April 26, 2010 | Read Time: 2 minutes
Denver
As the one-year anniversary of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act approaches Wednesday, stories are appearing in the press noting that little of the money set aside to create volunteer opportunities has yet been distributed.
At a luncheon speech here, Patrick Corvington, the new head of the Corporation for National and Community Service, may have been alluding to the slow process when he said he’s thrown out his earlier views about philanthropy’s plodding pace and has come to appreciate the sector’s “gazelle-like” agility.
“The turning-on-a-dime ability of philanthropy is something that I miss,” Mr. Corvington said, in a remark that elicited plenty of laughs.
Even if the pace may be slow, Mr. Corvington said the law was working and that AmeriCorps is on track to meet the law’s goal of expanding from 75,000 volunteers to 250,000 by 2017.
“America is responding to President Obama’s challenge that every American get involved in solving problems,” Mr. Corvington said.
The corporation will distribute $840-million in grants in 2010 and $985-million next year, Mr. Corvington said. But he said the grants “won’t mean a thing” unless the country begins to make headway against some of its biggest challenges, like high drop-out rates and high unemployment.
“For too long, too many of us have been satisfied by saying that we tried,” Mr. Corvington said. “As the folks who are in advanced-thinking philanthropy know: We must not only try, we must succeed.”
Following Mr. Corvington’s speech, Admiral Michael Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, took the podium and urged foundations to look for ways to help serve soldiers returning from Iraq and Afghanistan.
Many of the returning soldiers — perhaps as many as the 300,000 to 500,000 who have seen combat — will suffer from mental wounds and post-traumatic stress disorder, he said.
The country did not do a good job of taking care of its veterans after the Vietnam War, he said, and he sees the legacy of that failure in the homeless people outside his Washington, D.C., barracks.
“We need to address this early to not repeat Vietnam,” he said.
He pointed to the Iraq Afghanistan Deployment Impact Fund, a program of the California Community Foundation that provides grants to charities that serve military personnel and their families, as an example of an organization that was already having a big impact.
