On November 4, CCYP officially welcomed Patrick Wade Wolfe as our first-ever AmeriCorps Cape Cod (ACC) service member. Over the next year, Patrick will help us build something we’ve wanted for a long time: a youth-informed pathway that connects our region's young adults to hands-on service opportunities.
Patrick grew up in Southwest Ohio and earned his biology degree from Kenyon College. He’s had a lifelong fascination with wildlife, ecology, and conservation, and his field experience reads like an adventure novel: mist-netting bats, trapping insects under a blazing sun, and electrofishing mountain streams in the North Cascades.
He also knows a thing or two about bringing people outdoors. Patrick served as president of his college’s Outdoors Club, and in 2020 he thru-hiked the entire Appalachian Trail, an experience he says taught him more about adaptability and feeling at home in unfamiliar places than anything else. That’s a pretty good qualification for someone who’s just arrived on the Cape and is about to meet a whole lot of new people. While his long-term goal is a PhD in ecology and conservation, he’s excited to spend a year learning about conservation on the Cape and becoming part of the local community.
If you’re not familiar with ACC, it’s one of the Cape’s great community assets. Since 1999, the program has engaged service-minded adults to meet environmental and disaster preparedness needs across Cape Cod, recruiting, training, and hosting 20 national service members each year who commit to 11 months of full-time service. Members take on capacity-building projects for municipal governments and nonprofits in all 15 towns, with focus areas in natural resource management, disaster preparedness and response, environmental education, and volunteer engagement.
Earlier this year, we set out to answer a deceptively simple question: how many nonprofits exist on the Cape and Islands? We pulled every registered organization from IRS records and gathered them into one searchable map and directory, covering more than 1,700 organizations. For the first time, the full scope of the our region's nonprofit sector was visible in one place.
When we launched the directory, we asked visitors to take a quick, one-minute survey before diving in: name a few Cape nonprofits off the top of your head, tell us how you’ve engaged with local organizations, and share how many nonprofits you think operate here. We shared early results from the survey at this year's 2026 Philanthropy Day Conference, and the results are shaping what's we're investigating next.
We believe the orientation gap is especially wide for young adults. And national research shows that getting involved in one’s community now depends on insider knowledge that many people don’t have. The directory showed us just how many organizations are out there. But a directory is only a starting point. Knowing that an organization exists isn’t the same as walking through its door, picking up a shovel at a trail workday, or joining its volunteer roster.
To develop a local model for making participation simpler, Patrick will:
Interview young adults where they are, through tabling, presentations, and visits at high schools and colleges across Barnstable County, plus CCYP events and workplaces.
Lead a series of listening sessions to hear directly from young adults about what draws them into community service and what keeps them out.
Plan and lead two Volunteer Connect service events with our conservation partners.
If you’ve browsed our directory and wondered where to start, Patrick is here to help answer that question. Watch our newsletter and social channels for listening sessions and service days! If you’d like to host a future service event or connect with us about engaging young volunteers, please reach out. And if you haven’t explored the directory yet, now’s a great time.