Highlights from Atlanta 2001

RAY SUAREZ: Our topic tonight is really a question as much as a topic. "Building Community in America and Around the World: Fraying Ties or Renewed Engagement?" I think it's been chosen as the theme in part because that idea is not settled. It's still up for grabs. This was a theme that was chosen well before September 11th, and an invitation extended well before I ever could have imagined that I'd be moderating this panel during the seventh game of the World Series.

[Laughter]

MR. SUAREZ: So pursuant to the idea of letting every voice be heard, we are in modern speak going to privilege the discourse down at your level as well. So while these wise old heads will have plenty to say, it will then become a discussion that has a wider set of participants. There are mikes scattered throughout the audience, and we want to hear really what's on your mind because a group like this—and believe me, I know you people so I know what I'm talking about—a group like this meeting on an occasion like this can, unless watched, lapse into self-congratulation. And rather than having that happen, I want you to use up some of that unused energy from some of the afternoon panels, where I understand people were really ready to get to the mikes, really ready to engage, really ready to ask some good questions.

Let me introduce you to the panel. You have their full bios in your conference materials so I'm not going to read about their long and distinguished careers.

First we have with us Sarah Newhall who is the president and CEO of PACT, a leading U.S.-based NGO whose mission is to help build strong communities globally by strengthening the capacity of grassroots organizations, coalitions, and networks in over 20 countries around the world.

And sitting next is Sarah is not Deepak Bhargava, who couldn't be with us tonight. It's Raul Yzaguirre who is the president of the National Council of La Raza, an educational, organizational and incredibly important resource for Latino organizations around the country based in Washington.

And finally, Professor Bill Galston is with us. Bill is at the University of Maryland where he heads up the Institute for Philosophy and Public Policy. He's been a policy adviser to the Clinton administration and headed up a large Pugh-funded project on youth civic engagement.

In these three individuals we not only have tremendous expertise, but we also have perspectives ranging from the global to the local, and we are delighted that all three can be with us tonight.

And when they asked before we came up here, down at the dinner table, what I wanted out of this panel, I said the first thing I wanted was brutal candor, and I thought the rest would take care of itself.

As I said, the topic for the evening's discussion was conceived before the events of September 11th, but it's the sense of Independent Sector that it is even more relevant today than when it was first chosen earlier in the year. We want to explore two issues this evening:

First, what is the state of civic engagement today? And, of course, embedded in that question is a series of ancillary questions, what do we mean by civic engagement in the first place? Building community or what Robert Putnam has popularized as social capital. How does civic engagement differ amongst varying groups and across different issues.

And further, I will be asking each of the panelists to discuss how the events of September 11th have affected civic engagement for the constituencies and the issues that they know best.

We want the challenge also to go out to our panelists to make specific recommendations to you, the leaders of foundations, to corporate grant-makers, religious organizations, social service groups, advocacy groups, and aid organizations, arts and education, health and environmental groups, all of the others that make up Independent Sector. What do you do, not in some airy abstract way, but what do you really do to strengthen civic engagement at home and abroad?

So let me start with you, Bill. You seemed at dinner to be ready to rise to the challenge. How would you assess the state of civic engagement in the United States? Is it more like bowling alone, or are we on the cusp of a new age, just with different rules and different signposts for a different kind of social engagement?

MR. GALSTON: I would have found that question reasonably easy to answer on September 10th, and now I find it very difficult, and let me tell you why. And let me offer two famous quotations to explain my difficulty.

A famous intellectual from the World War I period, Randolph Bourne, once said famously that war is the health of the state. He was quite ambivalent as to whether that was a good thing or a bad thing, but what he meant to suggest by that quotation is that in times of national emergency, there is a kind of a rallying around and a coming together, and we are clearly seeing elements of that now.

Here's a second quotation, equally famous, from William James who called in an essay for what he called the moral equivalent of war as a way of bringing people together in stronger communities for more effective working together to solve common problems.

And one of the things that I think we've learned is that there is no moral equivalent to war. It is no accident that Robert Putnam in his book, which is so controversial but I think so insightful at the same time, has identified what he calls the long civic generation as people who came to maturity under the stresses and strains but also the formative influences of the Great Depression and of World War II.

So the reason that I find your question so difficult to answer now is that depending on what kind of era we're entering into, looking forward, we could be entering into a period in which a new generation of young people will be formed in all sorts of unexpected ways by the perception of a common situation, a shared problem, and a response to it which is local and global as well as national.

But alternatively, and with this I'll end, imagine if we had had Pearl Harbor without World War II. Would we be talking about our parents as the greatest generation, as the civic generation? I don't think so.

So this is an elaborate way of saying that we are right on the cusp of events that will shape and determine the answer to your question, and because what lies immediately before us is so uncertain, it is very, very difficult, and so I'm going to resist the temptation to replay all of the statistics that I have in my head from September 10th, because I think that September 11th may have obliterated the relevance of those statistics.

MR. SUAREZ: But aren't we also in some peril for overstating the effect in communities of the events of September 11th?

MR. GALSTON: Well, it depends on what you're looking at. Let me give you a couple of examples of huge impact. It is clear that at least temporarily that the events of September 11th have profoundly affected people's attitude towards government. Indices of trust in government have surged by, you know, at an unprecedented speed.

There has also been a very pronounced effect on attitudes of people towards one another, you know, what the scholars call generalized social trust. That, too, has expanded tremendously.

