MR. PETER SHIRAS: Les Lenkowsky has been a very active member and associate of INDEPENDENT SECTOR in many ways, but in addition to that, has had a very distinguished career in the foundation world. He was the director of research at the Smith Richardson Foundation. He has served as the president of the Institute for Educational Affairs in Government, deputy director of the United States Information Agency, a research fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, and most recently a professor of philanthropic studies and public policy at Indiana University and at the Center for Philanthropy.

In his capacity of working with the INDEPENDENT SECTOR, Les has been on our Research Measures Committee, National Advisory Board. He's been on our Public Policy Committee, and what became our Public Affairs Committee. He served on our Task Force on Tax Policy, and last year also served on our Year 2000 Transition Task Force for the new administration and in that capacity, actually, was instrumental in helping us to formulate a number of recommendations which have since been picked up by the current administration, including a number of proposals to increase the tax incentives for charitable giving, proposals to increase the efforts of government to help develop the capacity of the nonprofit sector, and the creation of a White House office to serve as a key point of contact for the nonprofit sector in the administration.

So it is with great pleasure and great delight that we welcome Les to be with us today. We look forward to his comments, and he's agreed to answer questions and have dialogue with us after his comments. Les.

[Applause]

MR. LENKOWSKY: Thank you very much, Peter. I'm really pleased to be here today, and I'm especially pleased that INDEPENDENT SECTOR which, as Peter noted, I've been working with for quite some time, and whose work I greatly admire, to invite me and to invite all of you to a seminar meeting on the future of the Corporation on National and Community Service. In some ways this represents quite a turnaround for INDEPENDENT SECTOR.

As Peter mentioned, I did serve on a task force that was convened in the year 2000 to develop recommendations for the presidential candidates about the not-for-profit sector, and in the very first draft of the set of recommendations, which were some very good recommendations, there was absolutely no mention of the Corporation for—what was then the Corporation for National Service.

Now as a longtime board member of the Corporation—I served on its board since it was created and before that on a commission appointed by the first President Bush—I thought this was a rather curious omission, and very politely made my views on this known and, of course, the final document did produce a strong recommendation with respect to the importance of the Corporation.

But I thought it was interesting that the leading association of nonprofits in Washington in a first draft of a set of recommendations for the presidential candidates somehow managed to overlook the work of the Corporation, which even then was a $750 million agency that does absolutely nothing but support organizations in the nonprofit world.

My predecessor, Harris Wofford, in fact once likened us to a grantmaking foundation, and he said if we were a grantmaking foundation at the time, we would have been the second or third largest in the United States in terms of our annual spending.

Now it is also the case that this sort of oversight in the first draft was not a particularly unique occurrence with regard to the Corporation. Even though we came into being in 1994, we have lived something of a charmed life ever since that date. Every year the one thing that was fully predictable is as appropriations time rolled around, one or another member of Congress would offer a motion to eliminate our budget altogether.

In fact, the former head of AmeriCorps, Deborah Jospin, once told me that so regularly did this occur that when her pager rang summoning her to action because our budget had been, in the phrase of Congress, “zeroed out,” she would hardly pay attention anymore, it was just such a regular thing. And it was well understood that President Clinton would go to bat for the Corporation and sooner or later in some fashion the funds would be restored.

And while much of this opposition came from my side of the Congressional aisle, the Republican side, others, more than most people realize came from the Democratic side as well. In fact, a number of Democrats would have much preferred to see some of the fundings for the Corporation go into more traditional kinds of social spending programs and toed the line mostly because the president had made this particular agency such a high priority.

The campaign of then-Governor Bush also was notably silent about—was mostly silent about the Corporation for National and Community Service. In July of 1999, Governor Bush made his first major public policy address as a candidate. It was in Indianapolis, as it happens, and I helped our former mayor and now the chairman of the board of the Corporation, Stephen Goldsmith, put it together. It was a speech on what has become known as the faith-based and community initiative, and it was a pretty good speech. It was substantive, it had a lot of interesting things about it. But, again, there wasn't a single mention of the work of the Corporation for National and Community Service.

