ICP partnered with the Children & Youth Unit at the World Bank to convene an international experts meeting on measuring the impact of youth voluntary service programs. The meeting will was held on May 8-9 at the World Bank headquarters in Washington, DC. It brought together over 50 researchers, policymakers and practitioners from the field of youth civic engagement to examine existing evidence for the impact of voluntary service on participants, explore different evaluation methods, identify gaps in the research, and develop a research agenda to address these gaps.

A full report based on the proceedings of the meeting will be compiled and made available here.

For more information about this meeting, please contact ICP Program Associate, Charmagne Campbell-Patton at campbell-patton[at]icicp.org.

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Background

Youth voluntary service programs exist in dozens of countries around the world, and new programs and policy initiatives are currently being developed in many others, often with the help of international organizations like UNICEF, UNV/UNDP, and International Youth Foundation. This will result in many more young people being offered the opportunity to engage in youth service. Already, fully one quarter of young respondents to the World Values Survey in 2000 report some voluntary action with religious or secular organizations that promote social welfare, conservation, human rights, and many other goals. These programs attract a great deal of attention, and potentially enormous resources. In December 2007, U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama said that expanding opportunities for national service would be “a cause of (his) presidency”. In 2008, the Time magazine made the case for National Service in its cover story and a call was issued in the American Prospect for a national youth service program, to enroll one million young Americans by the year 2020, at a cost of more than $14 billion per year, in today’s dollars. We – the community of researchers, policymakers, and practitioners – have an obligation to make sure that we are doing the right thing in supporting these programs, and that we have the tools necessary for evaluating their impact.

Overview

The World Bank and ICP are organizing this meeting as an opportunity to bring together, researchers, policymakers and practitioners from the field of youth civic engagement and particularly youth service, to assess the existing research on the impact of youth service programs on young people, explore different evaluation methods, develop a draft evaluation framework, identify gaps in the research, and develop a research agenda to address these gaps. This meeting will initiate a conversation among an international group of researchers, practitioners and policymakers about the evidence base for youth service as a strategy for positive youth development.

 Objectives:

• Discuss methodological approaches for evaluating the impact of youth voluntary service

• Outline the main challenges in evaluating the impact of youth voluntary service programs

• Review the current research and available evidence on whether and how service contributes to youth development

• Identify the gaps in existing research on the impact of youth voluntary service programs

• Develop a draft framework for evaluating youth service programs, and

• Determine a plan to expand the evidence base in ways that are consistent with the highest standards in quantitative and qualitative research and also useful to policymakers and practitioners in promoting best practices in youth service; identify the roles of different actors in this process.

 Outputs:

• Draft framework for evaluating youth voluntary service programs, including discussion of appropriate methods, indicators and outcomes.
• Synthesized recommendations, action plan, and endorsed commitments for moving the youth voluntary service research agenda forward.
• Final meeting report summarizing presentations, discussions, and research agenda to be published and distributed through WB and ICP website and in print.
• Dedicated space on World Bank Children and Youth and ICP’s website will be used as a tool for building an international community of interest around the youth voluntary service program evaluation and for distributing knowledge
• Establishing a working group to carry on the work and keep the topic in the agenda of all the organizations that commit to working on it

 Outcomes:

            Short Term

• Shared understanding of the current evidence base
• Consensus about what evidence is lacking
• Development of a framework for evaluating youth service programs
• Creation of a roadmap for expanding the evidence base

Long Term

• Increased resources for research on the impact of youth service as a youth development strategy
• Rigorous evidence on whether and which programs are most successful