And there's been a huge switch in the consciousness of the public sector as opposed to the market sector.

Now if all of those changes were to be sustained as opposed to temporary spikes, then we would have a kind of discourse in the next 10 or 20 years that would be very different from the discourse that's dominated the past 20 years. But if it's just temporary, then what I take to be your skepticism about the transformative impact of these events will turn out to be well taken.

MR. SUAREZ: Raul, NCLR advocates on behalf of millions who are making their first steps on their American journeys, often on behalf of families who have been in this country as long as it's been a country, but who share aspects of common problems, whether they're in the Bronx or East L.A., having to do with schooling, access to home ownership credit, political representation. Has September 11th changed what we saw happening in those neighborhoods, how people think about it, or are we just in a position now to forget some of the people who were in trouble then and are still in much the same trouble now?

MR. YZAGUIRRE: They're in worse trouble. One of the things that we don't recognize is that while there were lots of victims in New York City and lots of victims in the Pentagon, you don't think about the tens of thousands of victims in Las Vegas, Nevada who because they are related to the gaming industry, to the tourist industry, now are out of a job.

So we're seeing the economic impact, and that economic impact is not felt equally along the line. It is particularly devastating to folks who had two or three jobs to try to keep a family together, immigrant families, poor families, minority families around the country who are concentrated in the service industry, and the impact has been devastating. And there isn't any reserves. And for undocumented workers, they can't go to the unemployment rolls, they can't go on welfare. So the safety net is nonexistent for a large number of communities. So it's a very serious concern for us.

MR. SUAREZ: But what did civic engagement and measuring it and understanding it and talking about it mean in the kind of communities that you're talking about?

MR. YZAGUIRRE: Well, indeed, it is useful to talk about it before September 11th and post-September 11th. What was happening before September 11th was sort of two forces meeting each other. On the one hand, you had groups like the Industrial Areas Foundation, a whole host of—Acorn and some other groups, doing some very extraordinary work in organizing not only—at changing the paradigm of community organizing, not only organizing around ethnic lines, but organizing along economic lines in very diverse coalitions, reinventing, understanding, reinventing the science, the art, understanding how to do it effectively, how to sustain it, which has always been one of the big challenges of community organizing. How do you sustain it over the long term? Once a charismatic leader passes on or conditions change, how do you sustain it?

So all that was going on the one hand, and on the other hand you had sort of a couple of cross-currents. One of them is sort of the Generation X, it's an easy way of describing a more complicated process, but most people were sort of thinking about themselves, their own family, and disassociating themselves from the community.

And also something nobody seems to talk about, there was in the '60s, '70s, up to the early '80s, very distinct set of government policies that legitimized, encouraged community participation, whether it was in HeadStart parent advisory committees, whether it was revenue-sharing, whether it was model cities. You know, all Federal programs. And even those operated by the states had a mandate to include, to engage the community in the delivery of services.

Slowly but surely all of that has been almost totally wiped out. So now it is longer official policy except in very rare circumstances where the community is really invited to engage in the development of their own communities except through the nonprofit sector.

MR. SUAREZ: Sarah, would I be in assuming that there's a different level of engagement in the rest of the world on the part of Americans, pre and post-September 11th? And maybe you could discuss how that ends up being a dividing line between eras.

MS. NEWHALL: I think, traditionally speaking, American communities have been quite isolated from a global perspective, and one of the opportunities presented by the tragedy of September 11th is that there's a sharp learning curve going on in many American communities about what our relationship is and connectivity is to the rest of the world, and how problems in the developing world are directly related to problems in local communities.

So I think the opportunity here is to put together a framework, an agenda, particularly for ways of building networks and coalitions that engage local community action, which is so vital in America, to the same types of social problems that are going on around the world.

I don't want to cite statistics, either, but there's hundreds of thousands of people dying weekly around the world of AIDS, absence of maternal child health care, the consequences of poverty, and I think this is a time of vulnerability in America and a chance for real sensitivity and opening to the common crisis facing humanity around the world.

MR. SUAREZ: But when there's one single big story, and that gets all the attention, that gets all the spotlight, if you're a heavily indebted country in West Africa, if you are a country trying to deal with the maze of patent issues regarding drugs in Southeast Asia, does the fact that we're dropping bombs and food on some of the same people in one particular country sort of crowd out all the other things? What are the prospects for people trying to get Americans engaged in the whole world, not just in that discrete part of it?

MS. NEWHALL: We clearly suffer from myopia. Every day I cringe when I see the banner on television that says "America's New War." The level of hype in the media and reverberations around the world are incredible.

One of the personal things that has increased my sensitivity over the last couple of months, even though I'm working in global development, was the immediate response from people all over the world calling into our office and expressing their compassion and empathy for the type of terrorism and the type of violence and the type of death tolls that they've been living with for years. I thought it was a level of human kindness and graciousness.

Rather than pushing away part of the message—not the universal message, but part of the message is we need you and you need us, so what an opportunity here for solidarity there is. So I think we are poised, I think we're vulnerable. When you feel the deepest kind of human and individual pain is when you learn. And I think huge behavior change on the part of the way Americans view the rest of the world would be very timely right now, and it doesn't take away at all from any of our deep sense of the tragedy and the loss here. But maybe it opens us to understanding in a more profound way the type of loss experienced around the world every day.