The president—then governor, now president—was asked in a press conference what did he think about AmeriCorps, and he gave an answer, I can't quite quote it verbatim, but it went something like, “Well, if it's working okay, I see no reason to get rid of it.” It was better than nothing, but you would have hardly thought of that as a glowing endorsement.

Throughout the national service field, including in our own offices, there were more than a few worries that should Governor Bush become president, the Corporation was doomed. It would be tossed out like refuse from the previous administration. If not the Corporation as a whole, then what had become its signature program, AmeriCorps would meet an untimely end.

Now I must say that these fears were all along, in my opinion, needless. Governor Bush had in fact been a strong supporter of the Texas Commission on National and Community Service through which our programs operate. On our board of directors at the time was the then-governor of Montana, Marc Racicot. Marc was very close to candidate Bush, and as we have just seen in the last day, he's just been named head of the Republican National Committee, and Governor Racicot was a very strong supporter obviously of our work, having agreed to sit on the board.

There were other signs as well that in fact the worries about the future of the Corporation and of AmeriCorps might have been a bit exaggerated. Still, there was what you might call a knowledge gap at work here. And so after the chads stopped falling in Florida and I guess it was about this time last year, wasn't it, that we finally had ourselves a president-elect, I made it a point to go into Washington and meet with the group that was trying to put together the initiative that has been known as the faith-based initiative, for short.

I pointed out that the work of the Corporation could serve as a very valuable part of this initiative. The president's plan was unveiled in a speech called "Armies of Compassion" in January of this year, and I used to say, well, in the armies of compassion, the Corporation for National and Community Service has the foot soldiers.

Indeed, one out of every seven AmeriCorps members was even then working with faith-based organizations and a still larger number, of course, with community-based groups that weren't faith-based. Similar proportions hold for our senior programs as well.

We were already doing this kind of work, and could do even more of it and could serve a useful role in fulfilling the president's objective of assisting smaller charities, including religious ones, that were working closely with people in need.

Well, I am a professor by training, by profession, and so I guess I have learned something about education, and the folks putting together the transition paid a lot of attention. So on January 29th of this year when the president announced his program, he not only announced the creation of the Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives in the White House, but also the appointment of Mayor Goldsmith, who had been his top domestic policy adviser during the campaign, to the board of the Corporation for National and Community Service.

In fact, I had polled some of the members of the board and we were prepared to elect him, Mayor Goldsmith, as our chairman, which we have now done. And the president asked Mayor Goldsmith to serve as advisor on the faith-based and community initiative and in particular to advise him on ways by which the programs of the Corporation could usefully assist this what was then one of the top presidential priorities.

The fellow who did staff the White House office, John DiIulio, a professor from the University of Pennsylvania, also quickly came to understand the value of the Corporation for what is in fact the most challenging part of the president's initiative. For all the controversy that has swirled around the Congressional package, first in the House and still now in the Senate, all of us who have looked closely at this, and I'm sure most, if not all of you who have worked with not-for-profit groups, understand that even after the laws have changed, however Congress and the White House decide to change the laws, the real challenges are those of implementation and outreach, identifying groups particularly at the grassroots that are doing effective work, helping them get the resources they need. In many cases there's a lot of capacity building and training that needs to be done.

In fact, part of the president's initiative recognizes this by proposing something—I didn't give it this name—the Compassion Capital Fund, which really is meant to be a training and technical assistance fund for grassroots community groups, both secular and faith-based.

Well, John DiIulio recognized this and further recognized that the people we have in programs like AmeriCorps and VISTA, in our various Senior Corps programs, in the National Civilian Community Corps, and even in our college-based and elementary and kindergarten-through-high-school-based Learn and Serve program, we actually had people who, to one degree or another, were already doing this sort of thing, and they could do more of it and effectively help in what was going to be the challenging portion, the more challenging portion of the initiative.

Since taking office in October, I have actually made a point to travel around and visit some of these programs so I could get a first-hand look and see whether what I thought we could do, we actually could do. Although I have only visited a few cities, I have already seen some examples that convince me this insight is correct.

