Amid Crisis, Former National Service Chief Sees Hope in Volunteerism

On the day before he stepped down as chief executive of the Corporation for National and Community Service, David Eisner said in a speech at Georgetown University that he was both proud and concerned.

“It is very possible that this economic downturn is going to do to our civic infrastructure what Hurricane Katrina did to the physical infrastructure in the Gulf Coast,” he said.

The loss of resources — plummeting endowments at foundations, reductions in giving by individuals and corporations, lower municipal budgets for social services and education — paired with a growing need for assistance as jobs disappear, he said later in an interview with The Chronicle, “heralds a disastrous dislocation for nonprofit social-service agencies, community-development organizations, and other civic enterprises supported by a mix of philanthropy and community and government resources.”

But he believes that volunteerism is a tool that can help fight the fallout, and that President-elect Barack Obama, who has proposed to drastically expand AmeriCorps and other national-service programs, is poised to harness the energy of those who want to help.

Mr. Eisner, 47, says he is proud to have spent the past five years putting the Corporation for National and Community Service in a position to “take on a whole new set of roles” in supporting volunteerism and nonprofit groups. A former executive at AOL Time Warner, Mr. Eisner was appointed by President Bush in December 2003, after the agency faced a financial crisis and allegations of mismanagement. Supporters say that on his watch, the corporation became stronger, more efficient, and more accountable and that he built bipartisan support for the agency’s programs, such as AmeriCorps. He battled low morale and high turnover inside the agency, but in 2007 the Partnership for Public Service and American University’s Institute for the Study of Public Policy Implementation, in Washington, named the corporation one of the best places to work in the federal government.

Looking forward, he says the agency should get ready for the “gathering storm” by increasing the number of Vista volunteers, who are AmeriCorps volunteers that generally work to recruit more volunteers for assistance at nonprofit groups.

“Personally, I believe dealing with these issues should be a part of any stimulus package — saving our community infrastructure is just as important as building bridges and highways, and more important to healing the human impacts of this economic crisis,” he says.

Mr. Eisner stepped down in November to make way for President-elect Obama’s appointee to the corporation. He says he will keep his “toes in the water” by working on a project to help increase the amount of pro bono work that professionals donate to nonprofit groups. In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Eisner, who made about $150,000 as the corporation’s leader, discussed his departure, and how his views on volunteerism have changed.

How did you help make the agency win accolades as one of the top places to work in the government?

When I got to the corporation, every single employee was a term employee, which meant that nobody had job security. Everybody’s jobs were up every two to three years. Number two, there was no agreement with [the Office of Personnel Management], so that none of our employees had federal status. Then third, there was no evaluation system. There was no way for managers to tell employees, “You’ve done a good job.” And fourth, there was no merit or bonus system that had any predictability or stability. So these are really basic building blocks. They were hard changes.

I always get a kick out of how sometimes non-glamorous the work is of allowing an organization to be visionary.

How have your views on national service and volunteerism changed?

They’ve changed dramatically. First of all, I see national service most importantly as a critical scaffolding infrastructure for volunteer service across the country.

Before I got there, I hadn’t put together the power of a few national-service participants working with many community volunteers. I had seen them as two different movements. But now I’m very convinced that they work great together. Just two great examples: If you look at Habitat for Humanity, last year 600 AmeriCorps volunteers recruited and supervised more than 200,000 community volunteers that in turn built houses with Habitat. And in Madison, Wis., 15 Vistas recruited 700 tutors and mentors that completely turned around third-grade literacy. So that connection between national service and community volunteering I think is really important.

Is there anything you wish you’d done differently?

There are two. One is, internally, I was a little optimistic about how deep some of the cultural changes were, so after we’d fixed some of our initial budget, technology, accountability stuff, I wish I’d continued to put pressure on so that they became more culturally deep inside the organization.

And secondly, I made a transition from coming out of the hole that the agency was in, toward looking toward the future. The way it felt to me was moving from focusing on credibility, accountability, customer service, to focus on building the “nice to necessary” argument. Too many people believe that when an older American or a student volunteers, that’s a “nice” thing, speaking well of their character and generally making the community feel better about itself. However, when America’s kids are in peril, when disaster strikes, when rural Americans are trapped in fires, it is volunteers that offer us the most effective and most economically viable solutions, through mentoring, tutoring, disaster response, firefighting and so forth. That’s not just nice, it’s necessary. And I feel like I made that [argument] about a year too late. I spent three years climbing out of the hole, when in fact that third year, I probably should have shifted already.

What is your advice for your successor?

First of all, I would respect and listen to both the career staff and the existing grantee base. Number two, I would say think big, as opposed to incremental. And number three, I would say that there’s not much time before this economic crisis devastates our communities, and the agency has to be ready.

How can the agency get ready?

It needs to make sure that it’s got the capacity to develop waivers for [nonprofit] grantees around matching requirements, because many, many grantees are going to stop being able to match funds when their philanthropy goes down. And it means making sure that our state offices and state commissions have the ability to recalibrate their portfolios. My biggest fear is that in some state where last year, the focus was literacy, that next year the critical focus is homeless families, but nobody’s prepared to shift the portfolio from literacy to homeless families. So getting ready to help everyone, being able to make sure that the portfolio is focused on the most critical pieces in the community, is really important.

Do you think President-elect Obama can use some of the excitement around his election to promote volunteering?

Absolutely. Everyone’s so anxious to hear what he asks them to do. Citizens want to hear what President Obama is going to ask them, how he’s going to ask them to serve. And secondly, we’ve got an incoming president who has demonstrated that he understands how to touch these motivated groups, that he’s able to touch young Americans, the millennial generation, in ways that they want to engage, and that he’s got the ability to use this stunning new social-networking technology to generate that excitement and engagement.

I guess the biggest fear here is that if service becomes a, quote, “issue,” then it will fall to the bottom of the list. But with the economy and high-school graduation [rates] and jobs at the top of the list, if this administration sees service as the kind of powerful, low-cost, high-leverage tool that it is, then we’re going to see some amazing momentum.