Houston SERVICE - Priorities

After assessing Houston’s current efforts in these areas and collaborating closely with community partners, volunteer impact initiatives were carefully designed and will be implemented using various community partners.

• After School Zones: This initiative seeks to increase both the number of mentors engaged with the City’s at-risk youth and the number of young people who are able to participate in academically rich after-school programming.  The ultimate goal is to improve educational outcomes for the targeted youth by setting individualized goals for students and engaging them in apprenticeships that will help them gain mastery over content areas.

• Houston Veterans Continuing Service: The veterans’ initiatives will offer peer to peer support to help 250-500 newly returning combat veterans reintegrate successfully into civilian life, helping these veterans understand and better access the programs and services that are available to the 2500 servicemen and women who return to Houston annually.

• Everyone Can be a Lifesaver:   This initiative involves training citizens on a potentially lifesaving technique, compression-only CPR, which would impact the entire Houston population by having more residents ready to respond to instances of cardiac arrest.

Measuring impact is a crucial component of Houston SERVICE. Each of the three initiatives includes specific metrics to assess the programs’ impact over the next two years, with an ultimate goal of moving the needle on the City’s identified challenges through implementation of targeted volunteer strategies.

Houston SERVICE has created metrics specific to each of the three service initiatives in order to accurately measure the impact of volunteerism in Houston. The following service plan has been designed so that the tools used to measure the outcomes will be replicable for future service programs. Houston SERVICE will report these outcomes over the next two years as the programs roll out.