MR. SUAREZ: I did a town meeting last night out at Mount Vernon made up of young people, high school to just out of college, who had all themselves bootstrapped social services agencies into existence. Pretty remarkable crowd of 60 or 70 people between 16 and 25 years old. And they told me they were very optimistic about this being an organizable moment. You sort of got everybody's attention and it offers you the opportunity of doing something with it. Can an event like the terrorist attacks—I mean was it just their youthful optimism speaking, or in practical terms is this a moment around which you can do something serious, real, substantial?

MR. GALSTON: Well, every day in my house I conduct social science research with a focus group of one, namely my 17 year old son, and I listen to what he says and I listen to what he says about what his friends are saying. And there is no doubt about the fact, if I may lapse into professorspeak for just a moment, that this is a teachable moment, and there is a lot of self-instruction going on.

A young man who a month ago or two months ago devoured the sports page and ignored the front section of the newspaper has now transformed his gaze and the object of his attention, and his friends have done the same, and they are trying to teach themselves what they think they need to know but what they have not learned either through formal education or informal education.

So that extent, I absolutely agree with what the young people, the extraordinary people, the unrepresentative young people, to some extent, in your town meeting, but here is a huge cautionary note:

I believe, and I hope I'm wrong, but I believe that we are sailing into extremely choppy economic waters. I think if you look at what is happening not only in this country but around the world, this economic downturn may go deeper and last longer than a lot of people are now anticipating. And this is going to have profound consequences, I believe, for communities and for the work of the independent sector in this country. If more people are thrown out of work, if incomes go down, history suggests that contributions will go down; not because people are less public-spirited, but because they have less ability to give.

People, I think, are going to be more fixated on finding a job if they've lost one, and on making ends meet. So that may pull against increased civic involvement.

And there's a further problem. I believe that a lot of the domestic social programs that form an important part of the work of this sector are going to come under very intense pressure as the result of requirements or, you know, the alleged requirements for dramatically increased military spending, and also the obvious and unmistakable requirements for economic reconstruction of areas that have been directly devastated.

A year ago we were looking, I think, at a very optimistic scenario for the social sector. I believe that the social sector has taken a huge hit as the result of the events of recent months, coupled with the recession, and I am very worried. I am worried about the prospects of every organization in this room. I am worried that those wonderful young people that you met with may be encountering a very, very difficult context in which to try to exercise and implement their optimism.

MR. SUAREZ: Well, I've watched you thank corporate donors at the NCLR conferences over the years. I know that they're an important part of what fuels your work.

MR. YZAGUIRRE: I'm a little bit more optimistic, but I'm not an economist, so my opinion and $5 will get you a cup of coffee at a cheap restaurant. But let me get back to your basic question, is this crisis an opportunity for organizing. I say to you it's an unqualified yes.

As a former community organizer, I can tell you that the thing, the monster that you have to deal with more strongly is apathy. It's the one thing that will kill any community organizing effort very, very quickly, and it's what you fight against constantly. And nothing destroys apathy as quickly as a crisis, and there will be lots of crises. Bad times are great opportunities for community organizers, and so that's the silver lining, if you will, of the crisis that we're going to have.

Whether it's going to be six months, six years, I don't know, but I can tell you that this is a time of change, and I think this is where leadership can operate effectively. It's during change when things are more fluid, that you can have your greatest influence or greatest impact.

And if I may, you know, the people who work in international development understand this phenomenon, but the rest of the listeners may not. There's been a fundamental change in foreign aid and indeed in all aid programs. There was a time when we talked about development, we said tell us about your bridges, tell us about your roads, tell us about your ports, and we'll fund them and we'll do sort of a macroeconomic concept of economic development, community development, country development, nation building.

What is new in the international sector and international sphere is that the World Bank, the Inter-American Development Bank, all of these multi-lateral institutions are now providing huge dollars for social capital, for community-based organizations, NGOs, whatever you want to call it. That's now seen as an essential part of any development effort, and I think that's something we ought to celebrate and rejoice and support as much as we can.

MS. NEWHALL: I agree. This is a hugely organizable moment. Instead of tax stimulus packages right now, I would like to be seeing financial support going into the Peace Corps. I would like to see the same for Americorps. I would like to see the programs like Teach Tolerance and programs that have to do with conflict management and conflict resolution supported across the board.

It's a time when we need to focus on youth more than ever, and we should keep our eye on the Generation X group because I've also had a direct experience with a number of people that heretofore with quite apolitical. They just really eschewed politics, and now if I listen closely to their conversations, this learning curve about their relationship and responsibility to be peacemakers in the world is greatly heightened.

So I think the challenge for the Independent Sector organizations is to figure out very little practical steps, day-to-day ways that we can build on both our local activism but our global consciousness. I like to use the phrase social globalization. The literature and the press is dominated by economic-driven forces of globalization. We know that they are bringing huge imbalance to the world. What we need is a counterpoint which is social globalization, and I think this moment, however painful it is, gives us an opportunity to link local coalitions with global coalitions around issues that transcend boundaries, the environment, disease, women's issues, ethnic strife, strife. They're happening locally. They're also happening around the world and this is a time for a constructive voice to be given to what's the relationship between us and the rest of the world.

MR. SUAREZ: But Bill talked about a possible set of variables that might make that job quite difficult, putting the formation of social capital that Raul talked about, in direct competition with a new battle wing or a new carrier group or, you know, money for the new set of jets that are going to help us in bombing Central Asia.

How do you keep the kind of work that you're championing in there, in the arena, so that a moment of national threat it's not just assumed that one side of the argument always wins? I mean are we fighting an uphill battle?

