Program areas at Massachusetts Service Alliance
The americorps program provides funding for nonprofits and public agencies to develop and support americorps members. Full and part-time members spend one year performing intensive Service to meet critical needs in community and economic development, education, disaster recovery and relief, environment, public safety, health and nutrition, human needs, and housing. In the 2019-2020 program year, msa supported 23 americorps programs and 4 americorps planning grants. Over 1,200 americorps members served, investing over 960,000 hours of Service and engaging over 10,500 additional volunteers.
With the support of the volunteer generation fund grant, msa increased the ability of nonprofit organizations in Massachusetts to utilize volunteers effectively, thus increasing their capacity to serve clients. Msa assisted nonprofits in building their infrastructure through (1) deep and intensive capacity building with at least 15 organizations through the delivery of the Service enterprise initiative; (2) focused skills-based training on best practices in volunteer management; (3) mini-grants to 36 organizations to support volunteer engagement activities for national days of Service and capacity-building grants to organizations that engage volunteers to support youth programming. Overall through these grants, organizations engaged almost 10,000 volunteers.
In 2019-2020, msa had 34 commonwealth corps members serving at 15 host site partners across the state, providing a total of 38,148 hours of Service to strengthen communities, build organizational capacity, increase volunteerism, and positively impact Massachusetts residents. Through their capacity building efforts, commonwealth corps members recruited or managed over 613 community volunteers to contribute over 17,727 hours of Service, leveraged over $396,255 of cash or in-kind support, and supported approximately 2,133 new beneficiaries in receiving services. Their Service has impacted over 5,963 unique individuals.