City Year

City Year partners with schools to create learning environments where all students can build on their strengths and fully engage in their learning.

Ultimately, City Year seeks to significantly increase the number of students who are on track to graduate from high school in the communities we serve. Partnering with schools across the U.S., we seek to ensure that more students are reaching the 10th grade on track, making them three times more likely to graduate. By 2023, City Year’s goal is to ensure that 80% of students in our schools within 50-70 priority elementary to high school feeder patterns will reach 10th grade on time and on track to graduation.

As we learn about what contributes to student success through our partnership with teachers, schools and community organizations, we are dedicated to sharing what we are learning and contributing to broader system changes in education—both by helping to nurture future educators and working to identify and spread practices that support improvement across schools and districts.

City Year AmeriCorps members serve in schools full time as student success coaches, helping students cultivate social, emotional and academic skills, whether that’s mastering fractions or learning to work in teams—skills that are important in school and in life. AmeriCorps members tutor students one-on-one or in small groups, help students stay focused in class, organize school-wide events, and run afterschool programs. Through their work in schools and communities, City Year AmeriCorps members not only make a difference in the lives of students they serve, but also acquire valuable skills that prepare them to become the next generation of civically engaged leaders.

In the next five years, City Year seeks to leverage the full potential of the relationships cultivated between City Year AmeriCorps members and students by focusing on completing elementary to high school “feeder patterns” in each of our cities. This focus will enable us to serve students through key adolescent transition years and provide integrated and holistic supports designed to help students build upon their strengths, cultivate skills critical to success and graduate from high school, prepared to thrive and contribute to their communities.

By demonstrating the value proposition of multiple years of support for students in each of our cities, City Year will be positioned to spread proven practices across more schools in the cities where we serve and fuel a broader systemic change towards a more equitable educational experience for all students.

Furthermore, through the development of our students and our alumni, City Year will unlock a national movement of young people with the skills and mindsets needed to work across differences and drive positive change in their communities in transformative ways.

Trained, diverse, full-time near-peer AmeriCorps members: City Year AmeriCorps members are inspiring young adults, ages 18–25, who share a commitment to a cause greater than themselves. While our corps members come from all walks of life, they bring to their service experience similar characteristics: they are deeply empathetic, they are strong at building relationships, and they bring a “growth mindset”—the belief that abilities can be developed through dedication and hard work. In addition, their near-peer status—mature enough to offer guidance; young enough to relate to students’ perspectives—uniquely position AmeriCorps members to form positive connections with students. AmeriCorps members receive training and professional development throughout their service year to help support their work with students and to help further their own personal and career goals. Through their intensive work in schools and communities, City Year's diverse AmeriCorps members acquire valuable experiences and skills that prepare them to lead and contribute in a variety of professions after their year or two of national service.

City Year alumni: City Year’s remarkable AmeriCorps members and alumni are making a powerful difference in the lives of students. Now a network of 32,000 strong, City Year alumni are increasingly taking on leadership roles in schools and communities, making significant contributions as leaders who can mobilize diverse groups to tackle complex challenges across a range of professional fields. These professions include education, business, law, health, corporate social responsibility, government and public policy.

Continuous learning and innovation: To accelerate City Year's learning loop, continuously innovate and share what we are learning through our network of 350 schools, City Year launched its School Design Division in 2014 in collaboration with Johns Hopkins University's Center for the Social Organization of Schools.

Return on investment: In 2017, Deloitte Consulting LLP was engaged to aggregate and synthesize various industry and internal analyses to help City Year estimate and articulate ROI. The analysis suggests that in one year:
- The impact of a City Year team could generate savings that recoup up to 97% of the cost that a school pays for City Year
- City Year is 78% more cost effective than our peers, when compared to what it would cost the school to contract with other partners for the range of services that City Year provides
- Schools with City Year gained one month of additional learning, when compared to similar schools without City Year

In 2019-2020, 3,000 AmeriCorps members are serving 226,000 students in 350 schools in 29 cities across the country.

More than 32,000 City Year alumni are making significant contributions as civically-engaged leaders in a variety of professions.

City Year's plan is to continue to drive impact by strategically deploying AmeriCorps members to reach our long-term impact goal: to dramatically increase the number of students who arrive on track and on time to the 10th grade to 80 percent in the schools we serve, reaching 50 percent of the off-track students in communities we serve, and serving in cities that account for two-thirds of students living in urban centers who do not graduate from high school.