There's never been any question that in time of war or crisis, Americans give
generously to country and community. Times of prosperity have stirred more complicated
reactions. Many people find themselves better able to help others when they themselves are
doing well. On the other hand, there is little sense of urgency about the need for
collective action. But the obligations of citizenship - and the importance of gratitude -
should span good times and bad.
The persistence of a hard-core group of poor Americans, the scandalous quality of
schools in certain pockets of the country, the strains placed on some families by the
aging of the population - these are not minor problems. Nor are they easily solved. In
most cases, one-on-one assistance, not the mailing of a government check, is required -
citizen rather than bureaucratic action.
There's another challenge to face as well. Despite expanded opportunity for many
Americans, social fragmentation by class and race has persisted. Even largely-positive
developments like suburbanization and the technology boom have had the effect of making it
easier for people to interact mostly with those like themselves. This is disturbing. It's
hard to imagine democracy functioning well if people don't have a rich understanding of
their fellow citizens. Anyone who's served on a jury in an urban area knows that divisions
among race and class lines can paralyze deliberations.
National service is the only approach that can solve all three of these problems.
Whether or not it is compulsory, some form of national service should be universal - a
common expectation that young Americans have for themselves. This can't happen overnight,
but by 2004 we can provide a million young people the opportunity for national service.
In 1993, following Bill Clinton's campaign promise of giving college aid to those who
did a year or two of community service, Congress created AmeriCorps. Over the past six
years, 100,000 Americans have served their country through AmeriCorps - with 41,000 new
members now serving each year.
AmeriCorps members are not only doing nice work, but, often, important work. Typical is
the reading program in Houston that has used AmeriCorps members to tutor and recruit
volunteers to tutor, the result being an average two-grade improvement in reading among
more than 2,000 children. A program in Portland provides traumatized victims of crime help
navigating the criminal justice system. Since 1994, AmeriCorps members have taught,
tutored, or mentored more than two million children, operated after-school programs for
roughly half-a-million low-income children, helped more than 200,000 senior citizens live
independently, planted 52 million trees, and created 40,000 "safe zones" in
neighborhoods and schools. With initiatives like these, service has become an important
force in solving problems.
AmeriCorps is filled with people who simply never would have worked together - or even
spoken to each other - but for the service experience. The experience of jointly trying to
fix a roof or build a playground erodes biases. The key, as with the military, is that
people are not brought together for the purpose of being brought together. They come
together to solve a mutual problem. In the process, they become mutually dependent.
But despite AmeriCorps' success, it has not come anywhere close to having the impact on
our country that the draft or the GI Bill had. Those two experiences allowed a large
percentage of young people to a) serve their country and develop an "ethic of
obligation," b) solve pressing problems, and c) combat balkanization.
While millions benefitted from the GI Bill, only about one percent of 18 year olds have
had the AmeriCorps experience - hardly enough to transform a cultural ethos. While
AmeriCorps has established the principle that at least some government benefits should be
tied to giving something back to the community, almost all of college aid is still given
out according to other criteria, primarily need and academic merit. Finally, since such a
small percentage of people have done AmeriCorps, its role in combating balkanization has
been meager. To put it in pedestrian terms, we are not going to change the way Americans
view each other until the experience becomes so common, so universal that, say, a taxicab
driver can regularly exchange notes with his passengers about which service program each
had served in. That was the norm after World War II, when the driver and his passenger
were equally likely to have served.
So the question before us now is whether service to the nation will become, in fact,
national; whether this good idea will do more than have a big impact on a relatively small
number of Americans and instead operate on a scale sufficient so that service becomes a
universal experience of American life and a universal expectation of American citizenship.
The cost of making the AmeriCorps-style experience available to every high school
graduate overnight would - even in the Era of Big Surplus - put a strain on the federal
budget. Moreover, the physical and psychic infrastructure for such a national commitment
is simply not in place. But there is a way of capturing some of the benefits of national
service right now while also beginning the process of changing our cultural expectations
so that young people come to view it as their civic obligation to perform national
service. America's leaders should make this commitment: Anyone who wants to earn college
aid in exchange for service can do so. Financial aid for education would become an
"earned entitlement" - one in which anyone was entitled to the extra financial
assistance benefit so long as they contributed to the country first.
