MAKE IT LAST FOREVER: THE ... - National Service Resource Center

Information has been gathered primarily through over 100 phone interviews with national service-learning organizations, state
education agency service-learning coordinators, current and former Learn and Serve school and district subgrantees, and other
assorted schools as recommended by national service-learning technical assistance providers and experts. Additional queries were
made to numerous national educational reform organizations in order to ascertain the level of service-learning integrated into those
approaches.
The participants in the study are diverse, in that they represent:
• a cross-section of service-learning experience and capacity;
• rural and urban circumstances;
• small and large schools and districts;
• populations of different cultural backgrounds;
• states with only and varying amounts of Learn and Serve funding as well as those with other funding sources;
• National Leader Schools and novice practitioners;
• Learning In Deed participants and finalists as well as states which did not apply for the initiative
The information collected through these interviews was used to develop new conceptual framework for service-learning
institutionalization. While the framework comes from the data, it is based on an interpretation of its meaning. The data was selfreported,
and not verified for accuracy, so the framework rests on the opinions of service-learning coordinators themselves and not on
objective observation and analysis or statistical data.
ASSESSMENT OF THE SERVICE-LEARNING SYSTEM
What is Institutionalization?
To institutionalize something means to establish a standard practice or custom within a human system. This is based on the
assumption that institutions, whether they be social, educational, or political, have predictable attributes that people can expect to be
true year after year. Institutions are the vessels that define the behaviors within them, and as such, they organize their internal systems
so that these qualities can be sustained in a routine way. While this may appear to those outside the institutions that this is an
effortless task, institutions in reality work very hard to preserve their identity through programs, policies, and procedures. Actions, not
mere words, define an organization.
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