I was with Pablo in Miami, I guess on—when we were there? Friday, Pablo? On Friday morning, I went over to Little Haiti to see an organization called The Little Haiti Housing Association, and it's right in the middle of an immigrant neighborhood, a poor immigrant neighborhood where not only isn't English the main language, neither is French. It's Creole for those of you who know the culture of Haiti. And what this Little Haiti Housing Association was doing was working to help Haitian immigrants who had reached the point where they were looking to buy their first home or buy into a condominium do so. And they understood that the best way to create a stable community is to have a community of people who own their own homes or condominiums.

We had in that association a group of VISTAs who were basically acting as real estate agents but not charging 7 percent, thank you. He speaks as one who is buying and selling houses at the moment. And what they were doing was helping put the packages together for these immigrant home buyers, people whose credit histories were, to put it kindly, often uncertain, who did not have a lot of familiarity with banks, with real estate agents, with developers, with home ownership in general, and who needed assistance in just navigating what is, even for those of us with Ph.D.'s a formidably difficult system when you buy or sell a home. And that's what VISTAs were doing. There were four VISTAs there. They were probably pretty close, actually, in their own backgrounds to the people they were helping, and they were helping build community that way.

Although this was not a faith-based organization, the director of this particular program was a wonderful gentleman named Jean Baptiste St. Louis, and he was a Baptist minister who felt as part of his calling he was going to do this.

Well, that's what we were doing.

I also visited Buffalo recently, and toured around Buffalo with the head of the West Seneca Youth Bureau, a man of limitless energy who almost killed me dragging me around the city. But it was really very interesting and exciting. We visited St. Adelbert's Food Pantry, and it is a food pantry in a Catholic church where they are feeding the hungry, and the wonderful nun, Sister Mary Johnice, who runs it, she's described as the Mother Teresa of Buffalo, not only feeds and clothes but offers counseling.

And, yes, there are religious symbols all over the place, but of course there's no questioning of somebody's religious belief when they come seeking a meal and help.

What do we do there? Well, as I was standing there talking to Sister Mary Johnice, up pulled a truck full of AmeriCorps members and also large heavy pallets of food, and they got out and we all started unloading the food and putting it into place where the various cooks and servers could get access to it. They'd also paint the walls and do rehab of the building, kind of a public space's habitat project, if you will, and through that provide support for this community group.

Well, I just offer these couple of examples of the sort of thing I had in mind when I was trying to explain to the White House that in fact in these armies of compassion, we had the foot soldiers, that we were active in communities already, communities which the White House sought to help, that were able to avoid some of these constitutional entanglements that are real and serious, but also avoidable if you understand what's permitted and what's not permitted in our relationships between church and state.

A lot of AmeriCorps members support Habitat for Humanity projects. They are some of the folks who will help organize the sites and get the equipment and recruit the volunteers and all the other things that are necessary before that Saturday morning photo op with public officials and others who are building a house.

Some of you who have done Habitat projects know that Habitat often begins the day with a prayer. Do AmeriCorps members participate in a prayer service? The answer, of course, is—I mean these are the sorts of things Congress has been wrestling with, the op ed pages have been full of. I've even gotten some mileage writing about them, and what do you do?

Well, it turns out there's a very simple solution. AmeriCorps members are supposed to put in I guess an eight-hour day, and the clock doesn't start until the prayer service ends. So basically they can go to the prayer service if they want, they're just not on government dollars.

Now does that sound artificial? Sure. But it's one of the ways through our 200-plus years of our history that we've made practical accommodations between church and state that stay within the spirit of our constitutional desire to keep church and state separate, and yet recognize the reality of religion and faith in the workings of so many of our organizations.

So we were already doing a lot of that. And we could do more. We could provide either direct services or all sorts of capacity building. We could help with fundraising. We could help improve accounting systems. We could do all sorts of things that those charities that then wanted to apply for public funds would enable them to become more competitive for grants or other kinds of public support, and we could, of course, in Washington work with various Cabinet agencies.

The president in his announcement created five offices of faith-based community initiatives in five major domestic Cabinet agencies, Labor, Health and Human Services, Education, Housing and Urban Development, and the Department of Justice, and they were tasked to see what they could do to get their resources into the hands of these community and faith-based organizations.

Well, they're sincere about wanting to do that, I have no doubt. But it's the nature of life in Washington that one develops certain connections and certain ways of knowing about groups that might be interested in performing public functions. What we could do is work with them because we have people in communities throughout the United States to help identify other groups who might also benefit and be able to use effectively some of their various grant money.

