New National Service Chief Vows to Improve Relations With Charities

In an interview with The Chronicle, David Eisner, the new chief executive of the Corporation for National

and Community Service — the federal agency that oversees AmeriCorps and other service programs — discussed how he plans to tackle the organization’s problems.

Last year, the corporation faced allegations of financial mismanagement and had to limit its service corps by thousands of positions because it had approved more slots in the previous year than it could afford. In 2003, the organization approved about 30,000 new positions, compared with the nearly 70,000 approved in 2002.

Despite the problems, Mr. Eisner, who started his new job last month, takes over a federal agency that continues to receive political support. President Bush has proposed increasing AmeriCorps volunteers to 75,000 this year, and Congress, after denying the corporation extra money last year to avert cuts, may provide an almost 20-percent increase in its budget for the current fiscal year, including a 62-percent increase in support for AmeriCorps. The measure is part of a comprehensive spending bill Congress is expected to consider soon.

Mr. Eisner replaces Leslie Lenkowsky, who resigned in August to return to academe. Mr. Eisner says he wants to put a high priority on improving communications with the charities the agency works with and on making the agency’s finances more transparent.

Before joining the corporation, Mr. Eisner worked as a vice president at the AOLdivision of Time Warner, where he oversaw the company’s charitable foundation. He also served as a consultant for Network for Good, a Web site that encourages people to donate and volunteer.

A graduate of Stanford University and Georgetown University’s law school, Mr. Eisner has also worked in government as a press secretary for three Republican members of Congress.

Following are excerpts of Mr. Eisner’s remarks:

How have the troubles of the past year affected Ameri-Corps’s reputation among the organizations it supports?

Our relationship with grantees suffered. The underlying equity of the corporation was in many ways diminished in the eyes of our grantees, less by our capacity restraints and more by the perception that we had not dealt straight with them. Their perception was that we could have provided better notice, more information sooner so they would have been better able to respond to our capacity shortfall. They also felt the shortfall was a product of mismanagement.

Is that true for the general public, too?

Interestingly, our overall brand was strengthened. It’s the classic problem that you don’t know how much you need something until it threatens to go away. The threat brought attention at the community, media, state, and national levels as to how much good the program is doing, both for its grantees and its volunteers. It helped build greater bipartisan appreciation and support for the program than ever existed.

What will you do to improve relations with charities that receive AmeriCorps money?

We have to improve communications. I don’t mean public relations, but collaboration so our grantees are better included in our formulation of policy; development of programs; and responses to our budgetary, regulatory, political, and policy questions. We also have to be more transparent. We have to pick metrics to help grantees understand how we manage ourselves and our numbers. Our management reform will also go a long way to give us better fiscal accountability, and to be fast, flexible, predictable, and strong.

You’ve said AmeriCorps is at a crossroads. How so?

The corporation broadly, all of its programs, have played into a rising tide of Americans’ demand to participate more in civic institutions and to ask what they can do as issues of patriotism and duty come to the fore. We are also on the cusp of receiving a budget that would enable us to turn AmeriCorps into a robust participant in national service.

At the same time, there is greater public and media awareness of the good works of our grantees, programs, and volunteers. And we have the makings of the greatest bipartisan support in Congress ever and a president who has made service one of the strong planks of his agenda. All that together signals we are at a unique moment of opportunity to move this whole dialogue and program forward.

What will happen if Ameri-Corps does not receive the expected increase in funds?

The budget in the omnibus [spending bill] gives us the opportunity to support the president’s target of supporting 75,000 AmeriCorps members with the appropriate level of training and support with a mix that would enable the field to flourish. Every increment taken away will involve sacrifice at one level or another. The current proposed budget is the budget we need.

The proposed budget would cut money for administrative and other costs. How would you handle those cuts?

We are prepared to make do with less, to make tough decisions, to absorb the cuts on the back end, inside the corporation, so grantees won’t feel that negative impact.

We have a lot of buckets of money usable for different things, and we are still analyzing how to ensure that our grantees receive everything they need to succeed, including adequate training and evaluation.

What are your views of legislative proposals that would increase the proportion of money charities must raise from other sources to receive federal money?

We want programs to move towards sustainability and want this not to be an entitlement program. At the same time we want to make sure that we are treating grantees fairly and that grantees that serve their clients and members well are not penalized. We want to be careful not to set restrictions in the areas of sustainability or matching that unintentionally preclude us from giving grants to good programs. Some grantees, when ultimately sustainable, will move off on their own, different from other grantees who may never be in a position to do so. I hope the rules end up being flexible.

How resilient is AmeriCorps and the organizations it supports?

People made 2003 work when prospects were still bleak. They pulled through and made do in impossible circumstances. Now there is a light on the horizon.