"Demosclerosis" is the term that writer Jonathan Rausch coined to describe how lawmakers, bureaucrats, and beneficiaries unite to defend government programs against change and endow them with the political equivalent of immortality.
This is not the fate we wish for AmeriCorps, our country's unique experiment in voluntary national service. Having just marked its 10th anniversary, AmeriCorps has weathered political storms and has anchored itself firmly in communities around the country. But as strong advocates of national service, we do not want AmeriCorps to become another brick in the bureaucratic wall.
National service is not your typical government program. It is a new civic venture that, like any entrepreneurial start-up, must constantly readjust its founding premises and assumptions against the realities of the markets in which it competes. We believe AmeriCorps offers an intriguing new way of tackling public problems, but it remains very much a work in progress. The enterprise and its friends can only gain by remaining open to criticism, susceptible to change, and willing periodically to rethink its purposes and rationale.
This volume was written in that spirit. It evaluates AmeriCorps' performance over its first decade, explores possible futures for national service, and offers concrete ideas for expanding opportunities for Americans, young and old, to serve.
Above all, we hope to build a sturdy, empirical foundation for the wider public debate on national service. Part one of this volume offers a concise synthesis of what a decade of research can and cannot tell us about AmeriCorps' effectiveness when judged against the four original goals set by national service advocates: tackling unmet needs, expanding opportunity, bringing Americans together through service, and strengthening citizenship and civic enterprise.
Part two offers a progress report on national service at home and abroad. David Eisner, chief executive officer of the Corporation for National and Community Service, describes recent management and financial reforms at CNCS and maintains that service is "just beginning to hit its stride." He outlines a five-year plan that focuses on bolstering bipartisan support, using national service to organize more private volunteering, leveraging federal dollars more effectively, and strengthening partnerships with colleges and universities.
Susan Stroud, executive director of Innovations in Civic Participation, takes readers on a tour of the last decade of national service developments across a dozen countries. She argues that America's experiment in national service is best understood as part of
a worldwide service movement that may eventually become "a common experience and expectation for the majority of young people worldwide."
Part three features essays by a philosophically diverse group of commentators, all of whom have figured prominently in public debates over national service since its inception. These writers offer bold and sharply contrasting views of the various evolutionary paths that AmeriCorps might take over the next decade.
For example, Steven Waldman -- co-founder and editor-in-chief of Beliefnet, a multi-faith online community, and author of The Bill, a book about the creation of AmeriCorps -- argues for a dramatic expansion of national service, linked to a new push to challenge "some 100,000 houses of worship" to provide free room and board
to service volunteers. "Imagine what would happen," Waldman writes, "if the nation's religious organizations placed a greater emphasis on repairing the world, to use the Jewish phrase, than on arguing."
Stephen Goldsmith, the former mayor of Indianapolis picked by President Bush to chair the Corporation for National and Community Service, puts the accent on "community." He envisions a decentralized future for national service as an organizer of local, neighborhood-based efforts to mobilize what Edmund Burke called
the "little platoons" of civil society.
Taking the opposite tack is William A. Galston, Saul I. Stern professor of civic engagement and director of the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy at the University of Maryland. Although he was a prime architect of AmeriCorps as a top policy adviser to President Clinton, Galston now calls for a more comprehensive vision of "universal service" that would entail conscripting young Americans into military or civilian service. He argues that if "we work as hard to foster an ethic of
contribution and reciprocity" as we have at creating programs that enhance individual self-improvement, consumption, and choice, "we can create a richer civic culture that summons, in the words of Lincoln, the better angels of our nature."
Finally, building on ideas developed at the Progressive Policy Institute, we propose an alternative, voluntary path to universal service. Based on the model of the post-World War II G.I. Bill, our plan would offer federal student aid to young Americans willing to give something back to their country through either military or civilian service. It prescribes concrete steps for scaling up AmeriCorps with the ultimate goal of making national service "a common expectation -- a rite of civic passage -- for young Americans on their way to responsible and productive citizenship."
We hope that this appraisal of the existing research, coupled with imaginative proposals from leading thinkers in the field, will inform the public debate over what course America's national service experiment should take over its second decade.
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We wish to thank the contributing authors for their essays and also acknowledge the work of Tom Mirga for his usual excellence in bringing out the best in all of our writing, Rachel Chute for helping to manage the project to a successful completion, and Tyler Stone for ensuring that this volume's design matched the quality of the
contributions.
We would also like to offer special thanks to William Schambra, Robert Grimm, and Ben Binswanger for their help in developing the concept behind this project during many hours of brainstorming in the fall of 2004.
Last but certainly not least, we wish to acknowledge Jean and Steve Case, whose generous grant made this volume possible. We are grateful to the Case Foundation for its support of and enthusiasm for this project from the beginning and for its overall commitment to the goal of a more active and engaged citizenry.
-- Will Marshall and Marc Porter Magee
Washington, D.C., May 2005
