America Learns: About Us

Gary Kosman, our Founder & CEO, on the origins of our organization. This video is from the 2010 Friends For Youth Conference.

The Services We Provide
Every volunteer and national service program needs to track, use, and communicate the data that's most important to them. The problem comes when just one person (or even a small team of people) is responsible for all of that work. We solve that problem.

We provide web-based services that make it easy for program leaders to accomplish their goals around:

Tracking what's happening in the field;
Performance measurement;
Reporting;
Evaluation;
Complying with complex regulations; and
Providing personalized professional development and support to volunteers, AmeriCorps members, or VISTAs.

Some of the organizations we serve use every aspect of the services we provide, while others simply use one or two components.

Why We Do This Work
We are passionate about making the lives of those who lead volunteer and national service programs as easy as possible.

When these leaders' lives are free of administrative burdens and monotonous grant compliance tasks, they're able to pour far more energy into what matters to them: program excellence and sustainability. We make this reality possible for program leaders worldwide.

Why We Care

Our founder, Gary, started planning for America Learns while he was still in college in the late 1990s. At the time, he was volunteering as a tutor and mentor at an after-school drop-in center. While the center's staff members knew what they needed to succeed -- the ability to quickly demonstrate impact to community stakeholders and funders, the ability to easily monitor volunteer and student progress, the need to involve volunteers in meaningful reflection, the need to provide volunteers with effective training and ongoing support -- the staff members were simply swamped with other day-to-day activities to keep the program running. Ultimately, this led to children not being served well, which nobody found acceptable -- not the children, not their families, and not the individuals leading these programs.

After spending years conducting hundreds of interviews with staff members of volunteer and national service programs, Gary began to develop services to help these leaders do what they've always wanted to do: to easily collect and use the data that's most important to them so that they can put more energy into program excellence and sustainability. When program leaders have this capacity, it's far more likely that their programs will have a real, lasting impact. Helping program leaders and their teams accomplish this goal is what fires us up each and every day.

In 2003, with support from Echoing Green, we started serving youth-focused education programs nationwide. Since that time, we've grown to serve volunteer and national service-driven organizations in various sectors worldwide.