MS. NEWHALL: One thing we have to be courageous enough to feel that if we speak out and are considered to be unpatriotic that it's a false charge. And I think I've heard all day today in different ways people saying when I spoke out about such-and-such, I was immediately attacked.

I think that kind of environment in which we are of course operating in when the war, the new American war is being waged, it's very, very difficult. I don't think it's going to be easy. I think, yes, the money right now instantly, $30 billion for homeland security. Think if we had had $30 billion to work on building the global community how much more we could have done than the situation we have right now where we are pouring our effort into bombing Afghanistan when we know no one can win this war.

MR. SUAREZ: But if the terms we use to discuss this have sort of embedded in it this idea that one side is right—and I'm talking about people who are pulling for polar opposite sides, they are convinced their side of the argument is right, don't we, by default, end up making decisions about these things that resemble pretty much the ones that we were making three months ago, when you said think of what we could have done with that money? Well, you were very unlikely to get it, even on August 10th.

MS. NEWHALL: We may be more likely to get an increase in global assistance now, interestingly, than we would have been before September 11th, because people are saying, the policymakers and the State Department and Congress are saying what are we going to do to reduce conflict in the world? And the answer is the exact same things all the members of Independent Sector are doing in American communities. They're going to address issues of poverty, they're going to address issues of illiteracy and the need for education. We're going to address health care. It's the same vulnerabilities because we're all human beings. And I think, oddly, while I'm not expecting a huge increase in foreign assistance, the leaders, Colin Powell, Secretary of State Colin Powell have a bigger ear than they've had in previous years and even months.

MR. YZAGUIRRE: It's going to be a debate with a couple of very interesting wrinkles. The wrinkle is, as you say, that now there's a realization that isolationism as a policy has gotten us to where we are, and that our lack of engagement and involvement—you know, we don't even know where these countries are at, and now we're fighting. We don't know all the ethnic groups, and now they're front page news.

So we are going to have to—conservatives and liberals are going to unite, are uniting, and will continue to unite in the international sphere to be less isolationist and more engaged, more involved in the economic development and cultural programs and Voice of America and all those kinds of things.

At the same level, at the same time, at the local level, there's going to be much more competition between domestic programs and programs of armaments. So it's going to be Vietnam all over again except with the wrinkle that whereas Vietnam was far, far away and no Viet Cong was going to come and attack us in the Bronx or in the Rio Grande Valley, this is now here at home, and how that plays out, this threat is—you know, it touches everybody. It's not somebody else's civil war, it's our own civil war.

And so how to factor that wrinkle in is hard to figure out, but at some point it will be another "guns versus butter" debate all over again.

MR. GALSTON: Let's come back around and relate this to civic engagement. We've been talking about the policy sphere, and that's a very important conversation to have, but I'm watching as major officeholders in the United States encourage rank-and-file Americans to do their part by shopping, where people are wearing ribbons and putting bumper stickers on their—the five ton truck that they use to go grocery shopping and think that they are pulling for the war effort, helping the war effort.

Are we risking, just as one conservative columnist famously wrote of the '90s about defining deviancy down, are we defining civic engagement down by making it quite easy to have an outward display of sentiment and have that be spoken of as doing something?

Yes.

[Laughter and Applause]

MR. GALSTON: I will now deliver myself of some unvarnished thoughts on that subject.

MR. SUAREZ: You were just waiting for the right provocation.

MR. GALSTON: In the Outlook section of today's Washington Post was an article, actually a summary of a longer article by Charles Moskos and Paul Glastrus. The thrust of the article was that this is the moment to reinstitute a draft, but a draft with a difference. Not just a military draft, but a civil and civic draft, so that at the age of 18, after graduating from high school, young people would have both the opportunity and the requirement to serve their country for a year or 18 months. They could have a wide variety of choices as to where that service would occur, but everyone would have to do something, or at least everyone would have to be exposed to a lottery system so that everyone, rich or poor, white, black, brown, Asian, would have—and male and female, would have equal choice of service.

I have to tell you, as one of the initial architects of Americorps, back in the transition of 1992 as someone who's now the head of a research center dealing with civic engagement among young people, I believe that that is the kind of bold idea that our country ought to be taking seriously. Let me tell you something. It's not cheap.

In order to provide even these minimal opportunities, we would be talking about a civic investment of tens of billions of dollars each year. But I believe that it's very, very important to establish specific concrete institutions in which young people can have the experience of citizenship and civic engagement. They don't have to be governmental institutions, but there has to be a much wider range of real opportunities for young people than there is now, and I happen to believe that there is a partnership that's necessary between the civil sector and the public sector in order to bring that about. Assuming that there's some sort of civic invisible hand that's going to do it without explicit public decisions is, I think, wishful thinking. And so that's why I uttered such an emphatic yes to your question.

[Applause]

MR. SUAREZ: Let's take it out into the audience now. Where are you wireless mike people? Let me put my glasses on. I was told you're very tall. Yes, he is. And we've got some raised hands. We've got some wireless making their way to the raised hands. This is good. Tell us who you are.

QUESTION: John Shippee, Rhodes College. Having just agreed with what Ball Galston said, I am now going to be very cheeky and disagree with what he said at the beginning about the lack of a moral equivalent of war.

