WASHINGTON D.C. – An unprecedented volunteer response to Hurricane Katrina, the launch of new strategic goals to advance service in America, and management achievements including a seventh consecutive clean audit were the highlights of the fiscal year 2006 Performance and Accountability Report released by the Corporation for National and Community Service today.

The report, available on the agency’s http://www.nationalservice.gov/about/role_impact/performance.asp website, recounts how more than 2 million participants serving directly through the Corporation’s AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, and Learn and Serve America programs provided more than 216 million hours of service and achieved demonstrable results in meeting a wide range of other critical community needs in education, disaster relief and preparedness, youth mentoring, elder care, and other human needs.

In addition to their direct service, these participants recruited, trained, and managed an additional 1.8 million community volunteers, which helped to multiply the effect of Corporation programs and to foster a culture of service nationwide. More than 115,000 of those volunteers worked side-by-side with national service participants in the Gulf Coast helping communities recover from the devastating 2005 hurricanes.

“Americans should be mightily proud of the millions of their fellow citizens who pitched in to solve some of the toughest problems facing our communities and our nation,” said Corporation CEO David Eisner. “This past year offered defining challenges for national service, and the citizens in our programs met and exceeded every expectation. The essential value and relevance of national service in improving lives, strengthening communities, and fostering a culture of service in America becomes more self-evident every day.”

The report describes the unprecedented mobilization of national service resources in response to Hurricanes Katrina and Rita. Working in cooperation with state service commissions, FEMA, the Red Cross, and other national, state, and faith-based and community disaster relief organizations, more than 35,000national service participants contributed more than 1.6 million hours to the relief and recovery effort in fiscal year 2006, doing everything from mass care and shelter operations to debris removal and home construction.

Among other accomplishments for fiscal year 2006, the report showed that national service participants:

• Assisted more than 108,000 seniors and their families in their efforts to live independently.
• Provided mentoring and other support to nearly 16,000 children of prisoners.
• Provided opportunities for more than 435,000 children and youth from disadvantaged circumstances to volunteer.

In addition to noting key accomplishments by Corporation programs, the 2006 performance report highlights the initial progress made toward a series of national goals set out in the Corporation’s new five-year Strategic Plan. The plan identifies four key strategic initiatives—Mobilizing More Volunteers, Ensuring a Brighter Future for All of America’s Youth, Engaging Students in Communities, and Harnessing Baby Boomers’ Experience—that present significant challenges and opportunities for the agency and the nation in the years ahead.

In 2006 the Corporation took a number of steps to advance the Strategic Plan, including the launch of the “Get Involved” baby boomer volunteer recruitment campaign at the White House Conference on Aging, establishing a Federal Mentoring Council and National Mentoring Working Group to bring together leaders in the mentoring field; releasing a number of research reports analyzing the trends and demographics of America’s volunteers; and launching the “10 by 10” campaign at the National Conference on Volunteering and Service to help recruit 10 million volunteers by the year 2010.

On the financial management side, the report notes that the Corporation in fiscal 2006 earned its seventh consecutive unqualified—or “clean”—audit on its financial statements. The agency also received its fourth consecutive unqualified opinion on the National Service Trust, the fund that pays the AmeriCorps Education Award members receive after their service.

For the first time, the Corporation eliminated a reportable condition over the monitoring of grantee activities. This result was achieved after an intensive, two-year effort in which the Corporation put in place a unified grant risk assessment plan, held program and grant staff accountable to their monitoring plans, improved documentation of monitoring activities, and built innovative oversight and monitoring tools into its electronic grants management system.

“Through the hard work and dedication of Corporation staff and the cooperation and support of our grantees, we have achieved a milestone in which we all should take much pride,” Eisner said.

On a variety of other operational management issues, the report details gains the Corporation made in the areas of improving program and project quality, cultivating a culture of performance and accountability, delivering exemplary customer service, and building a diverse, energized, and high-performing workforce. Among other achievements, the Corporation in fiscal 2006:

• Transitioned to a customer-friendly online payment system for the AmeriCorps alumni to manage their AmeriCorps Education Awards from the National Service Trust.
• Began consolidating the agency’s five regional service centers into a single location to improve quality and efficiency and to cut costs.
• Developed a set of performance measures designed to measure the agency’s progress toward its strategic goals.
• Increased overall grantee reliance on non-Corporation resources to 44.1 percent, up from 38.6 percent in 2005.
• Implemented an Employee Appraisal System for to better align performance with strategic goals.

The Corporation also removed a reportable condition concerning employee payroll. The audit recommends some improvements in internal financial controls and a change in the way the Corporation manages VISTA cost-share agreements. The management response to the audit outlines the steps the Corporation is taking to address these issues.

The Corporation for National and Community Service improves lives, strengthens communities, and fosters civic engagement through volunteering and service by providing opportunities for Americans of all ages and backgrounds to serve their communities and country. Together with the USA Freedom Corps, the Corporation is working to build a culture of citizenship, service, and responsibility in America. For more information, visit http://www.nationalservice.gov.

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