Learn and Serve America's National Service-Learning Clearinghouse

I am delighted to have the opportunity to begin to communicate with you on a regular basis. We have been very busy in Learn and Serve America since we last saw you at the grantee meeting in December. Since that time, David Eisner has been confirmed as our new CEO.As you well know, we have received your progress reports and continuation requests. These have been reviewed by program staff and we will be contacting you very shortly to begin discussing and negotiating. We have also received a good number of applications for the School-Based Competitive grants focused around homeland security. These will undergo a multi-stage review process and decisions will be made available in June of this year.

We are working on a host of projects that will soon be available for your use. This year’s state profiles will be available on our website in early April. The state profiles outline all of the Corporation-funded programs in each state. We gather information about our grantees from eGrants and we have included all of the subgrantees whose information was available from LASSIE, an old subgrantee information system. Please use these for your own communication purposes.

The new eGrants subgrantee basic information form will be available for you to use shortly. You can see it now. However, we will let you know--with great fanfare--when you can begin to use it. In order to populate the state profiles and to trigger the creation of a form in the new performance measurement system, you will be asked to enter the contact information and the amount of funds awarded for each of your subgrants. This data must be complete when you submit the July 31^st progress report to us this year. You will be able to update this information at anytime by logging into your eGrants account. I can’t tell you how excited I am to contemplate being able to see and disseminate all the LSA sites!

Abt Associates and Brandeis University are working closely with us to finalize the new performance management system – aka LASSIE, the next generation. Many of you have helped design the system either as part of the field network or the expert network. As soon as the forms are available in draft form, we will disseminate them to you so you can see, on paper, what the questions will be when the website goes live.

As we get closer to the 15^th Anniversary of Learn and Serve America, we have a perfect opportunity to demonstrate the strength of the service-learning movement and LSA’s influence on its development. As you share the great stories of your program activities and accomplishments through articles, brochures and other media, please remember to demonstrate your affiliation with Learn and Serve. Through this identification you carry the message that there is a national federal investment in service-learning and that can only multiply our success. As a part of this, we have worked with Mississippi Industries for the Blind to ensure that they stock a variety of Learn and Serve America identity items. The National Service-Learning Clearinghouse has created a link to the order form: WG_URL:PAGE_ID=146:

I look forward to continuing to share updates with you on a more regular basis through this newsletter as well as through the 2003-grantees listserve as developments arise. I look forward to hearing from you, too.

Best,

Amy B. Cohen
Director
Learn and Serve America

Planned to be a regular feature of the LSA News, this edition’s Shout Out!!! is a request for photographs of your participants in action. We would like to increase our library of images for use in Learn and Serve America and Corporation-wide hard-copy and web-based publications. The following guidelines are useful both for photos you plan to send to us and for those that you use for your own promotional purposes.

Photographs

Generally, the photos of any service activity should reflect the energy, extent, and diversity of the activity, showing many different types of people serving together on projects. Specifically, you should take into consideration the following:

1. Take action shots, not just portraits of smiling faces. Shots should be close-up photos of people actively serving, particularly in small groups of two, three or four;
   
2. Include some group shots of people interacting and even possibly looking toward the camera;
   
3. Photos should show diversity if possible, with many types of people serving together (ages, genders, races, etc.);
   
4. Remember to turn the camera sideways and get vertical shots as well; these are very helpful when you design a vertical brochure or poster; and
   
5. When taking photos of participants wearing the program logo, please try to have the subject turn so the logo is in view of the camera. With portraits, you can usually do this by having the subject turn their shoulder with the logo towards the camera. We know that this is not always possible when taking photos of participants “in action” – however we would like to highlight the importance of having the logo in the picture.

Digital cameras

Given the popularity of digital cameras, we have some additional guidance for people taking digital pictures. In order for us to be able to use a digital picture, the digital camera used should be rated at 3 megapixels or higher. Digital images should also have a minimum size of approximately 2160 x 1440 pixels. On most digital cameras, this can be accomplished by adjusting the “quality” setting to “high” or “maximum.” Again, this is the minimum size – we would love to have larger images. Also, if you edit or save the pictures with a computer program, please set the quality setting of the file to its maximum value. For example, when saving an image as a JPG in Photoshop, you would select 12 as the quality. In Paint Shop Pro, you would select the “Options” tab on the file save dialog box, and then select a compression factor of “1 – Lowest Compression, Highest Quality”. For other programs, please refer to your help file or documentation.

Getting pictures to us

For digital pictures, you can either email the pictures or put them on a CD. However, the guidelines listed above will result in the files being rather large – so if you decide to email the pictures to us, make sure each email isn’t too big to send. For film pictures, please send us the negative (or slide). We have high quality film scanners at the Corporation that would allow us to obtain a quality high enough for printing. Also, please send us the print for reference. If the film negative (or slide) is not available, we do have the ability to scan prints – however, this is not preferred.You can send the photos or disks to your program officer or to Amy Cohen, Director, Learn and Serve America.

NOTE Please make sure that you have gotten a permission/release form from the individuals in the picture and keep it on file. This is essential if the photograph is used in promotional material by you or us.

New Program Outcome Reporting System On The Way For LSA Grantees

First phase to go on-line in April 04

The Corporation for National and Community Service has contracted with Abt Associates and the Center for Youth and Communities at Brandeis University to develop a new Learn and Serve America program outcome reporting system. The new reporting system is comprehensive, in a web-based format that can serve as a powerful and flexible tool for the Corporation, its grantees, and its subgrantees over an extended period of time. There are three major elements to this system, to be implemented in stages over a 3- to 5-year period:

• The core of the system is a web-based institutional data collection and reporting system that will provide basic service-learning program and outcome information that describes and tracks the progress of Learn and Serve America (LSA) programs at the grantee and subgrantee levels. Major elements of the web based system include online data entry for use by the Corporation and its grantees in managing the data collection process; and a sophisticated reporting capability that will allow users to access program data and to generate aggregate reports on an as-needed basis. A number of LSA grantees and service-learning researchers have helped refine the questions that comprise the data collection, and have provided suggestions about desired website features and functions. The site is scheduled to go live in April 2004.

• The second major element of the system will be the creation of a web-based Outcome Assessment Toolkit. This entails the development of a set of participant and community-level assessment tools/surveys for use by grantees and subgrantees in assessing program outcomes. Specifically, these web-based tools will allow individual service-learning programs to survey their participants and those they serve and then automatically generate and report basic results. The identification and piloting of assessment tools will take place in Year 2 (2005) of the project, with full implementation in Year 3 (2006).

• The third element of the system will be the use of the participant assessment tools and software to conduct controlled studies with statistically valid samples of programs and participants across the Learn and Serve system.

The ultimate goal of this new reporting system is to provide the Corporation, its funders, and those in the field with reliable, consistent, and readily available data on the full range of performance measures, from basic service-learning program descriptions to program outputs, to intermediate outcomes, to end outcomes for institutions and participants.

Amiko Matsumoto, Coordinator for Higher Education, became the proud mother of a baby boy on March 18, 2004. Mother and son are doing well. We expect Amiko to return to work over the summer or in September.

Bob Bhaerman, Coordinator for K12 programs, has announced his retirement from the Federal government effective April 29. Learn and Serve America plans to wish him well on April 29 at 2 pm. If you have greetings to share, send them care of Pat Carpenter at pcarpent@cns.gov.

We will contact both Bob and Amiko’s grantees to let you know who will be handling your grant during this period. In the meantime, please contact Mark Abbott, Associate Director for Grants Management, with questions or concerns (mabbott@cns.gov or 202-606-5000 ext. 120).