In 2021, as a part of California's comprehensive strategy to address the climate crisis, California Volunteers, Office of the Governor, established the country’s first state-level climate service corps known as the California Climate Action Corps (CCAC).
CCAC is a national service program led by California Volunteers and implemented by Bay Area Community Resources (BACR) under the guiding framework of AmeriCorps. The program is dedicated to advancing climate actions that engage community members, cultivate change, and leave a lasting impact.
Today, CCAC has continued to scale its program size and expand its impact to local communities across California. CCAC stands as a landmark climate program and an exemplary model for generating collective impact through service and civic engagement. In 2024, the Biden-Harris administration announced the establishment of the American Climate Corps—a landmark initiative with the goal of engaging over 2,000 AmeriCorps volunteers across 36 states and territories. The ACC has derived its program model from the structure and scalability of the CCAC and their commitment to providing accessible and impactful climate initiatives to volunteers and AmeriCorps members.
CCAC has significantly scaled its program since its inception in 2020. Each year they have continued to expand the number of NGO partners hosting AmeriCorps members and the number of volunteers participating in climate-focused service. In the 2022-2023 program year, they engaged over 15,000 volunteers and 100 AmeriCorps members, with the goal of growing that number to 25,000 volunteers and 325 AmeriCorps members for the 2023-2024 program year.
Being a federally funded program meant that CCAC had to develop rigorous tracking systems to monitor volunteer data for compliance. They had previously relied on Salesforce to track their volunteer engagement data, with AmeriCorps members manually entering in volunteer data, with some members reported having spent 8 hours each week doing data entry alone. They soon discovered that manual data entry was not a valuable use of AmeriCorps members' time, nor did it accurately capture volunteer records and attendance. CCAC realized that in order to meet the deliverables of their grant, they would need to invest in a volunteer management system that would centralize their network of volunteers and partners.
BACR and CCAC discovered Golden through the California Volunteers, Office of the Governor, who had been using Golden to monitor their state commission efforts since 2022. CCAC found value in the fact that they not only had a centralized system to track their volunteer opportunities among their partners, but that they also had the ability to market their opportunities to the public through Golden’s branded volunteer portal.
CCAC implemented Golden's Aggregator model in the fall of 2023, and has seen significant program growth since. Prior to joining Golden, CCAC engaged 15,000 volunteers in service opportunities. In their first year of using Golden, CCAC has engaged 23,048 volunteers to date and is on track to meet their goal of engaging 25,000 volunteers by the end of September 2024 – a 10,000 increase in the number of volunteers in just one year. Looking to the year ahead, CCAC plans to continue to grow their program and services to more communities and partners throughout the state of California.
Transitioning from Golden to Salesforce meant that CCAC partners could more easily track volunteer data. Rather than entering each volunteer record manually into Salesforce, partners utilized Golden's spreadsheet upload feature to bulk upload participant data in a few simple clicks. Many of CCAC partners leverage Golden's check-in feature enabling volunteers to quickly sign in and streamline administrative tasks.
Golden’s Insights feature, which captures new and returning volunteer data, gave CCAC the tools to remain in compliance with federal and state reporting requirements with almost no administrative time constraints.
CCAC estimates that because of Golden, AmeriCorps members save approximately 6 hours each week on data entry, and have more time to focus on their own climate initiatives.
Golden’s branded volunteer portal serves as a state-wide CCAC page with public events and engagements that any Californian can volunteer for. The Calendar view displays opportunities happening each day, and the Dynamic Map will filter events by location. This has been extremely helpful to match volunteers to the right opportunities, and allow CCAC to easily identify opportunities to promote to their leadership teams, lawmakers, and other stakeholders in California.
Through promoting opportunities in Golden’s branded portal, CCAC has been able to engage over 23,000 volunteers in the 2023-2024 program year, an increase of 8,000+ volunteers from the previous year. CCAC is on track to meet their goal of engaging 25,000 volunteers in service for the 2023-2024 program year.
Golden’s Aggregator model allows partners to have their own dashboard to manage volunteer opportunities and track volunteer records, allowing for each AmeriCorps host site to have autonomy over their data and programs. As the statewide entity for the CCAC, data flows up directly from each partner into the main CCAC account.
Within their first year using Golden, CCAC was able to engage over 75 partners throughout the state of California, and over 325 AmeriCorps members to lead climate initiatives within their communities.
CCAC now serves as the national model for the ACC. As other states and commissions begin to roll out new climate initiatives, CCAC continues to scale and expand their program in the 2024-2025 program year using Golden to track, monitor, and market their volunteer program. Because of the significant success they have found using Golden for CCAC, BACR is now exploring a Golden subscription of their own to manage their other programs as well.
California and the CCAC will continue to be the leading model for effective civic engagement for climate resiliency. Because of Golden, they have been able to successfully scale their program while ensuring data integrity and time savings.