SAGA Education reviews

Committing to a year of service gives you the opportunity to make a crucial difference in a community in need, to gain valuable work experience, and to make friends you will have for life. Those interested in a service year know that this time with service organizations is sometimes volunteered or, more often, completed with the service member receiving a modest stipend throughout. SAGA’s model is the latter – providing our Fellows with a stipend, paid biweekly over the course of 10 months. Our annual stipend in Chicago and New York averages about $19,000 for 10 months of service (about 1400 hours), and is highlighted in our promotional material and throughout the recruitment process. SAGA understands that committing to a service year on a stipend can be challenging. We have several resources to help potential Fellows decide if our stipend is livable. Applicants are encouraged to make use of our resources and to research other material on budgeting a stipend to come to a decision. The stipend for SAGA Fellows is competitive with other service programs--in fact, higher than some better known programs. We expect that our Fellows commit to us and to our students having already weighed the pros and cons of the opportunity, stipend included. We also ask candidates to keep in mind that SAGA just recently turned two. As we grow, we will continue to focus on other “benefit” areas where we are not as competitive, including building partnerships with graduate programs for scholarships and solidifying more employer partnerships for post-service opportunities. Also, the workweek for Fellows is 37.5 hours. We provide the lesson plans; we provide the training; we reserve time for Fellows to make the calls to parents that are a part of our unique model. Fellows are sometimes given the option to exceed the 37.5 hour week. When they decide to take on extra projects, we pay time and a half for those hours.