So all of this went on through the spring, and to be perfectly honest, I had no desire to leave Indiana University, to become the CEO of this organization. But one thing is missing from the mix. The White House sort of understood all this and thought it was a great idea, especially John DiIulio, but they needed a CEO. So one day I was visiting DiIulio in the White House, and a couple of other people, and they literally imprisoned me in the West Wing asking if I wouldn't consider doing this.

So what I'm telling you is watch out for what you wish for because having sort of sold the White House on the value of the Corporation in connection with this initiative, the next thing that happens is they asked me to do it, and I was stuck. I mean that lightly, of course. I'm honored to do this, and really feel that it is important, and if the White House felt I could do it, well, I was glad to accept.

So it was on that basis sometime in May I said I'd come down here and then begins this agonizing process known as FBI and ethics check and confirmation. Actually in my case, the FBI was smooth, confirmation was basically 30 minutes with Senator Kennedy and his dog Splash, and for me it was my ethics that were in question.

It has to do with the fact that usually when you take a government job, you quit your previous job, right, but they have made a special provision for professors so that you can actually go on leave. I think this was designed for nuclear scientists, not professors of philanthropic studies, but anyway it pertained to me, and so I was going to go on leave. I thought it would be nice to have a job to come back to in case this thing didn't work out.

And so there—well, the problem was that Indiana University, my home base, is a major recipient of a grant, grants from this corporation. We are the Indiana sponsor of a group called Campus Compact, and so suddenly the alarm bells went off, and three levels, not just one, three levels of ethics officers were trying to get me to make a clean break with IU, and I see a couple of my former students in the back of the room here, and they know how devoted I am to my students, and I said, well, look, you know, I've got to be able to work with these students. I just can't say goodbye. And they said sorry, that's what you're going to have to do.

Well, we negotiated that over months and so finally it was done. Well, just about the time I'm getting ready to come down here, the tragedy of September 11th occurs, and that in a curious way gives even greater meaning to the work of the Corporation for National and Community Service. You don't have to look very hard to see an enormous surge of interest throughout the country among people young and old in serving their country, in getting an answer to the question how can I help.

I don't know how many of you have driven long distances across the country since September 11th, but I went about a third of the way, driving a car from Indianapolis to Washington, and it's true, there are flag banners on every overpass and even on the Pennsylvania Turnpike. And people are looking for ways to help, and it quickly dawned on all sorts of folks that, gee, maybe we ought to be expanding national service as a way of giving people those opportunities to do so.

We actually had some very strange alliances develop as a result of this. Many of you are probably familiar with the proposal from Senators McCain and Bayh to quintuple, quintuple, the number of people we have in AmeriCorps.

As far as we can tell—that proposal was made a couple of weeks ago. As far as we can tell, Senator McCain has never even voted for us, and now he wishes to quintuple us. And we're delighted he does, of course. But this gives you a pretty clear sense of how the attitude of a lot of people has started to shift as they think about the work of the Corporation.

The president on November 8th made a very important speech in Atlanta, asking Americans to do what they can to help in the war effort by doing things in the homeland. All sorts of things, ranging from things connected to homeland security, such as helping out where police or fire departments are stretched thin by call-ups for the reserves, to assisting public health officials, to working, of course, with the relief agencies.

Just today I got word that another 24 members of AmeriCorps and NCCC were called up to go to the World Trade Center to work on a project of aiding families with the Red Cross.

The president called on all Americans to try and do something, even if it's something as relatively modest as talking to one's own children.

There were two reasons for this. One is I think as we all know, and certainly I have not seen a piece of mail since just about I got here, so any of you who have invited me to do something and haven't heard back, it's because our mailroom, like lots of others in Washington in the government, closed down. We have had anthrax in our mailroom, trace amounts, fortunately, but it does close things down.

Well, we are, like all other agencies, looking seriously at the various kinds of threats that we hadn't even had to think about before, and so when the president is calling on American citizens to participate, it's partly that he had to mind, to really give active help in dealing with a variety of tasks, but also it's a matter of morale and of building trust.