I think you're half right. There's a lack of the focus that war brought about, but thinking back through the history of this country, the moral equivalent of war has been out there during non-war periods in a number of times. In Tocqueville's observations about the independent sector of his day, the multiplicity of organizations. In the China mission, if you will, around 1900. In its successor in 1960, the Peace Corps, and the civil rights movement, and everything that was boiling up before Vietnam became the focus of our attention. And it's out there in the 9000 young people who, every Easter, go out and build Habitat houses, and all of the others who do other things.

And it's in this room one of the generals of the moral equivalent of war Wendy Kopp is looking at me right now. Another is Dorothy Strongman. Others are the Bonners and Bill White, if you will.

The problem when you don't have a war as a national focus for all of this energy. I think the energy is there and I think possibly the civic draft that you just mentioned may be one way of focusing it, but we've got it. All we've got to do is get ourselves back in the places where the warriors are, the colleges, the schools, and begin to invest more in those young people. Thank you.

MR. SUAREZ: Bill, response?

MR. GALSTON: I think this is time to hear lots of voices. I mean I have an elaborate response, but I don't want to soak up all the time.

MR. SUAREZ: Well, why don't you give a simple version of your elaborate response?

[Laughter]

MR. GALSTON: Well, the short simple response is that there is a difference between heartening anecdotes on the one hand and aggregate statistical phenomena on the other. And this comes up in every conversation of this sort. I would say that in the aggregate, the past 20 years have been a period in which there has been an overall weakening of a sense of connection, a sense of involvement, a sense of participation, particularly on the part of young people. There's just a mountain of evidence to that effect, and that's not the same for each of the—to the same extent for every subgroup in the population. I'll freely grant that. But in the aggregate I think the statistics speak for themselves.

QUESTION: It depends on what you measure. It gets to that book. If you're talking about PTAs and those kinds of things, you're absolutely right, but if you're talking about new work-oriented engagement and a whole set of other kinds of things—I'm not arguing with you. I'm just telling you the data is not that clear to me. It's much more mixed and much more complicated than—what we may be seeing is not so much a lack of engagement but a reprocessing, a reconfiguration of that kind of engagement because we have a different world. We have many more women, if for no other reason, we have more women working in the workforce. That's a simplistic reason, but it's one that's cited often, and that does take a certain amount of a voluntary sector out of circulation, if you will.

MS. NEWHALL: Social movement is the movement for corporate social responsibility, and it has captured the interest of the younger and of the business workforce, and I think it's encouraging locally and it's encouraging globally. And as we put together social policy and social activism, I think there's something very important that the independent sector has to gain by zeroing in, in part, there.

I also think we have to keep emphasizing youth. Look at the global demographics. It's the graying of America, but youth make up—people under 21 are 60 percent of most of the developing countries. We need a youth strategy. In the '60s there was a youth strategy. I didn't read The Washington Post today, but I think some kind of national service—again, Peace Corps, Vista, Americorps, Teacher Corps, things that create habits of the heart is what we need here. We need to capture and build upon the human impulse that's universal to do good, to help a neighbor, to put out a helping hand.

MR. SUAREZ: Yes.

QUESTION: John Pomeranz from the Alliance for Justice. Actually, first of all, Raul, thank you for mentioning some of the other victims from September 11th. I had the opportunity last weekend to hear from Patti Cante, the head of the Culinary Workers Union, in Las Vegas where 15,000 workers from the casino hotels have been laid off, despite the fact that they're at 90 percent capacity compared to last year. So there are definitely more people than we are talking about.

I wish I could share the panel's optimism about this being a teachable and organizable moment. I fear that with the rhetoric that's going on right now the issues that we were talking about on September 10th that were about communities speaking out and trying to address their problems, and I'm speaking about providing amnesty to undocumented aliens, something that seems improbable now that we're trying to close the borders with Canada, much less with Mexico. I'm speaking about prescription drugs in an era where we're buying new weapon systems or putting more troops into the field.

I think that all of the issues that were about communities gathering together and organizing to solve their problems have been buried under the other issues, and I find it ironic that the issues that are not getting buried by the new war are things that are in the stimulus package where we're bailing out large corporations and not the workers.

So I wish I could share your optimism, and I worry that instead the non-community engagement issues are coming to the fore, not the community engagement ones.

[Applause]

MR. GALSTON: I substantially agree with what you just said. The only thing I disagree with is your description of me as an optimist.

[Laughter]

MR. GALSTON: I actually thought I was the panel's pessimist in the sense that I have been emphasizing throughout my remarks the impact of our changed economic and fiscal circumstances on a lot of the things that a lot of the people in this room care passionately about.

I don't think the impact, at least in the next year or two or three, is going to be positive. I think it's going to be negative, and I think, by the way, if I may be permitted a partisan remark, that we have a substantial struggle on our hands in the next month or two or three as to the nature of the size and the shape of the stimulus package. And if that struggle comes out wrong, then the fiscal wherewithal that is necessary in order to cooperate with local and community-based organizations to move some of these objectives forward will be gone, and not just for a year or two or three, but for five years or 10 years.

The stakes are huge, and our general fiscal opportunities which looked so bright a year ago are already much dimmer. There were people organizing around the country for significant prescription drug benefits, for example. That, I think, is one of the very first casualties of the changed fiscal circumstances, and the list will be much longer if the political debate in Washington in the next month or two or three goes the wrong way.

So I guess what I'm saying over and over again is that there is a profoundly important connection between what's going on at the local level, what's going on in the voluntary sector, and what's going on in the sphere of national politics. And it is futile to pretend that those can be decoupled, the voluntary sector can do business as usual. It can't.

