Chapter One: Overview of the Summer of Service Program

• take part in a national evaluation of the summer initiative.

For their efforts, the youth serving as participants received federal minimum wage stipends (of $170 per week) and a $1,000 post-service benefit upon satisfactory completion of the program. Under the program guidelines, the non-participant volunteers were permitted to participate in all or part of the service activities, but unlike program participants, were not eligible to receive stipends and post-service benefits under the Summer of Service funding.

The overall Summer of Service initiative was nine and a half weeks in duration. A national service and leadership training conference for staff and participants was held in June, followed by eight weeks of service activities at the local level. The program culminated in August in a closing summit conference with the President.

As part of its evaluation of the Summer of Service Program, the Commission on National and Community Service (CNCS) contracted with Abt Associates Inc. to analyze the characteristics and activities of participants and programs across the sixteen funded Summer of Service program sites. This document is Abt Associates' final report on the Summer of Service, and contains our analysis of the data collected from the sixteen sites.

Chapter 2 provides

Chapter 3 examines

The remainder of this report is divided into four chapters. information on the accomplishments of the Summer of Service grantees. demographic data on the Summer of Service participants, plus information on their reasons for joining the program. Chapter 4 reports on the participants' assessment of their Summer of Service experience. And Chapter 5 summarizes some lessons that may be learned from the summer initiative. A series of appendices at the end of the report provides additional information on the evolution of the Summer of Service program, the data collection approach used by Abt Associates for this study, and the characteristics of the sixteen program sites.

CHAPTER TWO

ACTIVITIES AND ACCOMPLISHMENTS
OF THE SUMMER OF SERVICE

This chapter examines the accomplishments and characteristics of the 16 Summer of Service program sites in the aggregate. The chapter presents data on beneficiaries served, service area focus, activities performed, use of volunteers, and the nature of program partners and other assisting organizations. As a supplement to this information, Appendix B at the end of the report provides brief profiles of each Summer of Service program, highlighting the key individual achievements of each.

Beneficiaries of the Summer of Service

The data collected from Summer of Service grantees reveal:

As shown in Exhibit 2.1, in total, more than 154,500 people benefitted from the direct services of the 16 programs. This means that each Summer of Service participant provided services to an average of more than 105 beneficiaries over the course of the summer.

The majority of the beneficiaries were children (more than 70 percent), although the services were also directed at their families, senior citizens, the homeless, and persons with disabilities.

The services that were provided to these beneficiaries represent a diverse range of activities, including intensive educational programs to increase academic skills, screening for lead paint poisoning and other health problems, restoration of parks, playgrounds, and other community facilities, and construction of housing for low-income families.

In addition to these direct services, some of the Summer of Service program sites also provided information about community issues or the availability of resources through public service announcements in the media or by providing materials to organizations to share with their clients. Although the "service" represented by these informational campaigns may have been somewhat less substantial than the more intensive service activities cited above, these outreach activities reached a much larger population. When reported estimates of the number of additional persons reached through these media/outreach efforts are added to the

1 To develop the unduplicated counts of beneficiaries shown in this table, where appropriate adjustments were made in the figures reported in the Activity and Accomplishments Reports after discussion with the individual program sites.

2 The figures in this column represent an estimate of the total unduplicated count of beneficiaries of direct services reported by each Summer of Service grantee. Not included in these figures are the estimates for persons that received "informational services" through a grantee media campaign or indirect dissemination of information through other organizations.

3 The figures in these columns represent estimates of the unduplicated count of beneficiaries within each Service Area component of the local Summer of Service programs. Because the same beneficiary may have received services in more than one Service Area, the figures in these columns may not sum to the total unduplicated count of beneficiaries.