Turning Goodwill Into Action

President Bush’s call to service is getting mixed reactions

Woody Drake, a 32-year-old painter in Columbus, Ohio, hadn’t planned to spend the next couple of years teaching kids to dance, perform, and do other arts projects after school. At least, not before September 11.

But the shock of the attacks, coupled with the loss of home-decorating business as the economy became more sluggish, prompted Mr. Drake to sign up with

the national-service program AmeriCorps. Mr. Drake says that when he saw an ad for the program, he “was sitting there, broke and depressed and worried for my nation.”

In January, he started as an AmeriCorps member with the Greater Columbus Arts Council, receiving a stipend and an educational scholarship for his efforts. “I love my country, so I wanted to try and teach peace,” he says.

Mr. Drake’s decision to commit to volunteerism is exactly what President Bush has hoped to inspire in millions of Americans. In his State of the Union address in January and in subsequent speeches, Mr. Bush has urged Americans to seek out new volunteer opportunities by asking them to dedicate 4,000 hours, or two years of their lives, to national service and volunteer work. He has also asked Congress to approve more than $500-million in additional federal money for service programs. Many of the new volunteer efforts, Mr. Bush has said, will focus on “homeland security” and other efforts to fight terrorism.

So far, however, responses to the president’s call have been mixed. Organizations that connect people with charities that need volunteers say they have seen increases in calls and e-mails from potential volunteers. And full-time service programs — such as AmeriCorps and Teach for America — have experienced sharp spikes in numbers of applicants.

But checks with local charities that rely on volunteers turned up few examples of big, sustained jumps in offers of donated help.

“We did not see any kind of increase,” says Emily Loveday, spokeswoman for the United Way of Greater Knoxville, in Tennessee, which runs a hotline to match volunteers with charities. Even after the president gave a speech about volunteerism in Knoxville last month, she says, the organization did not see a change.

John Bridgeland, the head of USA Freedom Corps — the White House office established by Mr. Bush to coordinate his volunteerism plan — says charity leaders should not expect too rapid an increase in volunteers, since the president’s agenda will take time to put into place. The goal, he says, is to achieve changes that will be felt “in 30 years.”

Striking a Balance

As Congress considers Mr. Bush’s request for new federal aid, charity leaders and others are debating how the administration can best go about increasing volunteerism. A central issue, they say, is striking the right balance between the need to move quickly to build on the sense of patriotism that emerged after the attacks last fall and the need to put in place necessary administrative structures to make effective use of new volunteers.

Some experts in volunteering worry that the president may be rallying charitable troops without a substantive plan for turning public enthusiasm into action. Charities say money is needed from the government or private donors to bolster efforts to recruit and manage volunteers before organizations can benefit from a flood of unpaid help.

“If you really do want to increase volunteerism at a local level, you need to invest in local organizations that have those networks in place,” says Karen Delaney, head of the Santa Ana Volunteer Center, in California.

She has led a lobbying effort to encourage Congress to approve $100-million for volunteer centers, which serve as clearinghouses for many local volunteer activities. The money would be used by centers to add more staff members to oversee volunteers, take greater advantage of technology to connect people to charities, and pay for employee training.

Leslie Lenkowsky, chief executive officer of the Corporation for National and Community Service, which oversees AmeriCorps and other federal service programs, says he respects volunteer centers and appreciates that they need new technology and other upgrades to effectively do their work.

But he says that a formal evaluation of the strengths and weakneses of volunteer centers should be conducted. “I frankly would like to see a good plan from them on what they would do,” he says. “Where is the money going to go and how do we know it’s going to produce those results?”

Mr. Bush’s effort is not the first time a president has tried to spur volunteerism. Mr. Bush’s father, as president, established the Points of Light Foundation in 1990 to coordinate the nation’s 500 volunteer centers.

And perhaps the best known effort was 1997’s Presidents’ Summit for America’s Future, in Philadelphia, where President Clinton and several former presidents gathered corporate, charity, and government officials to discuss ways to increase the number of mentors for poor children. Despite the fanfare surrounding the event, some critics have complained that its long-term impact has been negligible.

The Bush administration is striving to avoid the pitfalls of some earlier efforts, says Mr. Lenkowsky. “The normal tendencies of many initiatives is for them to morph into a sequence of events signifying all sorts of interests and good things, but ultimately leaving relatively little behind,” he says. “That’s the risk we are working hard to guard against.”

One factor that sets President Bush’s volunteerism drive apart, says Robert Putnam, a Harvard University professor and author of Bowling Alone: The Collapse and Revival of American Community, is that it comes at a time when Americans’ sense of civic responsibility is running particularly strong. A galvanizing event, such as the terrorism attacks, comes along only once or twice in a century, Mr. Putnam says.

He adds, however, that “the window of opportunity is beginning to close.”

Mr. Putnam, who is serving as an informal adviser to Mr. Bridgeland, says converting interest into volunteer hours “is not something for which we have years and years to work on.”

So far, there have been signs that the president’s use of the bully pulpit has helped inspire some Americans to give more of their time to community service.

Before Mr. Bush’s January speech, online applications to AmeriCorps averaged 225 a week. After his speech, online applications rose to an average of 420 a week.

