City Year reviews

I think that the most important thing to know about City Year is that your experience will vary GREATLY depending on your sponsor and school environment. At my site, the teams with the overall best experience have very engaged sponsors, a welcoming school, and competent, driven leadership. It also depends on your team relationship and how discipline is handled. There is also a huge lack of consistency in City Year that breeds a lot of resentment between corps members. At my site, some teams work less than ten hour days while other teams work eleven or almost twelve. Some teams are also not penalized for dress code or tardy violations, while others are written up consistently. We are also infrequently allowed to take days off or leave early, while other teams have members who have missed beyond their allowed time without consequence. This causes a lack of unity and often nothing is done about it. Because City Year is so funding and data-driven, often the needs of the corps members are not sufficiently heard. Much of the data collection is often left to corps members themselves, making the data subject to error and giving an impossible workload to corps members. PMs are not a good support system, instead they are data monitors. The classroom is also a difficult environment. Working with a teacher is hard because there tends to be an unwanted power struggle- teachers often feel that you're imposing in some way. If your teacher does not like you, it's extremely hard to meet your "impact goals"/ have a good experience. City Year is not adequately prepared for a lot of what corps members have to deal with. There are also very little resources for those not interested in pursuing education or social work, making the job search post-City Year daunting. You're expected to have a complete post-City Year plan early in the year, but are provided absolutely NO time in which to create said plan. You are also only given a short amount of days off, which forces you to choose between a personal (sanity) day and a day for interviews/ job hunting. Many of the perks of City Year (college/graduate school partnerships, stipend, food assistance, AmeriCorps education award) are not made clear at the beginning. You are told the GROSS stipend amount that you'll make, but depending on certain factors, it may be $100-$200 less a month, which is almost unlivable. Food assistance (CY corps members are supposed to qualify automatically) is an incredibly long and frustrating process, especially because the offices that handle food stamps require tons of paper work and time, and often don't understand why our income isn't "income". Very little help is given in this area. Without food stamps, the stipend is COMPLETELY unlivable. The AmeriCorps education award - $5,500 for one year- can be great or not worth it, depending on your case. Many schools match the award which makes it a great benefit, but if you have substantial student loans, I'd say that it isn't worth it. One generally defers loans during their service year, which will cost you more than you think: interest accrues daily, and in my service year I gathered more than $4,500 in interest. Because of this, I and many of my fellow corps members, are leaving with more debt than we anticipated. I have had to work a second job the entire time I've worked with City Year and this is particularly frustrating for management. I often cannot participate in weekend events, and my PM hounds me for it. I am frequently asked if I "need" the other job, if I can possibly cut down on hours, etc. I'd recommend City Year if your parents or anyone else are/is still paying for at least some of your living expenses. City Year is unrealistic for those of us who are 100% independent/need to save money. Overall, I do not recommend City Year for everyone. While I have learned a lot, the heavy dissatisfaction commonly felt at our site has made this experience less than fulfilling. This could be a great experience of trials and challenges that strengthen you; instead the trials and challenges and little support break you.

It's possible that City Year started out as the sort of participatory, energetic, competent organization that could really meet their goals-- a group of passionate young people who reject the apathy of their generation and work hard for others. But, even if it ever were such an organization, its mass production has now led to an incompetent shell of it's ideals of civic engagement. Employees (volunteers) are required to wear costumes daily-- t shirts or polos covered in branding from sponsoring organizations, and chunky Timberland boots (another sponsor), in red and yellow McDonald's franchise colors. Corps members should expect to spend a considerable amount of time selling the City Year brand-- from making sure any and all documents are covered in CY and sponsor logos to actual cold calls and fundraising. A considerable amount of time and energy goes into public military-like calisthenics that clearly have nothing to do with any aspect of helping children. The trainings for the first several weeks of service are devoted to imbuing in corps members the "culture" of City Year, which is passed on the form of "founding stories" and myriad inspirational quotes in the handbook. This "culture" talks with dewy-eyed admiration of democracy and participatory engagement-- yet doesn't leave room for volunteers to share and implement THEIR goals, and, worse, certainly doesn't make space for the people CY's supposed to be helping to ask for what THEY want. The few real and genuinely useful activities that corps members do, which in my opinion is limited to one-on-one tutoring in struggling schools, is painfully limited by insufficient training and devotion of time to more public (and thus potentially fundraising) efforts-- the big service days, calisthenics, filling out endless forms on childrens' "improvements" to show the sponsors, etc. I only spent about 4 hours out of my 40 hour weeks tutoring. Other CY activities in school were extremely poorly run, and often resulted in poor relations with teachers and the administration. As an 18 year old out of high school, I was left to manage an after school program for 30 children for four months when my supervisor quit, despite repeated requests for assistance from my superiors. This sort of situation was common. My biggest complaint with working for City Year is the disillusionment and lack of appreciation for individuality and honesty in the franchise. Civil service is not one-size-fits-all, and just because you say you're doing "good" doesn't mean you are. Or, in fact, that you're not doing actually harm by setting poor examples for they children who look to you as role models by being incompetent, brainwashed, and self-righteous.