Mayor Annise Parker announced today the launch of Houston SERVICE, a comprehensive, high-impact service plan that leverages service and volunteerism to address three areas of need in Houston: youth development, veterans’ affairs and CPR readiness. In addition, Houston SERVICE is launching www.HoustonSERVICE.org to provide details on the service plan, its initiatives and other ways for Houstonians to become involved in volunteer activities.

“This grant enables the City of Houston to help both Houstonians with big hearts and organizations in great need of volunteers, especially those that focus on at-risk youth, veteran outreach and heart health,” said Mayor Annise Parker. “I thank both Bloomberg Philanthropies and the Rockefeller Foundation for funding the City of Houston as a Cities of Service Leadership Grant recipient and look forward to seeing the impact of Houston SERVICE.”

After assessing Houston’s existing service efforts in top-priority categories and collaborating closely with community partners, three volunteer impact initiatives were developed:

• 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
• Houston Veterans Continuing Service: The veterans’ initiative will offer peer-to-peer mentoring support to help 250-500 newly returning combat veterans reintegrate successfully into civilian life over two years
• Everyone Can be a Lifesaver: Recognizing heart disease and stroke as the nation’s leading causes of death, this initiative will train citizens how to perform effective bystander CPR using compressions only. These “volunteer trainers” pledge to teach compression-only CPR to five others, which will impact the entire Houston population by having more residents ready to respond to instances of cardiac arrest.

Immediately following the launch, the Chief Service Officer will be joined by the American Heart Association – Houston Division to host its first compression-only CPR training with City of Houston employees. The training will be done using the American Heart Association’s “CPR Anytime” kit, a compact kit equipped with everything needed to learn basic CPR in just 22 minutes, which will be distributed to more than 100 city employees. Effective bystander CPR, provided immediately after sudden cardiac arrest, can double or triple a victim’s chance of survival.  

Like all impact volunteering strategies, Houston SERVICE’s initiatives target community needs, use best practices and set clear outcomes and measures to gauge progress.

Houston SERVICE is the product of a six-month assessment and consultation process coordinated by Chief Service Officer Cameron Waldner and staffmembers Katherine Price and Dave Beauchamp. The process brought many diverse groups to the table, including non-profit organizations, schools, colleges, private sector partners, public agencies, faith-based groups and everyday citizens.