-- President Bill Clinton, March 1, 1993
With these words, President Clinton launched AmeriCorps and the
Corporation for National Service, starting a new chapter in the long
tradition of citizen service in America. Since 1993, millions of
Americans have served in national service programs, bringing about
lasting improvements in our communities and demonstrating that service
can be an effective strategy for solving problems.
Recognizing that our strength as a nation depends on individuals who
act on their commitment to help others, national service provides
opportunities for all citizens to do their part. More and more
Americans are taking advantage of those opportunities by tutoring and
mentoring children, making neighborhoods safer, helping communities
recover from natural disasters, building Habitat for Humanity homes,
restoring parks and doing hundreds of other things to improve lives
and bring people together.
Tapping the power of citizens to get things done will be even more
important as we enter a new century full of challenges. No longer
will we look to government to solve most of our problems. But just
because government is being reduced, it doesn't mean our problems are
going away. Indeed many of these problems from crime and drugs to
illiteracy and homelessness are mounting.
To meet these challenges, we need to unleash the greatest power our
country has -- the energy and idealism of our people. If big
government is not the answer, then we need big citizens, who can act
on the problems that are mounting in our midst. This must be our aim
to crack the atom of civic power, and release it to solve our most
pressing problems.
The Corporation for National Service through its programs Learn &
Serve America, the Senior Corps and AmeriCorps -- is working with
thousands of nonprofit partners to strengthen the voluntary sector and
unleash citizen power. Our aim is to make service a rite of passage
for every young person, a routine part of life for Americans of every
age.
The American Tradition of Service
Of course, citizen service is not a new idea in this country.
Traveling across America in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed
that Americans did not wait for the government to act to solve a
problem. If a school needed to be built, they built it. Tocqueville
marveled at how Americans were constantly forming groups to meet
common goals, and to this day, no country in the world has such a vast
network of clubs, church and civic groups, and neighborhood
organizations.
In this century, each new generation of Americans has risen to the
challenge of service. In the Great Depression, four million young
people joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, planting trees,
restoring parks, and building roads, bridges and trails that we still
enjoy today. In the 1940s, the GI Bill linked service with
educational opportunity for the first time when a grateful nation
rewarded its returning World War II veterans with funding for
education.
For the next generation, the call to service came from President John
F. Kennedy, who launched the Peace Corps in 1961. "Ask not what your
country can do for you," President Kennedy declared. "Ask what you can
do for your country." Since then, more than 140,000 Peace Corps
volunteers have traveled to the poorest corners of the globe, building
schools, helping farmers, treating the sick and building a global
community.
The 1960s also saw the birth of Volunteers in Service to America, or
VISTA. For more than 30 years, VISTA has helped low-income
communities help themselves. Along with VISTA, a diverse array of
service programs began to grow up from the grassroots: conservation
corps, urban youth corps and service opportunities generated by high
schools and colleges, businesses, churches and civic organizations.
The newest offspring in the service movement is AmeriCorps, created
by Congress and President Clinton in 1993. AmeriCorps was built on
the foundation of the first National Service Act, passed by President
George Bush in 1990.
Since 1993, nearly 100,000 young people have served in AmeriCorps,
helping solve problems in education, public safety, the environment
and human needs. This year alone more than 40,000 AmeriCorps members
will serve in more than 1,200 communities. In return for a year of
full-time service, AmeriCorps members earn a living allowance and
$4,725 to pay for college or pay back student loans.
A Focus on Results
AmeriCorps' motto is "getting things done," and that focus on results
has paid off in many tangible ways. In one year, AmeriCorps members
taught or tutored 500,000 students, mentored 95,000 more, recruited
39,000 new volunteers, immunized 64,000 children, helped with
disasters in over 30 states, worked with more than 3,000 safety
patrols, and with local law enforcement and civilian groups, trained
100,000 people in violence prevention, built or rehabilitated 5,600
homes, helped put 32,000 homeless people in permanent residences,
worked with people with AIDS and other serious diseases, and carried
out a wide range of environmental projects.
A key part of the AmeriCorps' story is how full-time service expands
traditional volunteering. America's largest volunteer organizations
including Big Brothers/Big Sisters, United Way, the YMCA and the
American Red Cross engage and utilize AmeriCorps members. They
have seen how full-time AmeriCorps members help them accomplish more,
recruit more volunteers and use volunteers more effectively. Studies
have found that every AmeriCorps member on average will generate an
additional 12 community volunteers.
