The Coalition for Service-Learning, which Campus Compact is a part of, has been advocating for federal funding for service-learning, particularly through the restoration of funding to Learn and Serve America. To encourage action, please contact your representative to ask them to sign on to a Dear Colleague letter to the Chair of the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee asking her to support funding for Learn and Serve America.

How to join in:

• By April 21, Reach out to your U.S. Representative (and any of their staff that you might know) this week and ask them to sign on to this letter. A sample message is below that you can forward and edit.
  Note that Appropriations committee members will not sign on to appropriations-focused letters. If any of these are your U.S. Representative, outreach will still be important as they work on the appropriations bills, but they should not be asked to sign on to this letter.
• Look up who your Representative is, and locate their contact information by clicking on this link and typing in your address. 
• Find the e-mail for the staffers for your U.S. Representative.
• At this time, this request is only for your U.S. Representative (House). We are working on a similar letter for the Senate, so there would need to be separate outreach to your U.S. Senators at that time.
• If you get a response that they will sign on, please forward that response (or send us a message letting us know) to slfc@ysa.org so that we can remove them from our follow-up list so that we don’t keep asking them to sign on after they already have.

Sample message:

Dear Representative _____,

On behalf of [YOUR ORG], I am writing to ask you to sign on to the attached letter to the Chairwoman and Ranking Member of the Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, and Related Agencies Appropriations Subcommittee to support a $250 million annual appropriation for Service Learning Fund programs. These programs would be administered by the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS) through its Learn and Serve America program, which is authorized by the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act but has been discontinued due to lack of appropriations since 2011. The letter also includes report language to direct fifty-percent of funds to economically disadvantaged communities and five-percent to Tribes. The deadline to sign on is COB April 21, 2022.

Recovering from the pandemic and building back better will require active participation of young people in our nation’s civic life. Through a relaunch of the Learn and Serve America program, young people can contribute to addressing national challenges, like the pandemic, through service while learning the knowledge and skills necessary for future success. The Fiscal Year 2022 Appropriations bill required CNCS to submit a report to Congress to outline the process to restart Learn and Serve America so they are ready to receive these funds in Fiscal Year 2023.

The final report of the bipartisan, Congressionally-appointed National Commission on Military, National, and Public Service was published in March of 2020. After two years of study, the Commission recommended a dramatic increase in service-learning opportunities for K-12 and Higher Education students, giving young people the problem-solving and academic achievement skills they will need to be successful in school, work, and life. 

These types of opportunities are even more critical now as our nation’s K-12 schools work to increase student engagement in school and mitigate lost time in the classroom to prevent long-lasting effects on students’ achievement, future earnings, and the national economy as a whole. The reestablishment of well-rounded educational opportunities that promote student engagement and learning through nonprofit and afterschool programs like the Summer of Service and Semester of Service programs is a critical strategy in helping students recover from the effects of the pandemic.

We hope you will join us in supporting these cost-effective service-learning programs so that we can provide national service and extended learning opportunities to students across the Nation. To sign, please use this Quill link. If you would like more information on this letter, please contact: Adeline DeYoung in Leger Fernandez’s office at Adeline.DeYoung@mail.house.gov. 

Sincerely,

[YOUR NAME
YOUR TITLE
YOUR ORGANIZATION
YOUR ADDRESS (TO IDENTIFY YOU AS A CONSTITUENT)]