Volunteers in Service to America

Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA), American governmental organization (created 1964) that placed volunteers throughout the United States to help fight poverty through work on community projects with various organizations, communities, and individuals. Among the related issues addressed by Volunteers in Service to America (VISTA) were illiteracy, lack of quality housing, poor health and well-being, unemployment, and poor economic development. At VISTA’s founding, volunteers, who could be of any age, received a poverty-level stipend to cover their expenses and committed to one year of service when they joined. VISTA became a quasi-independent organization in 1993, when it was folded into AmeriCorps.

VISTA was the vision of President John F. Kennedy, who in 1963 first conceived of the program as a domestic version of the international Peace Corps, which he had established two years earlier. Though Kennedy did not live to inaugurate the organization he envisioned, his successor, President Lyndon B. Johnson, incorporated the idea of a domestic volunteer organization into his far-reaching War on Poverty. When Johnson signed the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, VISTA was officially created.

The first group of 20 volunteers began their service in January 1965. In that first year, volunteers worked with the urban poor in Hartford, Connecticut, with the rural poor in the Appalachian regions, and with migrant workers in California. By the end of 1965, some 2,000 volunteers had signed on. By the same time in 1966, the number of volunteers had grown to 3,600.

VISTA underwent a series of structural changes in the 1970s. The Nixon administration created the ACTION agency (Federal Domestic Volunteer Agency), which administered several volunteer organizations, including the Peace Corps and VISTA. In the 1980s, under President Ronald Reagan, VISTA funding and administrative support were substantially cut, which limited recruiting and training. Through those lean years, social activism and grassroots support led by current and former volunteers and their community counterparts kept VISTA and its ideals alive.

The organization was somewhat restored in 1990, when President George H.W. Bush signed the National and Community Service Act, which created the Commission on National and Community Service. That was expanded in 1993 when President Bill Clinton signed the National and Community Service Trust Act, which created AmeriCorps.