Volunteering Conference Highlights Obama Push on Community Service

Last week’s National Conference on Volunteering and Service in San Francisco featured a lot of talk about the Obama administration’s efforts to promote community service.

The Chronicle‘s conference notebook brought news about the following:

• Michelle Obama’s opening pitch for Americans to make community service a part of their daily lives.

• Advice on how nonprofit groups can support the administration’s United We Serve campaign.

• An official announcement about All for Good, the Web project to aggregate volunteer opportunities that will feed the administration’s Serve.gov.

• A suggestion that the administration’s emphasis on community service as a way to help solve the country’s problems could change the way such work is evaluated.

• Concerns about the strain an influx of new volunteers could put on nonprofit groups.

• The prospect that budget constraints will curtail spending on the Serve America Act.

• The priorities of Jackie Norris, a new senior adviser at the Corporation for National and Community Service.