YSI's Local Hosts

City of Houston Volunteer Initiatives Program

The City of Houston Volunteer Initiatives Program (VIP) is in the Mayor's Office and is responsible for engaging Houstonians in city government through volunteer service activities and community projects. The spirit of volunteerism and civic duty is deeply rooted in Houston's culture, with about one million volunteers every year from the Greater Houston Area. The City of Houston encourages individuals to explore a variety of programs that allow them to experience the many facets of civic engagement. In doing so, each volunteer helps to make their community a better place to live. Houston is a member of Cities of Service, a bipartisan coalition of mayors who have committed to work together to lead a multi-year effort to expand impact volunteerism. http://www.houstonservice.org

C3 Texas - Campus to Community Coalition of Texas

C3 Texas specializes in designing high impact service learning and civic engagement practices for higher education campuses as well as for school districts, throughout the great State of Texas. Their newly revised mission incorporates the P-20 pipeline, opening up a tremendous amount of funding and partnership opportunities: Transforming education for the public good with a statewide coalition of institutions of education committed to developing civic engagement and service learning partnerships between communities, faculty, and students. The average number of service learning courses offered per campus in Texas is 114, compared to a national average of 69 courses. Overall, students at member campuses in 2011 served a total of 22,654,279 hours – a value of this service at $483,895,403 to the State of Texas. http://c3texas.org/

Volunteer Houston

Volunteer Houston, established in 1974, is a nonprofit organization dedicated to the development, promotion and support of volunteerism. For more than 35 years, Volunteer Houston has been the city's sole referral service connecting volunteers to a broad spectrum of diverse nonprofit organizations. The vision of Volunteer Houston is that all people make volunteering central in their lives and work. Their mission is to engage more people and resources more effectively in volunteer service. Nonprofit organizations all around Houston and its vicinity rely on Volunteer Houston to acquire over 30,000 volunteers per year. http://www.volunteerhouston.org