MR. SUAREZ: Let me ask those of you out there who are working in organizing, working to strengthen civic engagement where you are, given that there's more than anecdotal evidence that people are watching the news more, reading newspapers more, talking about the news more, paying attention to things that people in my business were having a hard time getting them to pay attention to before, can you use that attention, can you use the energy that's being exerted in that kind of attention, to bring some attention to the things that you're organizing around? Are there opportunities since not everybody is going to get into uniform, not everybody is a rescue worker at the Pentagon or the World Trade Center? There seems to be also a free-floating desire to connect. Are you seeing any of that where you live and are you able to make any traction out of that where you live? Yes?

QUESTION: Hi. I'm Marilyn Smith from Communities and Schools, hailing from University of Maryland, with Professor Galston.

For about five years I ran the Learn and Serve America program for the Corporation for National Service, and as much as I supported and endorsed our other programs, including Americorps and Vista and loved them, I don't understand why people jump to the 18-year-olds when they're talking about getting people involved and funding those kinds of programs. The Learn and Service America program has stayed at a budget of $43 million for the last six, seven, eight years, and if any of you were in the giving and volunteering group today with Steve Culbertson talking about the impact of youth service on young people's civic involvement, their generosity and their giving as they get older and their commitment, I just don't know why we forget about that program and the importance of young people getting involved in second grade, third grade, sixth grade, ninth grade, tenth grade as part of our curriculum.

Lastly, the speaker this morning spoke about a—I forgot what he called it, an incredible crisis—revolution that we needed in how we teach young people as a result of September 11th. And all of those things fit together, but I feel frustrated that he jumped to 18-year-olds and skipped K-12 education as such an important part of that.

MS. NEWHALL: I think we probably all support you 100 percent on that. Absolutely. In fact, I thought the comment about radical transformation of civic education to become global civic education was one of the great points earlier today.

MR. SUAREZ: I don't think you're going to get any argument from these people.

MR. GALSTON: On the contrary, Marilyn, you know, my impression from Ray was that there was going to be a segment at the end where we would be asked to lay out our total agendas and you've just ticked off a number of the items. I picked one because it was directly responsive to the question that Ray mentioned, but, you know, I yield to no one in my support of a dramatic expansion of investment by both the Federal government and the states and foundations in exactly the sorts of things that you're talking about.

The opportunities for civic education and civic engagement and real learning that links schools and communities is something that we neglected for a generation. We're beginning to repair the generation of neglect, but you know better than anyone that we have a very, very long way to go. And it would be tragic if we didn't seize the moment, this opportunity to rebuild the entire panoply and renew it in a way of programs of that sort and renew it in a way that's relevant to the circumstances of the 21st century. So I plead not guilty.

MR. SUAREZ: Yes, in the back.

QUESTION: My name is Ben Smilos. I'm a junior at Washington University in St. Louis and I'm working with the National Student Advocacy Alliance. I want to respond to the point made about youth workers 18 or over in like a national student service corps or whatever you're talking about. It seems like a youth relationship and the nonprofit sector has done a bad job in youth involvement, youth on boards in involving young people in real civic engagement. It's done a really good job in involving youth volunteers in organizations and really using that mountain of resources and interests of young people. And I mean just to prove, I guess, everyone who has a nonprofit board, can you raise your hand just so—everyone who works on a nonprofit board? Everyone who's got young people under the age of 21 on their board, keep their hands up? Under the age of 21 on their board? With voting rights?

MR. SUAREZ: A couple of hands went down.

QUESTION: Okay.

MR. SUAREZ: Actually, pretty good, though.

QUESTION: I'm surprised. I mean it's good. That's because you come to INDEPENDENT SECTOR conferences.

MR. SUAREZ: See, I told you we'd get around to the self-congratulations.

QUESTION: But the point I'm trying to make is that I think that until we properly respect young people in real civic engagement, then we can talk about or ask them if they want to be involved in a national student service corps, what kind of ways they want to be engaged in working for public good, and we can talk a lot about how we want to use young people, but we need to really involve them in deciding how they want to be used.

[Applause]

QUESTION: Hi. I'm Karen Skates, and I'm president of an organization called Kids Voting USA, and Raul has been on my board, and I've talked to Bill and many of you here are familiar with it. We're in 38 states and we're a civic education program that does in fact involve kids from kindergarten through 12th grade with not only a curriculum but then the real life experience of going to the polls and actually voting. So it involves families, communities, a variety of folks in local organizations and affiliations, and in fact since this disaster we have heard from communities and schools all over the country in ways that we can try to involve our young people and build kids' voting programs.

But let me speak to one of the important issues, and one of our weakest areas of our program is our high school curriculum, and so we've begun to revamp that to include service learning. There is a lot—so much out there in service learning that the people who know it will forget more than I'll ever, ever know, but one of the things that I have discovered is in fact with respect to the national service corps, and in working with the Learn and Serve folks, I have discovered that in fact there has been written into legislation the very fact that actual civic engagement with respect to real life experience of working in a mayor's office, a water department, a real campaign, or doing voter registration are in fact verboten when it comes to any Learn and Serve money.

In fact, all we're doing is in fact encouraging young people to go to soup kitchens, to go to nursing homes, and all of that is very fine, but if we're talking about the real life experience of actually getting engaged in civic activity and citizenship activities, then there's something amiss with this national legislation that pours millions and millions of dollars into Learn and Serve programs for service learning but that does not allow kids to get engaged in the real life activity of civic projects in their community.

