"It's like a job. You have goals. You see results" -Yuriy, Experience Corps Member

• Getting Started
• Piloting the Idea
• The Experience Corps Model
• Beginnings of Expansion
• John Gardner´s Vision

Experience Corps had its beginnings in a 1988 concept paper by John Gardner, former Secretary of Health, Education, and Welfare and founder of Common Cause. Gardner's idea was to create a new institution that would mobilize the time, talent, and experience of older Americans to revitalize their communities. He called it Experience Corps and later would become advisory board chair for the program's pilot project.

Gardner's notion became reality some seven years later with the launch of an Experience Corps pilot project. Public/Private Ventures (P/PV), a nonprofit organization that develops innovative strategies to help disadvantaged children, served as the managing partner for this effort, working in close collaboration with the National Senior Service Corps of the Corporation for National Service (CNS) and researchers from Johns Hopkins University.

Interested in avenues for expanding the impact of the National Senior Service Corps, CNS became the lead funder of this initiative. The agency secured $1 million in federal funds earmarked for innovation through "demonstration projects," funds that seeded the Experience Corps pilot. The Retirement Research Foundation and the Pinkerton Foundation also provided funding to P/PV for technical assistance to and research on the new pilots.

After a planning and start-up phase that began in summer 1995, an 18-month pilot was conducted in 12 schools in Philadelphia; the South Bronx; Minneapolis; Portland, Oregon; and Port Arthur, Texas. The first Experience Corps volunteers–called members–began participating in early 1996. Each of the five pilot projects were sponsored by a lead agency in those cities, either a Foster Grandparent or RSVP program in every case. The projects agreed to place teams of 15 half-time Experience Corps members in some of the neediest inner-city elementary schools in their communities. In return, each project received $175,000 for the two-year period to plan, develop, and implement Experience Corps in their city.

The Experience Corps model–built on both research and accumulated knowledge from other service programs–focused on 10 key elements, which the pilot projects were asked to follow:

• A focus on elementary schools, particularly in the inner-city because of the academic and social needs of low-income children;
• Intensive service, with an expectation that older adults make a commitment to work at least 15 hours a week throughout the school year;
• Incentives in the form of a stipend (which ranged from $100 to $200 a month, depending on the city) for volunteers who served at least 15 hours a week;
• Diversity of participants, including volunteers at all income levels and a special focus on drawing more men to the program;
• A variety of meaningful service roles that ranged from tutoring and mentoring to getting more parents involved in the school;
• Leadership and initiative for those volunteers willing to take on more responsibility for running the program;
• Training to help volunteers both understand the strengths and needs of children and schools, and develop the skills needed to effectively fill their roles;
• Learning and growth, striving to strike a balance between what volunteers gave and what they got from their experience;
• Critical mass of older adult volunteers to highlight the impact a group could have within a specific school and, ultimately, in a particular neighborhood;
• The team concept, which brought together six to 10 volunteers meeting regularly at one site.

Once recruited, Experience Corps members spent the bulk of their day working one-on-one with children, with some of this time spent on academics and the rest of it developing close relationships with the students and supporting them emotionally. Volunteers also took leadership in developing before- and after-school programs for students focused on music, sports, dance, and academic enrichment, along with initiating other programs designed to strengthen the schools, such as parent breakfasts aimed at getting families more involved in their children's education.

Beginning in 1997-98, after the two-year pilot, the Corporation for National and Community Service provided additional funding for an expansion of Experience Corps (called the Seniors for Schools initiative). This new round of activity brought with it two key changes from the pilot phase. First, non-stipended opportunities were added for volunteers to serve on a less intensive basis than the 15-hour-a-week positions that were at the core of the program. As a result, an older person interested in becoming part of Experience Corps was provided greater choice in selecting a role within the program. Second, the program moved more significantly toward a focus on improving reading for low-income students in kindergarten through third grade. The Seniors for Schools program included the original five Experience Corps pilot projects and expanded to include projects in Boston; Cleveland; Kansas City, Missouri; and Leesburg, Florida.

Meanwhile, in January 1998 Public/Private Ventures helped spin off Civic Ventures as a new nonprofit organization to focus specifically on developing Experience Corps, and more broadly on creating new civic roles for Americans 50-plus in our society. Civic Ventures quickly raised funds to further expand Experience Corps, including two ongoing demonstration projects: One initiative adapted the in-school Experience Corps model to the non-school hours, working in YMCAs, Boys and Girls Clubs, and other community youth organizations. The second tested the use of seed grants to expand the elementary school model to new cities, including San Francisco; Washington, D.C.; Indianapolis; Phoenix; and Durham, North Carolina. Since 1999, two additional Experience Corps projects, focused on the in-school model, began operating in Baltimore (through Johns Hopkins Center for Aging and Health) and New York (through United Neighborhood Houses).

While the original elements of the Experience Corps model continue to guide the programs, several operational issues are worth further mention: volunteer training, site development, and stipends. Each Experience Corps project provides training for both initial and ongoing support of its volunteers. Training sessions include information on a range of issues, such as child development, literacy, conflict resolution, tutoring, parent outreach, and the policies and procedures that go along with working in schools. There also is an emphasis on team-building with other Experience Corps members and consistency for the students they serve.

For the projects that focus on in-school efforts, Experience Corps staff must be deliberate in their site selection, usually beginning with a few schools that have the greatest possibility for impact on both the children and the school. Staff members develop clear criteria and a selection process for potential school sites, and then explore the interest and commitment on the part of the school, including resources available at the site to help with running the program day-to-day. Projects running after-school Experience Corps sites also have developed a thorough site selection process. After selection, Experience Corps brings an already-developed structure to each site, working in partnership with the school or organization but maintaining responsibility for recruiting, training, and supervising the volunteers.

The incentives provided to Experience Corps members have often included a small stipend for those who work at least 15 hours a week. The stipend can amount to a quarter or more of a project's budget, but the incentive makes a difference for most Experience Corps members. Many of the volunteers are under 65 and not yet receiving Medicare or full Social Security. Their stipend pays for program-related expenses such as transportation to and from school, and also covers some of their own monthly expenses. Experience Corps is a former program of Civic Ventures. It became an independent nonprofit in 2009.

The last four years of our history have been characterized by intensive growth: nearly tripling in size in five of our largest cities, and adding five new places to the Experience Corps network during the 2006-2007 program year. In fall 2006, with funding from The Atlantic Philanthropies, Washington University in St. Louis began a rigorous evaluation of Experience Corps's outcomes for older adults and its impact on young children's reading achievement.