Our evolution

Since our founding in Boston in 1988, City Year has evolved from a small community service pilot in one city to a national organization that collaborates with partners to re-envision our educational system and create more opportunities for young people to thrive.

Today, City Year recruits and trains young adults from all 50 states to serve students and schools as AmeriCorps members across 29 U.S. cities.

While our goals remain expanding educational opportunity and developing young leaders through national service, our areas of impact have expanded. Today, they include supporting educators in under-resourced schools, producing human-centered research and policy, and, ultimately, creating lasting change.

Our beginning

Advancing national service

From our earliest days, City Year has recruited young adults who build positive relationships as they serve communities. Initially, corps members served across a wide range of areas—from beautifying parks to working with children to supporting public health campaigns. Through service, they developed durable skills that helped them to further their education and workforce goals.

City Year worked to promote engaged citizenship and the concept of voluntary national service as a rite of passage for young Americans.

City Year is proud to be part of the inspiration for the creation of the federal AmeriCorps program in 1993. Through AmeriCorps, more than one million Americans have helped veterans and their families to readjust after deployment; taught children to read; fought forest fires; and aided recovery efforts after major disasters such as hurricanes.

Our focus

Serving students and schools

We turned our focus to serving exclusively in schools over 15 years ago, recognizing that our AmeriCorps members, as near-peer tutors, mentors and role models, were uniquely and powerfully positioned to partner with classroom teachers and support students throughout the school day.

We serve where we are most needed—in under-resourced public schools, in districts with low high school graduation rates—reaching students who too often are furthest from opportunity.

From our roots in youth development and service, City Year has understood that supporting students means taking a holistic approach—developing tools and techniques that help children and young people to thrive academically, cognitively and interpersonally.

With our school partners we launched our Whole School, Whole Child® services that are grounded in both research and our own experience serving in hundreds of public schools.

Our work today

Practice + research + policy = change

Today, we’re applying research and feedback to build out a more robust, defined model and description of City Year AmeriCorps members as student success coaches (SSCs).

Student success coaching better conveys the holistic nature of the support corps members provide and training they receive. We want SSCs to be recognized as an important part of healthy and thriving school ecosystems and replicated beyond districts and schools that are directly part of City Year’s network.

In addition to our direct service in schools, we are promoting research and policy, including helping to launch the National Partnership for Student Success; innovating new school design and learning environments; and seeking lasting change.

This work includes the Student Success Coach Learning Network in California, where eight youth-serving organizations collaborated with City Year to expand student success coaching into several communities not directly served by City Year AmeriCorps members.