So that is an area that we're looking at and hopefully within this legislation somewhere down the road Senator McCain, by their working on a renewal, we can address that so kids can get involved in real life activities.

[Applause]

MR. SUAREZ: Go ahead.

QUESTION: Hi. Hodding Carter. Bill, obviously I agree totally with the notion that you just outlined because we have certainly been participants in that conversation. I'm sort of struck, however—and Karen's remarks sort of go to the heart of it. We do a lot of wonderful rhetoric about the moment and seizing the moment and this is the moment.

Well, at this moment, of course, war profiteers are winning every vote there is in the Congress of the United States.

[Applause]

QUESTION: And the reason that they're able to do it, of course, is they are seizing the moment. And how are they seizing the moment? Because they are organized and they are politically going after their objectives. Tastefully unmentioned, over and over again, in our discussions here is the necessity for those who think that they are speaking for something that matters in this country to be involved in the most energetic political way in advancing the causes that they think are important; not to wait for the dispensation of the good philanthropist or perhaps the Congress which will give them tip change after they've given away $25 billion worth of past taxes to those who don't need it, but perhaps to actually come to grips with the reality of the moment of what is needed in the investment of people in our time.

Folks, let us be honest about what the public sector means in America today. It means a sector dependent heavily upon public investments. We are no longer the people creatures of the tip change of philanthropy and the rich, heavily upon what government does. And in the state in which I live government is radically reducing the services for those who are served by the public sector, while deliberately not touching a tax cut, which has not even begun to affect people like me.

If we are not able to talk about this in a place like this, where can we talk about it? If we are not able to deal honestly with what is actually involved in what is happening to the public sector at this moment of opportunity, because we will not talk politically, when are we going to do it?

[Applause]

MS. NEWHALL: Very good. Let's organize.

MR. SUAREZ: I think they agree with you. Where do I sign it?

MR. GALSTON: Well, yes. The only thing that surprises me, Hodding, is that after I permitted myself what I explicitly labeled a partisan comment and then talked about the absolutely critical debate on the national stage that's going to occur in the next month or two or three, that it might even appear that there was any fear about raising political questions in this room. If there's fear, I haven't noticed it.

QUESTION: Actually it's not fear. It is the lack of explicit discussion. To make generalized conversation, to make generalized rhetoric at a place like this is almost obscenity. Not to deal with specifics about what is happening in the here and now is to pretend that we are in effect in some fairyland of conversation. That's what I really mean.

MR. GALSTON: It seems to me that the stimulus package is about as here and now as you can get, and what's in it and what's not in it is about as germane to the outcome of the causes that people in this room have spent their lives working on is anything we could be talking about.

MR. SUAREZ: Yes.

QUESTION: Hi, I'm Jan Masaoka from San Francisco. I'm from CompassPoint. The question that you asked earlier, Mr. Suarez, which is a teachable moment for what? What are we going to teach people and what are we going to organize them to do? In this—at least in this conference so far, there's been a remarkable lack of leadership about what to teach people and what to organize them to do. We need an agenda and that requires a political analysis and political organizing and an action agenda.

I have to say the leadership in the sector is instead wringing its hands. I've come to think of this as kind of a hand-wringable moment, and we can talk about these things like, you know, renewing the panoply and investing in social capital, but that isn't what's going to change things, and I would like to ask the people—

MR. SUAREZ: Well, what is? Before you move on, what is?

QUESTION: Well, I'm asking the leadership of the sector, many of whom are here, what can we do, in particular what can the philanthropic institutions do to in fact advance that agenda and argue for it and make that happen, rather than talking and fund those kinds of agendas.

MR. SUAREZ: Anyone have a response directly to that question?

MR. YZAGUIRRE: Let me just say I think Sarah needs to come up or the chairman of the board needs to come up. But let's not beat up on ourselves. This is the independent sector. This is where lots of voices can be heard, contradictory voices, voices who oppose each other. I think it's great to talk about it, but I wouldn't castigate our leadership for not putting forth a very specific agenda because that's what my responsibility and my organization, that's what our individual members need to do. In this forum we are to talk about the sector, we ought to debate and discuss it. But an action agenda that would say, you know, we, the Independent Sector, is going to oppose the administration's stimulus bill, while I certainly would embrace that, I don't think it's an appropriate response for this particular organization. It's not what you want to hear, it's not what I want to hear, but it's a reality about the nature of this organization.

MR. SUAREZ: But her question, organized to do what? I would really like to hear a good answer to that. Anybody got a good answer? Yes.

QUESTION: Hodding brought it up, so let's be explicit about this. Two days after September 10th, the Secretary of Energy held a meeting in his office with leaders from the power companies, Enron, Chevron, Texaco, et cetera, to get Anwar back on the agenda and to give cuts to the energy companies in terms of their pollution control.

Three days later the manufacturers association and other lobbyists met with the White House staff to get not only tax breaks but retroactive tax breaks so the taxpayers could give them back money that they should be using to pay the kind of things that we do here.

Three blocks down the road is one of the largest television networks in the world, CNN. I don't see them here. I'm staying with one of the senior executives of CNN who is a friend of mine. I asked her, she didn't know anything about the conference. I was at dinner last night with two other people from CNN. They didn't know about the conference.

