We expect President Obama to announce our exciting new summer initiative in the next week or so. Stay tuned!
As you all know, the President and First Lady have made civic engagement and community service a hallmark of their administration. They recognize, as do we, that getting involved on a local level is not simply a nice thing to do, it is absolutely critical to the ongoing work of restoring our nation, especially in times of great need.
From June 22 to September 11, the summer initiative willengage people in service to their communities and focus their efforts on national priority issue areas like education, health care, energyand the environment,community renewal,supporting veterans and military families, and preparing for disasters. This summer will be the beginning of a collaborative, sustained effort to strengthen communities by making service a way of life for all Americans.
We anticipate a surge in traffic to our website, serve.gov, as Americans - young and old, from every background, all across the country - respond to the President’s call to participate in our nation’s recovery and renewal. We want to make sure as many service opportunities as possible are posted on serve.gov prior to the public announcement. We are asking organizations to post by Friday, June 12.
here are multiple ways to post service opportunities:
- If you are already feeding your service opportunities to an aggregator, you do not need to resubmit your projects to us at this time.
- Organizations with just a few summer service opportunities can post their projects directly on serve.gov.
- Organizations with multiple project submissions can use Excel spreadsheet.
- Or, you can automatically link to serve.gov with an XML feed. If your organization has the technical and staff capacity to create an XML feed, contact us at ServiceInitiative@cns.gov with the subject line “XML Feed” and we will assist you with next steps.
This summer, in addition to connecting people with existing service opportunities at serve.gov, we want to encourage and empower people to develop their own service projects with friends and neighbors to meet pressing needs in their own communities. Look for do-it-yourself toolkits at serve.gov soon!
Our full summer team arrived at CNCS headquarters on June 1. We have been busy reaching out to partner organizations, meeting with CNCS program directors, and laying the foundation for a successful summer. We will be sending out regular email updates to all CNCS staff and grantees to keep you informed of our plans and our progress. In the meantime, if you have questions please feel free to contact us (contact list is attached).
Thanks again for your participation and your continued commitment to service.
In Solidarity,
The Summer Initiative Team
