always the case.
“Sometimes for communities, there’s broadband that’s available,” he says. “But it might be an issue of inadequate devices and hardware to connect to that broadband, or digital literacy training and helping citizens understand how they can make the most of it.”
He describes Lead for America’s service work falling into a few categories: community and economic development, agriculture and natural resources, health, and social capital.
To date, the organization that started in a dorm room in 2017 now counts 300 paid, full-time fellowships in more than 40 states. Members serve for one year.
Passion for Public Service Fuels Career Advancement
Christy Turner served her fellowship in Lead for America in Baltimore after graduating from college in 2022. She describes a passion for public service and thought law school would be her natural path. Instead, she focused on economic development and revitalization at an office of the Economic Development Agency for the state of Maryland that was just getting off the ground with a single employee.
“I had a very, very hands-on experience, and with that it allowed me to kind of see the ins and outs of state and city government very early on,” Turner says.
She now works full-time as a policy and research analyst at the West North Ave Development Authority, where she did her year of service.
A key part of her role was engaging with the public to help develop revitalization plans. She says one of the key skills she developed was public speaking.
She is slated to finish her master’s degree in public policy this spring and credits her national service work for her career path.
“The position that I have now, realistically, I would have thought that it would have taken me, maybe three, maybe even five years post-grad to get this position,” she says.
That kind of result underscores Lead for America’s impact as it taps people into service in communities where they live.
“It enables us to really take national service to where it’s needed most,” Stuckert says.