The plan outlined below would create one million service-for-aid opportunities by the
year 2004. Here's how the plan would work:
In February, President Clinton proposed increasing AmeriCorps funding so that by the
year 2003 there would be 100,000 new members each year. This is an increase from 40,000
this year and 53,000 next year. Even 100,000 doesn't come close to the GI Bill, but look
at it this way: It amounts to an equivalent of 230 people in each congressional district.
And the effect is cumulative. Five years later, there would be 1,150 people in any given
congressional district who had done service. Pretty soon it would be hard to go to a
Rotary Club meeting without bumping into an AmeriCorps alumnus at the buffet table.
Each new increase in AmeriCorps should be focused on a specific need. Clinton did that
in 1997, when he proposed an AmeriCorps increase dedicated to the America Reads program.
The next 10,000 members could be geared toward creating after-school programs that have
multiple benefits: keeping kids out of trouble, providing mentors, and giving daycare for
working parents. The 10,000 after that could help families with home care for the elderly.
And the 10,000 after that could save the country's crumbling national and state park
system.
Price tag: $362 million in new money for the extra 47,000 slots for a total of
100,000 service opportunities.
High school students should be able to earn education money by doing some part-time
service during the school year and full-time service during the summer, when they would
also receive a stipend. If they finish the service they would also get a scholarship of
$1,000. They would be getting more socially useful jobs and probably earning more money
for college than they'd get otherwise. In addition, this model of service is less
expensive for the government than the traditional AmeriCorps program because most teens
live at home and, therefore, wouldn't need nearly as generous a living stipend. For the
price of one AmeriCorps member, you could field six high school service cadets.
Price Tag: $900 million for 300,000 slots.
One of the greatest outrages of recent years has been the hijacking of the college
work-study program [See Sidebar by Thomas Ehrlich]. Nearly
a million young people are in the program earning college aid as they work in the
cafeteria, library or dean's office. While the program was designed to have a strong
service element, college presidents have turned it into their own pool of cheap labor. The
next President should stand up to the college presidents and require that half of all
work-study slots (500,000) be geared toward helping the community.
Price tag: $0 additional dollars for 500,000 new aid-in-exchange-for-service
opportunities.
Under most AmeriCorps programs, the government provides the bulk of funds for a
scholarship, a stipend for the member and some administrative money for the non-profit
running the effort. To leverage the federal government's resources, we should also
establish a corps of servers who receive a scholarship, but no government-funded stipend.
For instance, the Red Cross could create its own Disaster Corps made up of 21-year-olds
who could swoop in anytime, anywhere, working full-time, helping to coordinate the stream
of volunteers that come to assist. The government could give each youngster a $4,000
scholarship, and perhaps throw $1,000 to the Red Cross to sweeten the pot. Still, the
non-profit would be putting up much of the money themselves.
The Corporation for National Service has tried to do a small version of this.
Currently, there are about 15,000 of these "education award only" slots. But the
programs are having trouble finding people to fill them. What is lacking is a commitment
from the largest philanthropic, religious, and civic institutions to make this work.
Imagine, for instance, if the Catholic Church said they would make it a goal that every
parish would raise the money to sustain one person for a year of service. They could find
the family (or convent) to provide room and board, and the government would provide the
scholarship. Imagine similar commitments from other religions, as well as from groups like
the Boys Clubs, Rotaries, and other civic organizations. It's not hard to see how several
hundred thousand service slots could become available, while keeping the government's cost
limited to the scholarship.
The mechanism to maintain quality and accountability is already in place. Groups could
simply apply to the existing state commissions on national and community service to get
their programs certified. The commissions would be charged with the responsibility of
insuring that these slots are actually 'service' - helping other people as opposed to
filing papers in the office or raising money for the new capital campaign.
Price tag: $500 million for 100,000 members.
At a cost to the government of about $1.7 billion, you have a plan that would pay for a
20 fold increase in service opportunities with a five-fold increase in spending. With one
million Americans serving their country by the year 2004, it would set the United States
of America on the path to reaching the day when we can say that national service should
not be just a special chance for a few - but a way of life. This is an agenda that really
could be embraced by any candidate, Democrat or Republican. They undoubtedly could come up
with their own variations. (One other idea to consider: a national service program for
senior citizens, who have more time and experience to do good than even high school
students.)
The plan outlined above provides for a variety of service experiences, keeps it
non-bureaucratic, locally-controlled, inexpensive, and allows national service to become
an important force in American society.
It would enable the next president to state: every young person in America who wants to
earn extra college aid can do so - if they are willing to give something back to their
country and community. Under this system, national service would finally be national - and
the country could be transformed.
