America Answers Call to Help Kids

A year after Presidents’ Summit, charities gain many new partners

Nearly 350 businesses, government agencies, and national charities are working on new or expanded efforts to help kids in response to last year’s Presidents’ Summit for America’s Future.

Their combined efforts are generating millions of new dollars for charities and helping to recruit thousands of volunteers in response to the challenge issued by President Clinton and four former Presidents to help two million needy kids by 2000.

But many charity leaders also say that progress toward that goal has been marred by turf battles, inadequate management of new volunteers, and lack of coordination between national organizations and their state and local affiliates.

As next week’s one-year anniversary of the Philadelphia gathering approaches, charity leaders say that the most tangible benefit, particularly for national groups, has been the formation of new partnerships with companies. Sony Electronics, for example, has announced a new program in which employees in 12 cities will get two days of paid leave each year to volunteer at affiliates of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and the Boys & Girls Clubs of America.

“Before the summit, companies just gave us proceeds from product sales,” says Tom McKenna, executive director of Big Brothers Big Sisters of America. “With the summit, we’ve moved beyond cause-related marketing into much more meaningful partnerships. Cash is only part of it.”

Even with such positive developments, some charity leaders have been frustrated by the performance of America’s Promise, the non-profit group led by Gen. Colin Powell that is in charge of making sure the summit’s goals are accomplished. They say the organization has not done enough to insure that pledges made by national companies and other groups end up helping kids around the country.

Some non-profit officials also say they are annoyed that America’s Promise has not developed a measurement tool that will make it easy to gauge whether kids actually benefit from their efforts. They are working to make sure youngsters have access to the five elements that summit organizers identified as essential: health care, safe places to live and learn, the chance to learn marketable skills, a relationship with a caring adult, and opportunities to volunteer.

America’s Promise cannot provide precise figures to show how many millions of dollars in donations were made or how many volunteers came forward as a direct result of the summit, but many charity leaders say they believe that the event is helping to bring about a powerful movement to help children.

“The summit did make people stop and think,” says Rebecca Rimel, president of the Pew Charitable Trusts in Philadelphia. “It sent a wake-up call and helped the American public say, ‘This matters and I can make some difference in children’s lives.’ ” Her foundation gave $400,000 to help pay for the summit and $1-million to America’s Promise.

In many cities, the number of people volunteering has risen significantly in the year since the highly publicized event. The United Way in Boston, which runs the local volunteer center, placed 10,000 people in charity jobs in 1997, up from just 4,000 the year before. In San Antonio, an estimated 31,000 people volunteered last year, more than triple the number who did so in 1996, according to the volunteer center there.

Corporations have also provided many volunteers and money and have shown a new willingness to work with charities. Among them:

* Princess House, a New York in-home sales company, has pledged $300,000 to work with the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship. The result: a new program in which more than 100 pregnant teen-agers are now learning to support themselves by selling cosmetics, crystal ornaments, and other products from their homes. “The summit was catalytic,” says Jim Northrop, the company’s president. “The call to action we heard is that we need to take the time and energy to invest in communities that are disadvantaged.”

* Hallmark Cards has designed a congratulatory card that reminds up to 3.2 million new mothers — more than half of the country’s new mothers each year — to immunize their babies. Hallmark’s cards are signed by the governor of the state where the new mothers live and are distributed by health departments, hospitals, and non-profit groups. Each card includes a detachable form that parents can use to record the child’s immunizations.

* In less than a year, Mitsubishi Motor Sales of America fulfilled its three-year pledge to give $190,000 in scholarships and in-kind donations. Officials say they plan to give away more. In addition, the company helped pay for environmental-education programs, run by the National 4-H Council, for 200,000 young people — 67,000 more than Mitsubishi had agreed to help.

* Nike has promised to give $3-million to support mentor programs run by 100 Black Men of America, a charity headquartered in Atlanta, while the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services is teaming up with the group to conduct research to determine if adult mentors can successfully influence kids’ attitudes about sex and family planning.