One of the things that terrorism thrives on is disrupting trust. Terrorism is a particularly modern form of warfare. It works best in societies that are very much—where people are very much dependent upon one another, that are very complex. Because what terrorism does is it makes us very nervous. You begin to distrust everything, including the air you breathe.

One of the things, of course, that the institutions of civil society are renowned for is building trust and enabling us to work together and through working together to learn more about each other and to have more confidence in one another and in the communities in which we live. And that, too, is part of the motive behind the president's call on Americans in their own civilian lives to come on out and take part in all the things that need doing.

We at the White House are particularly concerned about Arab Americans. We know most Arab Americans in this country are here like any other immigrant group because they are seeking freedom and opportunity, and they want to be Americans. And yet also, quite understandably, as a result of September 11th, there have been lots of strains in our communities, some of which have been expressed in exceedingly violent and destructive ways. And through service projects we are looking to kind of rebuild some of those bridges of trust.

I did a speech to the Michigan Council on Foundations recently in Detroit, and while I was there, I went up to Dearborn. Dearborn, Michigan has the largest number of Arabs in residence than any part of the world except for the Middle East and Paris. And there in Dearborn is what I would describe as an Arab settlement house. The Arab Community Center for Economic and Social Services, ACCESS. And it was doing the kinds of things that would have been familiar to Jane Addams or Lillian Wald. They were teaching English to new immigrants. They were dealing with health problems of people who had just arrived from regions of the world where their health care was primitive. They were doing low-income housing projects, and they were helping people with economic development.

They were doing one thing that I doubt Jane Addams or Lillian Wald worried about. In the health services they had a special unit that was dealing with victims of torture, Iraqis who had been tortured by Saddam Hussein. I met a woman there who was dressed in traditional Muslim garb from head to foot, and she herself, I was told, had been tortured, but she had recovered to the point where she was able to be on staff and help others.

Well, it was a great thing to see, and we had VISTAs there and they were about to do a joint service project with City Year and one of their proudest events was that their soccer team had just won some sort of championship in the city of Dearborn.

Robert Putnam, in "Making Democracy Work," says that good government in Italy grows from soccer clubs and choirs. And there in Dearborn we had a soccer club coached by a refugee from Tunisia, and you could just see it developing right there. And I was proud that we had VISTAs there.

I have discovered that since taking on this job, I am a press magnet, and so the press follow me around when I do these things, and there's a very nice story that came out of this visit from the Associated Press in which the man who runs the center is quoted as saying, "We're Arabs, but we want to be Americans, too." And that's the kind of message we need to get out and we need to take seriously on the homeland as long as, and indeed long after, we are in this terrible crisis.

Well, in his November 8th speech, the president proposed the creation of a Cabinet-level task force on citizen preparedness. The Corporation for National and Community Service and the Federal Emergency Management Agency, FEMA, are the only two non-Cabinet members of it, and we are looking at ways to translate this call the president made into practical steps.

We will be making a report to the president on December 19th, and while I am not at liberty to share with you the details of that report at this point, I can tell you that it will emphasize the important role the nation's civic groups, the nation's independent sector, have to play in these challenging times.

This emphasis, of course, is a familiar one in American history. When faced with challenges, we have often turned not just to government or to business but to our philanthropic and voluntary groups, to our independent sector.

Yet if today you called Washington and you asked for that one person whom I am told exists and who knows everything there is to know about the Federal government and where things are, and you said, okay, you Americans, you're so proud of your civic traditions, who is it in the federal government that's paying attention to their well-being?

Where you most likely would be referred is the Internal Revenue Service. The cops. The regulators. And we do need cops and regulators. But if you think about it, there isn't any one agency in the federal government that sees as its mission to make sure that these very valuable institutions, institutions whose value we can easily overlook in placid times, but who in times of crisis become even more important to us, there's no part of this great government of ours that pays attention to how well they're doing.

I think that the Corporation for National and Community Service is positioned to do that, to see as its mission not just running a set of programs such as AmeriCorps and Senior Corps and Learn and Serve, but more broadly to be asking how healthy is the independent sector, what can be done to make it even stronger.

Our programs then become a means to that end, an important means because, after all, the lifeblood of our civic institutions are people who serve in them, and that's what we are all about, promoting service on the part of individuals.

