No good deed goes unpunished: a mountain of studies now shows that AmeriCorps, the nation's biggest community service program, works. House Republicans want to zero out its budget.

• Author: Bass, Melissa
• Position: Serving Country and Community: Who Benefits from National Service? - The American Way to Change: How National Service and Volunteers Are Transforming America - Book review

Serving Country and Community: Who Benefits from National Service?

by Peter Frumkin and JoAnn Jastrzab

Harvard University Press, 320 pp.

The American Way to Change: How National Service and Volunteers Are Transforming America

by Shirley Sagawa

Jossey-Bass, 256 pp.

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In April 2009, President Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act, which put AmeriCorps, the domestic Peace Corps-like program created under President Bill Clinton, on a path to grow from 75,000 to 250,000 members per year. Almost half of Senate Republicans (twenty of forty-one) voted for the measure, as did seventy House Republicans. This show of bipartisan support was as rare as it was timely. By more than tripling the number of AmeriCorps slots, the new law would give young people frozen out of the job market by high unemployment rates a chance to serve their country and communities at precisely the time when social needs are at their greatest.

Yet less than two years later, in February 2011, the GOP-controlled House voted to eliminate funding for AmeriCorps entirely. Sixty of the Republicans who voted to end the program had, two years earlier, elected to triple its size.

Such voting behavior cannot be explained by anything regarding AmeriCorps itself. The program had not substantively changed between 2009 and 2011. Nevertheless, the House vote signals that AmeriCorps's supporters now have to put forth arguments defending the program's basic reason for being--arguments that, two years ago, they might reasonably have assumed they no longer needed to make.

Fortunately, those interested in understanding the accomplishments of AmeriCorps--either to make a case for its continuation or, if the money can be had, to plan sensibly for its expansion--can draw on two recent books, Peter Frumkin and JoAnn Jastrzab's Serving Country and Community: Who Benefits from National Service? and Shirley Sagawa's The American Way to Change: How National Service and Volunteers Are Transforming America. Each is an excellent contribution to the field, and together they complement one another well in terms of their authors' perspective, focus, methods, and scope.

Frumkin and Jastrzab come to their work as academic and professional researchers, respectively; Frumkin studies social entrepreneurship and philanthropy, and Jastrzab evaluates efforts to aid young adults' transition into work and careers. Shirley Sagawa, dubbed a "founding mother" of the national service movement, has worked on national service policy for three presidents. She also served as the first managing director of the Corporation for National and Community Service, the federal agency that houses AmeriCorps's three component programs. Those are the National Civilian Community Corps (NCCC), a small, residential service program with military-type elements whose members often aid in disaster relief; VISTA, a Great Society-era antipoverty-focused program; and AmeriCorps*State and National, by far the biggest of the three, which provides grants to nonprofit organizations like Habitat for Humanity so they can put AmeriCorps members to work. Some members serve full-time, others part-time. Many receive a small stipend for living expenses; all can earn an award to help pay for higher education.

Frumkin and Jastrzab's work focuses more on explaining what servers gain from their experience, while Sagawa's places greater emphasis on how service is helping to address the nation's challenges. Frumkin and Jastrzab's work is based on their extensive and outstanding new research: a...