Non-profit groups are also collaborating with each other in new ways. 100 Black Men, for example, is providing mentors for Big Brothers Big Sisters, which in turn is working with Boys & Girls Clubs of America to identify children who would benefit if they had a mentor.

To serve children more effectively in the Charlotte, N.C, area, 40 separate mentor programs have agreed to work with a single telephone referral service run by the local United Way. United Way officials interview people who want to become mentors and refer them to an appropriate group.

Such partnerships are the most powerful legacy of the summit, many say.

“The greatest success of the summit is the number of places where this is beginning to occur, the rallying of a range of forces,” says Harris Wofford, head of the Corporation for National Service. The federal agency sponsored the summit along with America’s Promise and the Points of Light Foundation, a Washington charity that promotes volunteerism.

However beneficial, the new partnerships between companies and non-profit groups, and even those involving two or more charities, have not always been smooth.

“Developing meaningful alliances is still very challenging, particularly with other non-profit human-service agencies,” says Mr. McKenna of Big Brothers Big Sisters. Charities that compete for donations are often reluctant to work together because they might have to share successful fund-raising ideas, he says.

“You’d never expect corporations to collaborate, like Nike and Reebok getting together to build a better sneaker, but that’s what we’re being asked to do,” he says.

In summit-inspired partnerships with companies, charity leaders complain that corporate officials often expect to call the shots — especially since they provide money and other resources — and do not regard non-profit groups as equal partners. All too often, charity officials say, each organization has a different way of doing things but assumes that the organizations all work the same way. As a result, working together brings out the worst in all parties.

“If you can bring out their strengths, great,” says one charity leader, who asked that his name not be used. “But if you’re not careful, you bring out the weaknesses: the greed of corporations, disorganization of non-profits, bureaucracy of public education, and corruption of government.”

In other cases, charities have had trouble persuading corporations to make adequate pledges in response to the summit. Officials at America’s Promise are working with one national company, which they would not name, that has submitted five different proposals. America’s Promise has sent all the proposals back for improvement because it considered them to be inadequate, especially for a large, thriving company.

“If a major corporation is doing this much when they can do that much, we will kick it back,” says Dane Snowden, vice-president for corporate commitments at America’s Promise.

In some cases, commitments have been expanded to obtain more benefits for children.

Working with the Boys & Girls Clubs of America, America’s Promise helped to broaden commitments by companies like LensCrafters. The company had promised to provide free eye examinations to thousands of needy kids but was persuaded to also include free glasses and other eye care.

Nevertheless, some charities, even nationally recognized ones that serve children, have been unable to generate any new corporate support as a result of the summit — despite concerted efforts.

“I have aggressively tried to use the summit in fund raising,” says Catherine Milton, executive director of Save the Children US. “We had someone from our corporate marketing staff who spent months working nearly full time to develop relations that would have the summit as a basis, but it has helped us less than we thought.”

Ms. Milton says she spent months with an official from the American Camping Association to develop a joint proposal in which corporations would provide money, volunteers, and other support needed to send poor kids to summer camp. But lengthy negotiations with two different companies have led nowhere, Ms. Milton says.

Ms. Milton and some experts on volunteerism say they are also frustrated by the short shrift that many companies — and charities — give to the challenge of managing volunteers.

They say corporations and charities alike have made commitments to recruit more volunteers without first figuring out what changes are needed to accommodate all the new workers.

One exception is Big Brothers Big Sisters. Using a $100,000 grant from the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation, Big Brothers Big Sisters has hired a consultant to help figure out what internal changes are necessary to meet its promise to double its number of mentors over the next four years. And because it costs roughly $1,000 for each match between a mentor and child, the charity is embarking on its first-ever national fund-raising drive to help get the $100-million it needs to achieve the goal.

“Volunteers are not free,” says Mr. McKenna of Big Brothers Big Sisters. “What makes our program successful is that it’s a service with professionals who recruit, screen, and manage volunteers. This all costs money.”

