Library and Harlem Programs Are Priorities for Clinton

Bill Clinton’s latest philanthropic efforts are taking place in Africa and other places outside the United States, but the former president’s work at home remains critical to his current plans.

Two of his major goals domestically are raising money to build his presidential library in Arkansas and working with nonprofit organizations and others to help small businesses and other new neighbors in Harlem, where Mr. Clinton opened his post-presidency office last year.

In an interview here during his tour of Africa last month, Mr. Clinton said that he hopes to wind up his fund-raising efforts early next year for the William J. Clinton Presidential Center, now under construction in Little Rock.

Mr. Clinton’s foundation plans to raise $200-million for construction of the country’s 12th presidential library, which is expected to open in 2004, and to build an endowment.

The 27-acre complex will include a new Clinton School of Public Service, which will offer, through the University of Arkansas, graduate degrees in public service and in foreign policy. The complex will also house a center where the former president will hold conferences and other events.

Despite news reports last spring that some supporters of the library project worried that fund-raising efforts could be falling short, Mr. Clinton says the effort is on track.

“I would have completed all the fund raising this year but I just stopped and raised money for everybody else,” including charities and politicians, he says with a smile. Now, Mr. Clinton says, “I have to get people to be philanthropic with me before I can be philanthropic with other people because I’ve still got millions of dollars left to raise.”

When the library and museum project is complete, “it’ll be a lot more than just sort of a record of what I did as president,” he says. “It will be accessible to the world over the Internet — sort of the first great museum of America’s transition into global interdependence and into the new millennium.”

Battling Poverty

At home in New York, Mr. Clinton says he settled into his new office in Harlem with a goal of being a supporter of the largely black neighborhood that struggles with poverty even as it copes with pockets of growing wealth and gentrification.

“I’ve been heavily involved in a lot of what they are doing there,” says Mr. Clinton, who has always had strong support from black voters. “I like the culture. I like the music. I like the small businesses. I like the whole deal. I like the feel of Harlem, and I have all my life.”

When the former president came to Harlem, he held a meeting with religious, business, and political leaders to talk about how he could help with “the economic empowerment of poor and disadvantaged people” there, he says, which is one of Mr. Clinton’s goals as an ex-president both at home and abroad.

That meeting eventually led to Mr. Clinton’s foundation putting together volunteer “assistance teams” to provide individually tailored management advice to small-business owners in Harlem.

The teams are led by the management consulting firm Booz Allen Hamilton and include members of the National Black MBA Association. Also lined up to participate are graduate students from New York University’s Leonard N. Stern School of Business.

“In this program, we’re consulting and sticking with the small-business owners anywhere from 16 to 22 months,” says Clyde Williams, domestic-policy adviser to Mr. Clinton. “It’s not a quick fix and move on. They need long-term assistance.”

Adds Mr. Williams: “If you stabilize small businesses in a community, then gentrification, which is a major concern here in Harlem, to some extent can be stabilized.”

Mr. Clinton told an audience earlier this year that similar projects that assist small businesses would “sweep New York” in coming years and be copied throughout the country. “What we want to prove is that if we bring world-class help to these folks, they can realize the same productivity gains as big business,” he said.

Helping Schools

Since moving his office to Harlem, Mr. Clinton has embarked on other community projects.

For example, with the Robin Hood Foundation and the Harlem Children’s Zone, the former president has tried to let poor people know about the availability of the earned-income tax credit. The credit, put into effect nearly 30 years ago to help offset Social Security payroll taxes paid by low-income working families and to encourage parents to work, was expanded in 1993 during the Clinton administration. Among other steps to get his message across, Mr. Clinton appeared on a national radio program that reaches a large Hispanic audience.

Mr. Clinton is also working with a charity, Operation Hope, which has a parnership with the Carver Federal Savings Bank, to bring an “economic literacy” program on the fundamentals of personal financial management to public schools in Harlem.

With music channel VH-1’s Save the Music program, the former president is bringing music education back to Harlem schools that had dropped such programs over the past two decades.

“Harlem is a place that is sort of an advertisement for the economic initiatives I’d undertaken as president,” says Mr. Clinton. “I’m trying to help people solve their own problems.”