An Appeal for Action

Bush asks Americans to make a major volunteer commitment

In a move charity leaders hope will lead to a wave of volunteers, President Bush has called on Americans to embrace a

“new culture of responsibility” and to commit at least two years, or 4,000 hours, of their lives to serve their neighbors and country. He is also urging that more than a half-billion additional federal dollars be spent to encourage such service.

In his State of the Union address last week, the president urged citizens to help charities or to sign up with federal national-service programs that work with many nonprofit organizations under a new umbrella organization called the USA Freedom Corps that Mr. Bush is creating.

“This time of adversity offers a unique moment of opportunity, a moment we must seize to change our culture,” Mr. Bush said. “Through the gathering momentum of millions of acts of service and decency and kindness, I know we can overcome evil with greater good.”

The president asked Congress to support his expanded national-service efforts with more than $560-million in additional federal spending in the next fiscal year. Mr. Bush also told Congress that he wanted to work with its members on “ways to encourage the good work of charities and faith-based groups” in the “same spirit of cooperation we have applied to our war against terrorism.”

Michael Brown, president and co-founder of City Year, a charity that runs service programs in 13 cities using AmeriCorps members and grants, called Mr. Bush’s plan “far-reaching and visionary.” Mr. Brown added: “He’s really putting forward an idea of what it means to be an American citizen. It’s a 21st-century redefinition of citizenship.”

While there was much enthusiasm for Mr. Bush’s plans, some charity leaders worried about whether nonprofit groups would be able to raise additional money to manage a big increase in volunteers.

Another key issue is whether Congress will approve Mr. Bush’s budget request to pay for the expanded programs.

Mr. Bush’s call to service is the latest, but not the only, response by federal leaders to try to convert into real volunteer action what many believe is a new desire by Americans to help their country since the September 11 terrorist attacks. Sen. Evan Bayh, an Indiana Democrat, and Sen. John McCain, an Arizona Republican, have proposed legislation that would, among other things, expand the annual number of participants in AmeriCorps from 50,000 to 250,000 by the end of the decade.

“In the wake of the events of September 11, many Americans are asking how they can give back to their country,” Mr. Bayh said, adding that he was “pleased” by President Bush’s announcement. “Now is the time to tap into the renewed national spirit by giving more Americans the opportunity to serve a cause beyond their own interests.”

In his State of the Union address, the president said that, following the September 11 attacks, “we have glimpsed what a new culture of responsibility could look like. We want to be a nation that serves goals larger than self. We have been offered a unique opportunity, and we must not let this moment pass.”

President Bush said that the creation of a new government program called the USA Freedom Corps will help Americans channel their volunteer efforts. The administration said that the new agency will work with key national-service organizations in government and the nonprofit world “to provide incentives and new opportunities to serve at home and abroad.”

The USA Freedom Corps, Mr. Bush said, will focus on “responding in case of crisis at home, rebuilding our communities, and extending American compassion throughout the world.” It would have three components:

A new Citizen Corps. This program will place Americans in specific “homeland security efforts” across the country. The corps will consist of councils that will promote programs that include a new Medical Reserve Corps, Volunteers in Police Service Program, Terrorist Information and Prevention System, as well as major increases in the size of two existing programs — Neighborhood Watch and the Community Emergency Response Team.

“America needs retired doctors and nurses who can be mobilized in major emergencies, volunteers to help police and fire departments, [and] transportation and utility workers well-trained in spotting danger,” Mr. Bush said.

An expanded AmeriCorps and National Senior Service Corps. The Bush administration wants to increase the number of AmeriCorps participants from 50,000 to 75,000, and the number of Senior Corps volunteers from 500,000 to 600,000. AmeriCorps members help with community projects, and most volunteers are selected by and work for local and national charities. They get education awards to help finance college or pay back student loans. Senior Corps participants volunteer to provide community services that include becoming “foster grandparents” to needy children.