Charities in Massachusetts have come to the same conclusion. A coalition of local leaders calculated that it would cost $35-million to provide 50,000 kids with mentors. They are asking the state government, corporations, and foundations to come up with $30-million. Non-profit groups will provide the remaining $5-million.

But trying to raise the money over the last six months has been an uphill battle. “It’s almost taboo to talk about the government spending more money, but this is the message we’re trying to sell the state legislature,” says Linda Alioto Robinson, executive director of One to One in Boston, a charity that provides referrals and training for mentors. “They know nothing about mentoring. They do not understand that you don’t just recruit someone off the street.”

Some companies have gotten the message. United Parcel Service, which counts 30,000 volunteers among its 331,000 employees, has just announced $2-million in grants to help charities do a better job of overseeing unpaid workers.

“Managing volunteers effectively has become increasingly important for organizations and has never really been addressed in a significant way,” says Gary Lee, executive director of the UPS Foundation, in Atlanta. Mr. Lee says that he heard so many volunteer-management concerns from charity officials at the summit that he recommended that the foundation conduct a survey, which cost about $200,000. It assessed Americans’ views on volunteering and how charities use volunteers.

The telephone poll of more than 1,000 adults in February found that a high percentage of volunteers said they had quit a volunteer job because they had been poorly managed. Some 40 per cent said they had been frustrated because charities did not use their time well or provided them with poorly defined tasks.

The survey results helped the foundation decide to allot the $2-million in volunteer-management grants. The money is being split evenly among five national non-profit groups: 100 Black Men, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Junior Achievement, the Points of Light Foundation, and United Way of America. Each charity has come up with a different plan to bolster its volunteer program and will receive $400,000 over the next two years.

United Way, for example, is using the money to develop a program in which volunteers will provide child care and other services to families with a parent who is trying to move off welfare and into a job. Junior Achievement is training teachers to recruit adult volunteers who will serve as mentors to children.

One year after the summit, it is clear that local groups do not have nearly as positive a view of its benefits as do many national organizations that appear to have gained the most from the event’s spotlight.

In many states — as well as in cities and towns — civic leaders are forming organizations modeled after America’s Promise. The new groups are supposed to encourage area leaders to assess local needs and resources, generate new commitments to help kids, and keep track of the efforts.

Many regions have experienced a slow start, largely because the local coordinating bodies seldom have employees whose sole job is to carry out the goals of the summit. Instead, the work is being handled by other people, such as directors of volunteer centers, who must squeeze summit duties into their already-full working hours.

As a result, many cities have not yet started expanding efforts to aid kids because the cities are still involved in initial efforts to rally local leaders. Or they are engaged in the often-complicated task of assessing local needs and resources to avoid duplicating programs or providing unnecessary services.

Some local charity officials fear that unless they can get more staff members, money, and other support, the momentum of the summit could fizzle.

“This is a whole job on top of another job,” says Carrie Moffitt, chief executive officer of Volunteer Houston, the city’s major volunteer center. She is a member of Houston’s Promise, a coalition of civic leaders who are carrying out local summit goals on a volunteer basis. “This is way more work than we ever thought it would be,” she says. “We are all feeling like, How long can we do this?”

Still, many charity leaders say that the summit has made their jobs much easier. Steve Mariotti, president of the National Foundation for Teaching Entrepreneurship, says that the charity’s revenue has jumped by at least 20 per cent as a result of corporations and others seeking to respond to the challenges of the summit. But that increase, he says, is nothing compared with the lift in morale the event offered to his employees and board members.

“It was cool for my board, who tend to be small-business guys, to see Colin Powell on national TV and involved in the same field they are,” says Mr. Mariotti.

As for the staff, the summit “helped make it cool to work with charities that work with at-risk kids,” he says. “There’s no way to put a price tag on that. You couldn’t buy that in 50 years.”