Wendy Spencer: Voluntary service has helped reduce public spending

She’s responsible for a $1.1bn (£765m) programme co-ordinating hundreds of thousands of volunteers and tackling some of the United States’ most pressing problems, from mopping up after devastating floods to turning around troubled schools and running clinics for those who can’t afford healthcare. Yet Wendy Spencer says perhaps the biggest challenge in her working week is how to engage Karen, the first-grade pupil she volunteers to help at a Washington DC school. “It’s challenging – but it’s also the most rewarding part of my week,” she says. “As a volunteer you’re trying to keep her focused, you want to make sure you’re doing the right thing, but you want to be cool, you want to be friendly, you’re trying to be funny. There’s a lot to it – but it’s very fulfilling.”

Spencer, chief executive of the Corporation for National and Community Service, says this sense of fulfilment in helping others is at the heart of the success of the US’s intensive volunteering programmes. This year, CNCS, a federal agency established in 1993 by Bill Clinton, will oversee 86,000 members of AmeriCorps, the main national voluntary service programme for young people. AmeriCorps members serve for a year in healthcare, schools, environmental protection, veterans’ initiatives and disaster relief and manage hundreds of thousands more part-time volunteers in projects such as Spencer’s reading programme. A further 270,000 over-55s are involved in SeniorCorps which runs, among other things, a “foster grandparent” scheme for youngsters who need continuing support. And, since President Obama created a task force in 2013 to expand voluntary service (which Spencer co-chairs), new partnerships have been created to put more volunteers of all ages into everything from legal advice for vulnerable immigrant children to restoring American forests and grasslands.

Taking part in one of these programmes, she says, has huge benefits. Not only does it give people the chance to make a positive difference, but it can also help the volunteers themselves. “It’s not just that it makes you feel good: it also helps your career – it’s a tough job market and people are looking for advantages,” she says.

On this side of the Atlantic, there is growing interest in the model. Last month, the Cabinet Office revealed that it wanted to increase the National Citizen Service scheme, a summer volunteering scheme for 15- to 17-year-olds, which last year recruited 58,000 young people, to 360,000 places by 2021 – a sixfold increase. Generation Change, a partnership of 18 youth volunteering organisations launched in 2013, is campaigning for the government to help to provide the option of a full year of service for young people when they leave school. Spencer, who was invited to the UK by one of the charities involved, City Year UK, which puts about 200 young volunteers into schools in deprived parts of London, Birmingham and Manchester for a year as learning mentors, says there is huge potential for a formal, year-long volunteering scheme to take off here. “You’ve got City Year UK to look at with the results they’re getting, you’ve got a great service with the National Citizen Service and you’ve got the advantage that you can learn from our lessons,” she says. “You have a big footprint here already and, if you start to talk about this from the grassroots level all the way up to your national leaders, it’s going to blossom.”

The UK has some way to go before it matches US enthusiasm, however: one American in four now formally volunteers through an organisation and about 60% help their neighbours in a more informal way.

Could widespread volunteering ever take off here? After all, the now discredited “big society” concept, with volunteerism at its core, fell out of favour because it was seen by many as a way of replacing taxpayer-funded public services with those run by voluntary and community organisations in a bid to save money. But Spencer insists that it’s not an either/or and that the “can-do” spirit of volunteers complements what professionals provide.

Nonetheless, in the US, savings are undoubtedly a factor for the government. Spencer says: “We can eliminate a lot of the problems that are costing Americans a lot of tax dollars, like not having high-school graduates reading at third-grade reading level, and homeless veterans and people not recovering from disasters, and drug use in rural areas, which is plaguing us. We see that we are the solution that reduces the dependency on government spending.”

The agency’s budget, which includes paying a living allowance and college scholarships for AmeriCorps members, has for the first time this year been exceeded by investment in its programmes by private companies, fundraising and local community support. “I like to call our budget a government seed that grows,” says Spencer. “We invested $9m of government money [in non-profit organisation Habitat for Humanity]. That investment engaged 575 AmeriCorps members full time, and those 575 members recruited 260,000 volunteers,” she says. “AmeriCorps members raised another $7m of resources in cash and products, and built 3,441 homes. That’s $2,616 of federal investment per home. That’s what I call a bargain.”

Voluntary service benefits the volunteers too, Spencer says: many companies now look to recruit those who have been on the AmeriCorps programme, and the agency’s research shows that those who volunteer are 27% more likely to find jobs than those who don’t. Many go into full-time public service once they graduate from AmeriCorps – a trend that is starting to be echoed here among those who’ve completed the City Year UK programme.

In her own country, Spencer hopes that whoever wins November’s presidential elections will champion volunteering. “I am hoping the next president, whoever he or she is, will embrace our blueprint, which was embraced in a bipartisan way, and will use that as their mark to scale and grow [volunteering],” she says.

Ultimately, Spencer has a wider vision. “I contend that, if we can do this worldwide, we’ll have a more peaceful world, because people serving together are more tolerant of people different from themselves,” she says. “They are more compassionate, they learn about other people’s religions, races and ideas, and they’re less likely to be defensive, argumentative – or worse.”

Curriculum vitae

Age 54.

Lives Washington DC and Tallahassee, Florida.

Education Graduate?? of Valdosta State University in Georgia.

Career 2012-present: chief executive officer, Corporation for National and Community Service; 2003-2012: chief executive officer, Governor’s Commission on Volunteerism and Community Service (Volunteer Florida); 2001-2003: director, Florida Park Service; 1991-2001: campaign director, United Way of the Big Bend; 1987-1991: director of marketing and promotions, Greater Macon Chamber of Commerce; 1986-1987: director of marketing, Southeastern Special Risk Services; 1985-1986: assistant marketing director, Bank South; 1984-1985: district representative, United States House of Representatives, Congressman Charlie Hatcher; 1983-1984: assistant director of personnel, Sunnyland Foods.

Public life co-chair, Task Force on Expanding National Service; representative, White House Legal Aid Interagency Roundtable; representative, United States Interagency Council on Homelessness; and various other board positions.

Interests Family, sports and film.