Mr. Bush said that the United States needs its citizens working to help others. “We need mentors to love children, especially children whose parents are in prison, and we need more talented teachers in troubled schools,” he said.

A bigger Peace Corps. Mr. Bush wants to double the number of volunteers in the Peace Corps, a signature program of the Kennedy administration, over the next five years from fewer than 7,500 to nearly 15,000, its historic high in 1966.

The USA Freedom Corps will be managed by a national council, whose chairman will be the president. An assistant to the president, John Bridgeland, will become executive director of the Freedom Corps and will oversee its day-to-day operations from his office in the White House.

“Americans serve their country in extraordinary and countless ways,” the Bush administration said a statement following the president’s address. “Most of our nation’s civic work is being done without the aid of the federal government. But we believe the federal government can work to enhance opportunities for Americans to serve their neighbors and their nation.”

Ready to Volunteer

Officials at the Corporation for National and Community Service said that Mr. Bush’s proposals could help them put many more volunteers to work.

“We believe there are additional people ready to join,” said Gary Kowalczyk, the organization’s coordinator of national-service programs. “We will have to do some more recruitment, but we think the interest is there, and meeting these ambitious goals is very doable.”

Mr. Kowalczyk said some Senior Corps programs have waiting lists that exceed 2,000 people.

The number of young people inquiring about AmeriCorps service through the agency’s Web site since September 11 rose by nearly 30 percent, from 1,100 a week before the terrorist attacks to 1,400 each week in the months immediately following. “Some of our best AmeriCorps programs are receiving three to four applications for every slot,” said Mr. Kowalczyk.

City Year also reports that young people are showing high interest in service in recent months. Inquiries for applications to join its service program, such as downloads of application forms from its Web site, have increased 96 percent from September through November.

Officials at both City Year and AmeriCorps said it was too early to tell whether the inquiries will translate into a rise in the number of applications.

Mr. Kowalczyk said he believes that charities will be quick to put any new volunteers to work if his organization and others are able to recruit them. “The interest by charities for more resources is significant,” he said. “Without significant outreach because of funding limitations, over the last several years we have turned down between 10 to 25 percent” of the requests from charities interested in working with the agency’s service members.

Many charity leaders agree that Mr. Bush’s plan to increase AmeriCorps is workable, but they warn that a rapid expansion would pose some challenges.

Mr. Brown of City Year urged nonprofit groups to make sure they have the employees and information technology to be able to coordinate the new workers that may result from the Bush administration’s plan.

“It behooves nonprofits to be asking for infrastructure investments and not to think they can just do everything by just saying, ‘I’ll keep expanding my program,’ without the back-office capabilities that allow you to be effective, that allow you to be accountable, and that allow you to be sustainable,” Mr. Brown said. “It’s about capacity building as opposed to saying, ‘I’m just going to grow my program.’”

Another City Year official said that charities that hope to take advantage of an increase in AmeriCorps members will also have to be ready to do more fund raising in the future to meet the service program’s requirement that charities match money from the government. “It’s not without challenges,” said AnnMaura Connolly, vice president for public policy and special initiatives. “We’ll have to focus real hard on raising that private-sector match.”

Drafting Participants

Some observers were disappointed that the president’s plans left out the controversial idea of making national service a requirement for all young people as a way to emphasize the importance of giving back.

“We ought to institute a new kind of draft that everybody after the age of 18 or at high-school graduation would be required to register for,” said William Galston, a professor at University of Maryland’s School of Public Affairs who has studied national-service programs and supports a larger expansion of national service. “The people whose numbers come up would then be given a choice of among varieties of service, civilian or military.”

While nonprofit groups like City Year could benefit from such a draft, Mr. Brown says he does not see much practicality in the idea. “I see mandatory service as largely a red herring but I appreciate its spirit,” he said. “We should inspire people to serve. I’d like to see one day where it’s the natural thing to spent a year or more in service. What I’m not for, and what I think is against the American psyche, is the idea that you’d put somebody in jail if they didn’t go serve.”

