August 8, 2002 | Read Time: 2 minutes
President Bush last week unveiled a new advertising campaign to encourage Americans to devote 4,000 hours over their lifetimes to helping charities and performing other types of public service.
The “Everyone Can Do Something” campaign includes print, radio, and television ads produced by the Bush administration and the Ad Council, a nonprofit group in New York, with support from the Walt Disney Company. The TV and radio ads feature entertainment and sports celebrities, along with former senators Robert J. Dole and John H. Glenn Jr.
AmeriCorps Applicants Soar
According to the White House, in the six months since the president announced his call to service in January, online applications for the AmeriCorps national-service program have risen 90 percent compared with the same time last year, and VolunteerMatch, a group that runs a Web site that links people with volunteer opportunities, has experienced a 72-percent increase in activity.
The campaign also includes a remodeled Web site for the USA Freedom Corps, the White House office that coordinates the president’s call to service. The site was redesigned with the help of Network for Good, a nonprofit group started by major technology companies, such as Cisco Systems and the Microsoft Corporation. The revamped site includes information on how charities can become involved with the White House effort and assistance on managing volunteers.
The administration may have enhanced the site’s content for charities in part to assuage concerns of nonprofit leaders who said the White House has not been providing enough assistance to charities in handling the potential flood of new volunteers.
USA Freedom Corps’s next goals are to persuade Congress to pass legislation expanding AmeriCorps and other federal service programs and to continue to enlist businesses to promote volunteerism among their employees, said John Bridgeland, head of the USA Freedom Corps.
The president’s speech is online at http://www.whitehouse.gov/news/releases/2002/07/20020730-5.html. The USA Freedom Corps Web site is http://www.usafreedomcorps.gov.
