City Year

Way back when I was first commissioned to do this feasibility study I met briefly with the organisers of City Year, another year-long service programme brought over from America. In short, participants spend a year working in inner-city London schools as tutors, mentors, role-models and leaders. At the time, they were just finishing a six-month trial, with just a handful of volunteers, but now they are up and running on a three-year pilot, with over 50 volunteers in six schools, in Hackney, Tower Hamlets and Islington. I met this week with Helena Price, Development Manager of the programme.

A number of things interest me with relation to Avodah:

• City Year provide their participants with a full month of training before starting in the schools and clearly impart a very distinctive way of working. They enter with a strong sense of what it means to be a City Year volunteer, reinforced throughout by everything from the uniform they wear to the book they're given outlining their techniques and games to the physical training exercises imported from the American parent organisation.

• Given the direct and distinctive work City Year volunteers carry out, City Year were able to use evidence of impact on US schools in order to recruit host schools in the UK. This is something I hadn't thought about before with Avodah. We should be gathering and utilising whatever evaluative evidence exists on the work of AVODAH: The Jewish Service Corps.

• Schools pay £8000 per year for a City Year volunteer. This is about what we would want from our placement organisations. The schools not only pay it - there is competition for participants.

• The programme is running initially on a three-year pilot i.e. fundraising, aims etc. have all been within this framework. This seems to me to make sense: it makes the project realistic, containable and focused, providing something to build on from here.

• While 'City Year' does not refer directly to the corporate world there have been food links to business. Corporations can sponsor a team (i.e. a group of participants working together in a single primary school), not only providing money but linking staff with that team's community projects, working alongside them on various pre-arranged days. The relationship needs to be handled carefully but this could be an excellent way of getting corporate involvement in Avodah.

• There is a formal relationship between City Year in the UK and the organisation in the US, ensuring the brand and reliability of service. We have not yet worked out what our relationship will be with AVODAH USA but I imagine it will be less formal than that.

Clearly City Year is a much bigger organisation than Avodah will be. They draw on a much larger pool of participants and have the backing of a very high profile American scheme and their brand. I do see them though as part of the 'service-year zeitgeist' in the UK at the moment, one that bodes well for our prospects.