What this organization could do at this particular meeting is see to it that these kinds of statements are made available to the media, to get out there, and we're not doing that. And I would say that our leadership, when they put the organizations and conferences like this together, they be aware of the fact that once we're together like this, we are a news event, we do have a voice, we have something important to say, and what we have to say as a group is that the share of the American economy that has gone to the disenfranchised has gone down while the share to the franchised or the wealthy has gone up, and we think that needs to be turned around, and we are the people who are working to turn it around, and we need to have that message delivered.

[Applause]

MR. SUAREZ: Yes. You've been waiting for a while.

QUESTION: Hi. My name is Arianne Hoya. I'm the executive director of Cool, and we're a national organization that does work to engage young people, college students in community service and social change. Well, just raise your hand if you have a college degree in this room. And so it's pretty much everybody, almost. I don't know if there's a few.

One of the things that motivates me in my work is there's a fact that if you took the world's population and converted it to a hundred, only one person would have a college degree, and by contrast, 70 people would have no education whatsoever, and 50 would live in substandard housing, and those kinds of things. And I think that to me, you are saying the moral equivalent to war, I feel like we need the spiritual equivalent to war, and that's the role of this sector, which is to start to challenge what is it that we value, like what makes a human life good, and that, you know, maybe it's not the economy, stupid, you know, whatever that statement is that public officials make, but really that we need to think about that what the challenge is now—when I see folks with a big truck, with the flag on the truck, I look at that and I think that person, they want to belong to something. How can I connect with that person? Because I think that that's what—really, if we look around and look at the interest that people have, people feel that we want to be part of a world that's different, and it's our challenge to define what is that different going to be. And it is about the redistribution of goods and resources, but also about the fact that that is not what makes a good life, the goods and resources that you have. There's something deeper than that, and perhaps now is a chance for us to step up and really shape that.

[Applause]

QUESTION: Hi. My name is Kimberly Smith Cofield, and I'm the CEO of an organization in Boston. I find it really challenging to sort of hold a couple of agendas. One is very, very narrowly focused because I have 440 staff members who are trying to look to me for a rational reason why the things that they do day in and day out are not valued as much as what's happening now. They see money that typically had gone to our services to do very good work in the community going somewhere else and jeopardizing our ability to even have some of the programs that we have for sick babies or for Alzheimer's seniors.

I agree we need to have a public policy agenda, and that's my job as well, but when September 11th happened, we got calls that many of our seniors who come to the senior centers were just devastated because many of them had come from countries where this happened, and they thought they were getting away from it, and they were—you know, anxiety through the roof. And there were other kinds of things with our young people in the community who already felt vulnerable, who were already scared of the violence in their community, and this increased their vulnerability and also saying to themselves why even bother.

So there's so much to do narrowly and to work with our funding sources. It does frighten me. I'm worried about in our state much of the state budget is now cut, hugely cut, and where does that land but in our laps, and that's devastating.

So though we have a $17.3 million budget, I am afraid of what that means to the people we serve, and I just would like to know what can funders do besides, you know, this is a popular thing to support, and I don't mean to be, you know, very insensitive to this national crisis, but we're going to commit an enormous community crisis.

MR. GALSTON: Ray, may I comment?

MR. SUAREZ: Yes, please.

MR. GALSTON: You know, I'm very glad that you said what you said and also referred to what's going on in the states, because I think that's a very important dimension of what this sector is going to be facing in the next year or two or three.

Virtually every state in the country operates its budget under fiscal requirements that are much more stringent than the Federal government's. The state budgets over the past 10 years have grown year by year at a very rapid clip and some of that money has trickled down to agencies and groups at the community level that are doing very important work. We have gotten used to state revenues growing at 6 or 8 or 10 percent a year and state budgets funding a wide range of activities at elevated levels.

We are heading into a period now where virtually every state budget is going to halt and go into reverse. I don't mean to be alarmist here, but I think these are facts. And what that means is that what happens at the Federal level is going to be even more important than usual because you're not going to have states in a position to be able to compensate for huge cuts that are made at the Federal level because of bad decisions that are made at the Federal level. And so the stakes in the next few months I believe, the stakes for all of you flowing from events in Washington, very specific debates, as Hodding pointed out, in the Congress of the United States are enormous, and there may not be a unified agenda—I'm not an official of this organization and I don't know whether it's appropriate or not, but certainly different organizations that have different stakes in different pieces of this large problem certainly have an incentive and an opportunity, I believe the legal opportunity as well as the political opportunity to make their voices heard. And if they're not, because they're not raised, then I think we will all be paying the consequences for a very long time to come.

MR. SUAREZ: Let me get some final comments also from Sarah and Raul, and we'll be ending on time.

MS. NEWHALL: What's still on my mind is marshalling our energies at this moment to make the local global linkages and to take advantage of the sharp learning curve situation that we're in to continue to reinforce at every age group and every ethnic group and amongst men and women that we live in one world and that problems at home are the same as problems abroad and vice versa, and to put that as a key new ingredient where it's been asleep for a long time in the American political agenda.

MR. YZAGUIRRE: I'll own up to the fact that I'm a nonrecovering terminal optimist, at least when it comes to community organizing. I think that this is indeed a time of crisis. I repeat that a time of crisis offers us enormous opportunities to organize. It's limited only by creativity and our energy. And I encourage dialogue and bold ideas because this is a time to push them. Nothing ever happens when things are status quo, when things are normal, you know. The momentum is to keep things the way they are. When you start moving things around is where you can make some changes, and I hope we are smart enough and bold enough to take advantage of the opportunity.

MR. SUAREZ: Thank you all.