Minnesota Alliance for Volunteer Advancement announced today that it has received a Volunteer Generation Fund grant of $975,360 from AmeriCorps, the federal agency for national service and volunteerism.
The Volunteer Generation Fund invests in organizations to increase both volunteer recruitment and retention to engage those who answer the call to serve. With this new funding, MAVA will expand volunteer generation for high-impact tutoring, coaching, and mentoring. MAVA has formed a collaborative with 21 organizations covering urban, rural, statewide, and local efforts to place community volunteers with students from across the entire State of Minnesota. MAVA will provide training, consultation, and support, as these collaborative members work to generate significant, measurable improvements in the number of volunteers generated, remove structural inequities, advance racial equality, and help local communities respond to and recover from the COVID-19 pandemic.
MAVA's role is also to help student success organizations across the State to increase volunteer generation from specific demographic groups, such as youth service, generational/family volunteering, skill-based volunteering, and senior volunteering. MAVA will provide subgrants to community-based entities. These entities are nonprofits and schools, and together we have formed a collaborative volunteer generation for student success partnership. The goal of the collaborative is to strengthen the capacity of each individual organization so that as a State, Minnesota can help students succeed academically and support their mental health and overall wellbeing, in line with the National Partnership for Student Success.
MAVA will leverage our statewide infrastructure, partner with, and build the capacity of no fewer than twenty schools and nonprofits across the state. Due to the pandemic, many schools/organizations face unprecedented challenges in volunteer engagement. Organizations are struggling to rebuild volunteer structures that toppled during the pandemic and, more than ever, organizations have been reaching out to MAVA to seek assistance with dismantling barriers to volunteerism as a result of systemic racism. The goals are to collaboratively serve 17,300 students by recruiting 2,985 new volunteers and retaining 2,240 volunteers, who serve a total of 196,870 hours per year.
MAVA will hire additional staff to support this and other MAVA initiatives.
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