AmeriCorps members feel deep pride about being involved in their
communities and solving problems they didn't know they could solve.
Ask Michelle Harvey, whose AmeriCorps team in Kansas City helped close
44 crack houses and keep her neighborhood free from drug dealers. Or
Sean Whitten, who used his AmeriCorps training to rescue a young woman
who was lost for two days in the freezing cold mountains of Tennessee.
AmeriCorps is just one part of a larger family of programs overseen by
the Corporation for National Service. That family includes more than
450,000 older American volunteers serving in the three programs of the
Senior Corps Foster Grandparents, Senior Companions and RSVP.
America has the largest, fastest-growing, best-educated group of
seniors in our history. We must do far more to realize the potential
of over 50 million seniors, who bring to service a lifetime of skills
and experience as parents, workers and citizens.
The other great pool of talent just waiting to be tapped is the 50
million young people in our schools, colleges and universities.
Through Learn & Serve America, we're providing opportunities to nearly
one million students from kindergarten through college to meet
community needs while improving their academic skills and learning the
habits of good citizenship. This program helps teachers integrate
community service into the curriculum, a teaching method known as
service learning. By serving, students develop teamwork,
self-discipline and initiative skills to help them become more
productive workers and more responsible citizens.
National service in all its forms is helping meet a key national
education goal. In the America Reads initiative, President Clinton
challenged schools and communities to see that every American child
reads by the end of the third grade. The president called for a
citizen army of volunteer tutors to work in local afterschool or
in-school literacy programs to give extra help eeded by millions of
children who are falling behind in their reading skills. He asked for
additional AmeriCorps members and senior and college student
volunteers to organize or expand tutoring programs and to provide
direct tutoring. Congress has provided significant new funds for this
expansion.
Help for Children
Nowhere is America's volunteer energy more needed than in the caring
and guiding and educating of our young. Young people today are
exposed to risks that were unknown to our parents and grandparents,
from AIDS to easy access to guns and drugs. One of four children are
victims of assault or abuse. One in five lives below the poverty
line. While overall crime rates are down, crime by juveniles is up --
especially violent crime.
Mobilizing volunteers and other sectors of society to help America's
children succeed was the key idea behind the Presidents' Summit for
America's Future, held in Philadelphia in April 1997. With the
leadership of President Clinton and former President Bush, other
former Presidents, General Colin Powell, 37 governors and top leaders
from business, government and the nonprofit sector, the Summit called
for a new era of citizen action in America to turn the tide for
millions of children heading for disaster.
The campaign launched in Philadelphia America's Promise, the
Alliance for Youth is now underway, led by General Powell and
backed by all the former living presidents. America's Promise aims to
provide to every young person in the United States the five resources
they need for success: a caring adult (a mentor, a tutor, a coach);
safe places to learn and grow; a healthy start; an effective education
that assures the ability to read and provides marketable skills; and
an opportunity for all young people to give back and themselves to
serve.
The Corporation for National Service was proud to initiate and
cosponsor the Summit in partnership with the Points of Light
Foundation, and will continue to be in the forefront of this national
campaign. Since the Summit, the Corporation has added nearly 9,000
new AmeriCorps members sponsored by community and faith-based
organizations, helped recruit 1,000 colleges and universities to send
work-study students to tutor elementary students, and launched Seniors
in Schools with 700 senior volunteers in nine cities.
In addition to serving youth better, the Summit also launched a
strategy to engage more young people themselves in service. Martin
Luther King, Jr., said, "Everybody can be great because everybody can
serve." Young people need to be challenged and inspired to discover
and realize that greatness. All young Americans should have a chance
to see themselves and be seen as leaders and resources, not as
problems or victims.
Former Michigan Governor George Romney, who had the dream of this
Summit and worked until his death to make it happen, once said there
is no free lunch when it comes to volunteering. It requires
organization, time and resources from every sector public, private
and nonprofit. Just as we invest in roads and bridges to keep our
economy strong, so must we invest in service and volunteering to keep
our democracy strong. Healthy communities depend on informed, active
citizens.
The secret heart of America and the secret to our success has always
been our belief that we can change things, we can make things better,
that working together we can solve our most difficult problems. As
we enter a new century and a new era of limited government, that idea
and how we put it into practice will be more important than
ever.
__________
Harris Wofford, a former U.S. Senator from
Pennsylvania, is chief executive officer of the Corporation for
National Service.
U.S. Society &
Values
USIA Electronic Journal, Vol. 3, No. 1, June 1998
