Resident Volunteership Program

Welcome to the Resident Volunteership United Program

ReV-UP and the ResidentCorps

ReV-UP Button copy

Bella Communities designed and tested an innovative supportive service program to tackle simultaneously both financial empowerment and civic engagement mobilization.  The Resident Volunteership United Program (ReV-UP)  engages residents living in low-income communities to volunteer with other non-profit organizations in the immediate neighborhood as a pathway into civic engagement and economic opportunity.

The program provides rent incentives for volunteerism because incentives serve as a bridge to help residents with an earned economic opportunity.  We believe through this program, residents are stitching an economic opportunity to build a financial backstop to weather financial hardships, reducing this burden of anxiety, participating in community civic engagement, accruing social benefits and building professional, social, and personal skills.   For example, according to a study by the Corporation for National and Community Service, Office of Research and Evaluation, it has shown that volunteers have a 27 percent higher odds of finding a job after being out of work than non-volunteers.

ResidentCorps

ResidentCorps is designed as the fuel and glue that propel the program forward.  We want to use a peer-to-peer approach by inviting resident volunteers to make commitment and be a member of ResidentCorps.  Three arching guiding principles we ask Resident Corps to embrace:

  • See things not only as they are, but as they could be.  That is, we may have to learn to break the paradigm, just because things are the way they are, doesn’t mean that they can’t be different, better.
  • Believe you are capable of making a positive change.  We have to believe that we each have something to contribute regardless of our lot, condition, position or station in life.
  • Take action, do good, and pass it forward.  Action is key in everything we do.  We have to make good actions and unleash it out there in the universe.