Bridging Divides + National Service: Where We're Heading Next

I’m excited to share that Service Year Alliance 's Bridging Divides + National Service curriculum pilot has launched! Over the last year, we conducted a landscape scan of the service year field and engaged with bridging experts and service year practitioners through our advisory group and community of practice. We researched bridge-building trainings, curricula, and interventions. With our 19-member community of practice, we landed on our definition for bridging divides, named the key skills that corps members can and should develop during a service year, and developed our plans for a pilot and corps member skills assessments.?

Over the next two months, up to 300 corps members at programs across the country will learn about bridging divides through the Constructive Dialogue Institute ’s Perspectives online course and guided peer-to-peer discussions. Some will go a step further, engaging in specific applied practices through organizations such as Living Room Conversations , BridgeUSA , Braver Angels , and more.

It’s been thrilling to see the level of interest in bridging across our field. We have engaged over 100 program and state commission staff members through 1:1 meetings, our community of practice, and sessions at the 2023 AmeriCorps State and National Symposium - and hundreds more answered questions about bridging divides through our annual field survey. Just last month, over 80 service year programs expressed interest in assessing their corps members’ bridging skills, while others have asked us to keep them informed on the work as it moves forward. We’re looking forward to doing just that, including at the America's Service Commissions ' National Service Training in April.

In partnership with AmeriCorps , we're aiming to bring the right resources, perspectives, and practices to the table to inform the national service ecosystem. We believe that service years help to develop bridging behaviors, but the practices that best foster bridging mindsets within national service experiences aren’t well understood. We’re making progress to address that challenge.

We’re fortunate to learn from other partners leading complementary work - The Greater Good Science Center and California Volunteers, Office of the Governor , CoGenerate , Interfaith America , and have appreciated the conversations initiated by John Gomperts and David Eisner through their work on No Greater Mission, No Greater Means. By late Spring, we should have good learnings to contribute to the field. We’ll better understand how this intentional coursework in Perspectives helps to build bridging skills, and how corps member attitudes about engaging with others who are different are impacted by their engagement in applied practices. We’ll also have data on hundreds of AmeriCorps members who aren’t in our pilot so we can better understand how bridging skills are developed organically through service. And we’ll plan our next phase of this work with the goal of intentionally infusing bridging practices across service year programs.

Narratives from every direction tell us that we are in contentious and divided times, but service years - in AmeriCorps , YouthBuild Global , the Peace Corps , and more - unite people together. We are committed to working in partnership with the fields of national service and bridging divides to better support service year programs in developing corps members as life-long bridgers.

With special thanks to the courageous programs engaging in the pilot: Campus Compact , Center for Interfaith Cooperation , CivicWell , Communities In Schools of San Antonio , Repair the World , The Service Collaborative , Upstate Greenways & Trails Alliance , UServeUtah and the other amazing members of our Community of Practice and Advisory Group: City Year , Community Mediation Maryland, Habitat for Humanity International , Lead For America , Move for America , Pubic Health Works at the Trailhead Institute , SBP , SCI Social Capital Inc. , West Virginia Community Development Hub , United Way Association of South Carolina , Serve Virginia , America's Service Commissions , BridgeUSA , Civic Health Project , CoGenerate , Interfaith America , Dr. Allison Briscoe-Smith of The Greater Good Science Center , and Jennifer O. Leshnower , AmeriCorps Bridging and Democracy Fellow.