P/PV Program Areas | In-School Initiatives | Publications

Other Publications

A Spectrum of Service: Combining Paid Service and Volunteerism: Strategies for Effective Practice in School Settings

Extended-Service Schools: Putting Programming in Place

Growing Bigger Better: Lessons from Experience Corps' Expansion in Five Cities Executive Summary

High School Students as Mentors: Findings from the Big Brothers Big Sisters School-Based Mentoring Impact Study

Making a Difference in Schools: The Big Brothers Big Sisters School-Based Mentoring Impact Study

Making a Difference in Schools: The Big Brothers Big Sisters School-Based Mentoring Impact Study
Executive Summary

Paving the Way for Success in High School and Beyond: The Importance of Preparing Middle School Students for the Transition to Ninth Grade

Rewards of Giving: An In-Depth Study of Older Adults' Volunteer Experiences in Urban Elementary Schools

School-Based Mentoring: A Closer Look

School-Based Mentoring: A First Look Into Its Potential

The Case for School-Based Integration of Services: Changing the Ways Students, Families and Communities Engage with their Schools

Youth Development: Issues, Challenges and Directions

Growing Bigger Better: Lessons from Experience Corps' Expansion in Five Cities

by Lauren J. Kotloff with Linda Jucovy
June 2008, 55 pages

Going to scale often entails replicating a program in new locations, but it can also involve efforts to expand a program's reach in existing locations, enabling it to have a greater effect on communities already being served. This was the case with Experience Corps, a Civic Ventures program that enlists older adults as volunteers to help strengthen literacy and other skills of elementary school students in low-income neighborhoods. Beginning in 2001, with support from the Robert Wood Johnson Foundation and The Atlantic Philanthropies, Experience Corps embarked on a four-year initiative to expand in five cities. P/PV examined the five sites' efforts to increase the size of their volunteer pool and expand to additional schools, manage their larger and more complex programs, and raise sufficient funds to meet annual goals and sustain growth.

Growing Bigger Better considers how the sites' initial readiness to expand, the organizational resources they possessed and the receptivity of the external environment (i.e., the local school districts) shaped their progress. The report reflects on whether and how the local sites, and the program as a whole, benefited from the expansion effort, drawing out lessons that are relevant to other programs considering expansion. It concludes that while program expansion is a major undertaking, the Experience Corps expansion initiative clearly demonstrates how programs can become stronger, more energized and even more innovative through carefully planned and managed growth, and thus extend the benefits of their services to larger numbers of individuals and communities.

To read an accompanying executive summary, click here.

free download

Tags: Scaling and Replication, Action, In-School Initiatives, Research

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