Teach for America, in New York, had a 180-percent increase in applications during its most recent recruitment season, which ended in February, compared with the previous one.

A spokeswoman for the group says many applicants in their interviews are mentioning the president’s call to service as a reason for signing up. But she adds that other factors, including the terrorism attacks, the turbulent economy, and a new marketing campaign by the charity, have also contributed to the rise.

And interest generated by the USA Freedom Corps seems high. Through the organization’s Web site, visitors are linked to VolunteerMatch, a San Francisco group that uses the Internet to match volunteers and charities.

Jason Willett, a spokesman for that organization, says referrals — e-mails sent to nonprofit groups from visitors to VolunteerMatch’s Web site — have almost doubled in recent months. In April of last year, the group recorded 17,000 referrals; in April 2002, 31,000.

While the factors behind the gain are unclear, Mr. Willett says that whenever Mr. Bush speaks about volunteerism, the number of referrals immediately jumps up. “The president’s call has definitely helped,” he says.

But it’s not clear how many of the people who express interest in volunteering follow up.

Seventy-eight percent of people who contact charities through VolunteerMatch get involved at least once as a volunteer, and 28 percent become regular volunteers, according to a study VolunteerMatch commissioned before September 11.

Some directors of local volunteer centers say the president’s call has raised awareness.

“Anybody who walks in the door knows about the 4,000 hours,” says Carol R. Stone, president of Volunteer Center Orange County, in California. “He has touched people from all walks of life.” Ms. Stone says her organization has seen a rise in volunteers since Mr. Bush made his call, but she could not quantify it.

Part of the increase in Orange County has come from retired doctors and nurses who want to sign up for disaster-relief programs, says Gretchen Snyder, a manager at the center. The challenge, she says, is to find ways for these medical volunteers to get involved now, rather than waiting for the next disaster. The California group is trying to link such volunteers with local medical clinics and other health facilities, says Ms. Snyder.

Highly skilled professionals require more attention, sometimes meeting with two or three groups before deciding where they want to volunteer, she says.

Other charities have seen gains in young volunteers. Cynthia Nunn, president of the Boys & Girls Clubs of Greater Dallas, says that, since Mr. Bush’s call to service, “we’ve had a lot more college students that are coming in to give community service.”

She traces the first increase in volunteer participation to last year’s terrorist attacks. “Before the 9/11 incident, we had 24 kids that were volunteering in the program, and right after 9/11 we had 60 walk through the door and immediately get involved.”

Some charities, however, say they have seen no indication that the president’s speeches have had much impact. “There’s a lot of talk about it, but the proof is in the pudding,” says Stacey Vanden Heuvel, head of CommunityNet, a volunteer center in Rochester, Minn., that hasn’t experienced an increase in volunteers.

Questions About New Corps

Critics of the White House say the call to service may not be prompting a strong response because of confusion about the effort’s message and mission. They say the president’s attempt to link volunteerism with defense against terrorism has left the public uncertain about what kind of help is really needed and about where to go to offer help.

A particular point of contention is the plan to build a new infrastructure for homeland-security and emergency-preparedness volunteers, the so-called Citizen Corps that Mr. Bush is working to establish. Many volunteer centers argue that they are already doing similar work and that a new “corps” is not needed.

“We’re already set up for that, so why create something new?” says Shula Yelliott, director of the Volunteer Center of Chattanooga, in Tennessee. She says many volunteer centers now are asking the administration: “Why aren’t you putting new money into old places so they become better?”

Ms. Yelliott says that her office has received calls from people interested in joining the Citizen Corps but that she can’t fully answer their questions because she does not have a lot of information herself. “I can’t tell them what the Citizen Corps is going to look like because I don’t know. And I don’t know what homeland security is going to do,” she says.

Plea for Private Money

In response to such criticisms, the USA Freedom Corps has encouraged state and local officials to work with volunteer centers as they create the Citizen Corps.

Mr. Lenkowsky also says that he and other officials have been working with Congress, foundations, and other donors to help generate the money and other support for volunteer centers and groups that recruit, train, and oversee volunteers.

Just where money will come from to pay for volunteer recruitment and management remains to be seen.

Mr. Lenkowsky and Mr. Bridgeland hope foundations will contribute to the effort by taking steps such as giving their grant recipients extra money as incentives to increase their use of volunteers.

At least one grant maker, the UPS Foundation, in Atlanta, has given new money in response to the administration’s efforts. The foundation gave $75,000 for an April conference sponsored by the Federal Emergency Management Agency, the Points of Light Foundation, and volunteer managers to discuss how to coordinate an influx of spontaneous volunteers like the ones who appeared in New York after September 11.

Other foundations may follow the UPS Foundation’s lead, although most are waiting until it becomes clearer exactly what role they can play. Mr. Bridgeland recently met with the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, as well as other grant makers.

Christine M. Kwak, who oversees Kellogg’s philanthropy and volunteerism program, says foundations most interested in volunteerism, such as her own, will probably act as advocates to stir up new interest within the philanthropic world. Says Ms. Kwak:We want to stimulate more giving.”

Grant Williams contributed to this article.