Editors’ Note: Catherine Milton, the first executive director of the Commission on National and Community Service (which laid the foundation for AmeriCorps), recounts the creation of the agency, the subject of her new book, Creating AmeriCorps: Bipartisanship in Action (2023).

In 1991, I was sitting in my office at Stanford University, when I received a call from the White House asking me to help launch a new federal agency. At the time of the call, I was the founding director of Stanford’s new public service center, now called the Haas Center for Public Service. I had come to Stanford after working 12 years in Washington, DC on police and criminal justice reform. In those action-packed years I learned about federal agencies, the political in’s and outs of the legislative process, program evaluation, and implementing strategies for change. I became immersed in a variety of causes, including at the Police Foundation, undertaking a major study to prove whether women could do patrol work and creating a national coalition to open up policing to women; working with the Treasury Department and Surgeon General to propose new warning labels on alcoholic beverages for pregnant women; and in a politically divided Congress, developing and helped to get passed the first legislation for victims’ rights and compensation. I had left Washington to move to Stanford University with the desire to inspire a new generation about public service. Once at Stanford, I worked closely with Don Kennedy, the university president, and in the late 1980’s I became a leader in the emerging national service movement. That experience led to the call from the White House, asking if I would be willing to come immediately to Washington to serve as the Executive Director of the brand new federal agency, the Commission on National and Community Service. At Stanford I had learned how to start a program from scratch and my experience in Washington had taught me important lessons on how to create a new federal agency.

Creating AmeriCorps: Bipartisanship in Action is my account of how a uniquely structured “presidential commission” became the engine that transformed national service from a general idea into a new federal program. The bipartisan Commission on National and Community Service laid the foundation for the AmeriCorps program that has survived the political ups and downs of the past 30 years and enabled over 1.2 million Americans to serve their country. As my account documents, using a presidential commission with the ability to fund and carefully evaluate a concept before its implementation is an excellent way to encourage innovation and can be a model for “reinventing” government.

In Creating AmeriCorps, I describe how national service went from an idea to an experiment, to a piece of legislation, to a full-fledged federal program in a few short years. For years, there had been calls to make domestic national service a reality: a domestic Peace Corps that would engage millions of people in community service. The book tells the story of how that idea became a reality, starting with a political compromise between Republican President George H. W. Bush and Democratic Senator Edward Kennedy. Bush wanted funding for his Points of Light program and Kennedy sought a domestic Peace Corps-like program. (The Points of Light Foundation helps celebrate volunteerism and to place volunteers in service opportunities. AmeriCorps sponsors and funds organizations that provide long-term paid service opportunities.) Their compromise created the bipartisan Commission on National and Community Service (CNCS) with the mandate and funding to make grants and test the best ideas for national and community service.

The fact that the presidential commission had the capacity to fund projects was significant—and unusual. Most presidential commissions only have the authority to advise and recommend, not fund new ideas. Putting together a request for proposals (RFP) forced the Commission to seek public input, through hearings around the country and written submissions. Through this wide public outreach consensus emerged on how to structure the grants in a way that enabled the evaluation of different approaches. The legislation setting up the commission only allowed ten staff members to be hired by the Commission and did not require civil service rules or political appointments. Congress had appropriated the grant funds for a maximum of two years. This limit on staff size and tight timetable meant that the bipartisan CNCS commission members, many with relevant expertise, needed to play an active role to get the work done. These conditions created a start-up atmosphere, encouraged teamwork, innovation, experiments, hard work, and the opportunity to learn from mistakes.  

The book uses the creation of AmeriCorps as a case example of how impact evaluation supports the development of high-quality programs. A strong evaluation design focused on measurable results and outcomes greatly contributed to the survival of AmeriCorps through Republican and Democratic administrations since 1994. From day one, the Commission made sure that evaluation became a critical part of the work. Staff and Commission members understood that they needed to “prove” to Congress (and the public) that funds spent on service programs were worth it. The CNCS built evaluation guidelines into the grant applications and even trained grant reviewers to understand the importance of having clearly stated outcomes and ways of measuring the outcomes. CNCS hired respected third-party contractors to oversee the collection of evaluation data and hired another contractor with experience working with community organizations to teach local programs how to develop and collect data efficiently. The local programs were encouraged to monitor results from the data collected and use the data to continuously improve their programs. In the end, this ability to use data to learn what worked best and to tell the story of service became one of the reasons that national service survived three decades through a changing political environment.

