Community
City Year: The Red Jacket in the School Hallway
How City Year's young AmeriCorps mentors give a full year to help students stay on track — one red jacket at a time.
By The Pennygood team · Jul 2026 · 3 min read
In hundreds of American public schools, the same splash of color turns up in the hallway every morning: a bright red jacket. It belongs to a City Year AmeriCorps member — often someone barely out of college, there to sit beside a student who needs a steady hand with reading, math, or just getting through the school day.
The person in the red jacket
City Year calls these young adults student success coaches. Working alongside classroom teachers, they give students one-on-one tutoring and small-group help, build social and interpersonal skills, and run afterschool programming. Each coach commits to a full year in one school, showing up for the same students day after day.
The age is part of the point. City Year recruits mostly recent college graduates, roughly ages 17 to 25 — old enough to offer guidance, young enough to feel like a near-peer rather than one more adult in charge. The red jacket is deliberate too: worn on campus so students can spot a coach at a glance. More than 40,000 young adults have worn it across three decades.
Two roommates and an idea from 1988
City Year began in 1988 in Boston, started by Michael Brown and Alan Khazei, roommates at Harvard Law School. Their question was simple: what if young people gave a year to full-time community service the way others give a year to the military? Their first corps had 50 members. The model went on to help shape AmeriCorps, the national service network City Year is now part of.
It has grown a long way from that first Boston class. Today nearly 2,000 members serve across 29 U.S. cities, and the idea has traveled abroad — City Year launched in South Africa in 2005 and later opened sites in the United Kingdom.
Why a full year in one school matters
City Year concentrates on schools where many students are at risk of falling off track to graduation, and its case rests on consistency: the same caring person, in the same seat, all year long. The organization reports that schools partnering with City Year can be two to three times more likely to improve on English and math assessments.
Supporting City Year
The organization runs on a mix of public funding and private support. In July 2026, all 29 of its U.S. sites received AmeriCorps funding for the year ahead, but the corps stipends and school partnerships also lean on donors. You can give directly at cityyear.org — or, if you're a young adult drawn to the work, apply there to serve a year in the red jacket.
City Year's whole model rests on individuals who choose to spend a year of their lives on other people's kids. Pennygood is built for that kind of person: a platform where someone doing quiet, patient good can receive small monthly support from the people who believe in them. If a mentor or helper in your own community comes to mind, they can start a page at pennygood.me.