Other nonprofit leaders had different items on their wish lists.

Rick Cohen, president of the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy, in Washington, worried that Mr. Bush’s focus on volunteerism overlooked other pressing needs of nonprofit groups. “President Bush deserves credit for encouraging volunteerism and civic service, but charity alone cannot and should not bear the full burden of helping our nation’s most disadvantaged families,” he said. “Good neighbors cannot replace good government.”

Mr. Cohen wants Mr. Bush to promote “a nonprofit stimulus package” to help charities “stretched thin” by the recession and terrorist attacks. Included in Mr. Cohen’s requests is a plea for increases in federal money to pay for charity social-service programs.

Harris Wofford, a former Democratic senator from Pennsylvania who served as chief executive officer of the Corporation for National and Community Service during the Clinton administration, said he would have liked Mr. Bush to have included expansion of the Corporation for National and Community Service’s Learn and Serve America project. That project provides grants to schools and community organizations so that more than 1 million students, from kindergarten through college, can do volunteer work.

“Service learning should be something every student experiences as part of American education,” said Mr. Wofford, who is also chairman of America’s Promise, which encourages people to serve as mentors to schoolchildren.

Many charity leaders felt that Mr. Bush’s support of AmeriCorps marked a sea change from how Republicans generally had viewed the national-service program. Several times during the Clinton administration, the House of Representatives had voted to kill AmeriCorps, although money was always restored during negotiations with the Senate.

“This is a moment that national service on the home front is winning the status of a nonpartisan institution,” said Mr. Wofford.

But Mr. Wofford and others said that before Congress agrees to an expansion of AmeriCorps and other national-service programs it will want to make sure they are meeting their goals. “That’s a vital question. It needs to be answered, project by project, and community by community,” said Mr. Wofford.

AmeriCorps programs have a variety of ways to measure effectiveness — from the number of immunizations administered to children to the number of houses built in poor neighborhoods — but evaluating them should be simple, he said. “It isn’t brain surgery. Some programs are very successful and some are not.”

Leslie Lenkowsky, chief executive officer of the Corporation for National and Community Service, said his agency plans major changes in its programs with the goal of “making them more accountable, making them more responsive to local needs, to reduce the barriers, the obstacles that people have in joining them.” One measure he intends to look at is how successful participants in national-service programs are at helping charities recruit and use additional volunteers.

“We’re going to want to see that our programs are sustainable,” said Mr. Lenkowsky, “that is to say, that they really sink roots in the communities and develop a life of their own that’s independent of the corporation.”

Information on the Bush administration’s plans can be found at the Web site of USA Freedom Corps, http://www.usafreedomcorps.gov; the Corporation for National Service site, http://cns.gov; and the White House site, http://whitehouse.gov.

THE CORPORATION FOR NATIONAL AND COMMUNITY SERVICE: KEY PROGRAMS

AmeriCorps: More than 50,000 young people participate in this “domestic Peace Corps” by performing such activities as teaching poor children to read, building low-cost houses, cleaning rivers and streams, and providing emergency and long-term assistance to victims of natural disasters. Most members are selected by and serve with local and national organizations like Habitat for Humanity, the American Red Cross, and Boys & Girls Clubs. After their service ends, AmeriCorps members receive education scholarships that help finance college or pay back student loans. The budget for AmeriCorps in fiscal 2002 is $401-million.

National Senior Service Corps: More than 500,000 Americans, ages 55 and older, volunteer to provide hundreds of community services, such as delivering meals, tutoring young people, and participating in neighborhood-watch programs; serve as “foster grandparents” to children with special needs at schools, hospitals, and other locations; and work with older adults who need assistance, such as help with answering mail and shopping for groceries. The 2002 budget is $206-million.

Learn and Serve America: This project provides grants to schools and community organizations so that more than 1 million students, from kindergarten through college, can do volunteer work, such as starting recycling programs at schools and developing community gardens, while improving their academic skills and learning habits of good citizenship. The 2002 budget is $43-million.