We knew that program evaluation needed to be seen as politically neutral. The bipartisan commission agreed on the big goal of providing service in a cost-effective manner. In my book, I describe how they picked outcomes that were meant to be “nonpolitical,” such as measuring whether a program was improving the ability of children to read. In the early years, we also wanted to learn whether engaging in service was making participants more civic-minded and sensitive to issues in the way that the Peace Corps had argued it had done for its volunteers. But one of the lessons learned through the first two years of the Commission was the need to focus less on the benefits to service providers and more on the outcomes of the work they were doing.

In the weeks following the passage of the AmeriCorps legislation in 1994, I talked with key members of the appropriations and authorization committees of Congress to ask them what would influence them to continue funding. Was it the impact on those who provided the service? Or the impact on the community? Congressional staff and members were very clear that it was impact on the community. That guidance set the Commission’s staff in motion to focus resources and efforts on creating a grant process for AmeriCorps that would select those community groups that could clearly state their proposed outcomes and ways they intended to measure those outcomes. AmeriCorps also used funds to offer technical assistance to programs so that the work could include ongoing assessment, as opposed to something done at a program’s end, and so results could be used to continuously improve the programs.

Finally, the spirit of working across party lines led to some great innovations. Take, for instance, the creation of the National Civilian Community Corps (a precursor to AmeriCorps by one year) (NCCC). It started with an idea that Republican Senator Bob Dole had to create a Civilian Conservation Corps-like program to replicate the good experience his father had as a CCC member during the Great Depression. Dole had a similar positive experience as a GI in World War II where he came to know and respect people from very different backgrounds. Dole gathered a group of Senators from both parties, including Ted Kennedy, to think though options. As head of the Commission on National and Community Service, I was called to the meeting of the senators to help design a program that could be put into legislation. That afternoon, the senators and I discussed options and we agreed on a plan for a residential program for young people from diverse backgrounds, who would work together in teams when needed in times of disasters, and on an ongoing basis to help local nonprofit organizations with community projects. Later that day, I drafted the outline for the legislation and within a few months it was passed into law. Thirty-one years later, the NCCC, now part of AmeriCorps, is still performing national service at its best.

National service continues to evolve and innovate. Today, given the tightness of federal funds, some of the best innovations are coming from states. Governors and state legislators are supplementing AmeriCorps money with state funds to focus on issues important to them. For example, in California, the governor, concerned about the burden of student loans, developed the College Corps. This is a program that enables students attending state colleges and universities to work part time doing service programs in high priority areas such as food security, youth education, and public health. College Corps members learn valuable skills and get academic credit, while earning funds to pay for tuition for that year. Over 6,000 students have enrolled in California’s College Corps in the past two years. In addition, California and other states are addressing climate change by launching “climate corps” that focus on preventing environmental degradation as well as mitigating existing negative impacts on the environment.

Over the last thirty years, and continuing in the present, the services provided by AmeriCorps participants have helped to alleviate many of our nation’s most pressing problems. In the process, a multitude of AmeriCorps members have had their lives changed for the better as well. As I lay out in my book, these benefits are directly attributable to the creativity and energy of those involved in the original bipartisan Commission on National and Community Service and to the elected officials of both political parties who embraced the concept of national service and made it a reality.

-Catherine Milton

Catherine Milton was the founding director of Stanford University’s Haas Center for Public Service and went on to serve as Executive Director of the Commission on National and Community Service and then leader of the team that launched AmeriCorps 30 years ago. Before coming to Stanford, she spent 12 years focused on police and criminal justice reform in Washington, D.C., as a Senate staff member, crafting the first legislation to assist victims of crime and at the Police Foundation, writing or co-authoring three books, including Women in Policing that helped open the doors for women in police work.