Generations Serving Together

Generations
Serving Together

An incentive grant to age-integrate national service

The opportunity

We recently awarded eight $25,000 grants to organizations creating new initiatives or significantly expanding or deepening existing programs that unite older and younger to serve together. Grant recipients are participating in a powerful, virtual cohort experience, rooted in peer learning, problem solving, networking and mutual aid. Stories of grantees’ work will be shared with CoGenerate’s audience of supporters and media.

These grantees are working to age-integrate national service. READ MORE →

“Generations Serving Together grants will strengthen national service and show us the power of older and younger generations serving together. I look forward to seeing the impact that AmeriCorps members and AmeriCorps Seniors volunteers can have by coming together across the divides of age, race, culture and identity.”

MICHAEL D. SMITH
AmeriCorps CEO

The problem

In the United States, age segregation is common in national service, with AmeriCorps State & National, AmeriCorps VISTA and AmeriCorps NCCC largely enrolling young people, and AmeriCorps Seniors (formerly Senior Corps) exclusively recruiting older ones. This siloed approach limits opportunities to bridge divides, tap the best of all generations, and create transformational social change. In these polarized times, these are opportunities we can ill afford to squander.

Now more than ever, we need new ways to bring older and younger AmeriCorps members and volunteers together to solve problems, bridge divides and co-create the future.

The solution

We believe national service can play a critical role in showcasing new and powerful models of cogeneration,* with older and younger AmeriCorps members and volunteers working side by side to fight for racial justice, combat climate change, address educational inequities, create affordable housing, reduce social isolation and loneliness, and so much more.

Our goal is to help grantees launch and strengthen intentional cogenerational work, develop traction, and increase impact. In the process, we hope to influence and engage the broader field of national service, which is perfectly poised to leverage cogenerational solutions.