But there's a larger and important mission, which is to look after these terribly important institutions. Again, whether it's part of the faith-based and community initiative or dealing with the challenges presented by homeland security.

And I'm hoping that during my tenure in office we will be able to shape this as our mission, put some real substance to it, and make some great accomplishments. And I look forward, in fact, to working with all of you because I have to tell you that this last point I made is not particularly original with me. This one was part of the Presidential Task Force recommendation.

Peter Goldberg, I take it, can't be here today, but I'd like to say I owe my job to Peter Goldberg. You know, Peter argued this and has argued this for many years, and he's absolutely right, just as the Small Business Administration pays attention to the welfare of small business in the United States, which is the cornerstone of our success as an economic society, or economic success, I hope the Corporation for National and Community Service will be seen as the agency that pays attention to the well-being of our philanthropic and voluntary groups which are the cornerstone of our success as a democratic society.

And if that can be accomplished in the next few years, and I think with your help, with the enthusiasm of the administration and, of course, with the strong support of Congress, we can do it—then out of this terrible tragedy we all saw on September 11th, yet another piece of good will have come.

So thank you very much, and I will be glad to entertain questions.

[Applause]

MODERATOR: Thank you very much, Les, and it's great to have your comments and framing and some challenges also before us as we move forward on this.

Let me open it up at this point to the floor, and have you pose questions, make comments, and for those of you who are here today, please tell us who you are and give us the name of your organization.

QUESTION: I'm Dot Ridings with the Council on Foundations. Les, fill us in on the status of the former Office of Faith-Based and Community Initiatives and exactly where all those responsibilities and everything lie, the people and the process.

MR. LENKOWSKY: Yes. Physically they're all over Jackson Place, as you may know. Portions of the Eisenhower Executive Office Building were cleared out for security reasons. There is still a group there. As you probably know, some of the members, David Kuo is still involved, and others.

Prior to September 11th, the White House was getting ready to reorganize and replace John DiIulio in some fashion. There is still a certain amount of discussion about the nature of the replacement, but they were about ready to do this. Obviously in the wake of September 11th, the same people who would be involved in that decision have a few other things on their plate. So they have really not gotten around to it.

That, however, does not mean that the initiative itself has ground to a halt. Remember, there are fully operational now five Cabinet-level agencies that are going through their departments trying to improve the grantmaking process as it might affect these community and faith-based groups, and they are working with folks in the Office of Cabinet Affairs and elsewhere in the executive branch to do that.

In addition to that, there are lots of Federal grantmaking programs. I was just with somebody from the Administration for Children, Youth and Families of the Department of Health and Human Services, and they are looking at all their stuff and asking how can we get some of this funding to these groups that the president is seeking to help.

And we at the Corporation have recently established or are in the process of establishing an intake center so grassroots groups or faith-based groups can call in and say, gee, we'd like to do such-and-such, and we would refer them to one of the Cabinet agencies. Many of our state commissions are developing coalitions to work with these groups.

We've got VISTAs and AmeriCorps and others going in to work with these groups. So there's a lot of action going on already.

There's also a bill that used to be H.R. 7 is now still pending over in the Senate. I think some of the more controversial provisions have been taken off it. We're running out of time in this session. It's not clear what will happen.

But my point is all along, and I think John DiIulio certainly recognized this, and I suggested it earlier, that what you really need to make this effort succeed has a lot more to do with outreach and implementation than the sorts of things the White House is good at.

In fact, in June of this year, after I had signed on the dotted line, John called me up. We were talking about sending somebody over from the Corporation to John's staff, and the White House is to link us up and make the lines as smooth as possible, and in his inimitable fashion, those of you who know John will know what I mean, he said to me, "Well, Les, I've been thinking about this and instead of your sending somebody to us, why don't we send people to you?" "Because," he said, "the White House is great for PR and it's great for some kinds of legislative battles, but it is absolutely hopeless at administration and outreach and implementation, and you guys need to carry this ball."

And what he had in mind were his two associate directors, Mark Scott and Lisa Cummins, who are now part of the task force in our office on the White House faith-based and community initiative.

So all this is already under way. I guess what I am saying, sooner or later we will figure out what that office in the White House should be long term, but for the purposes of this program, it's making less and less difference.

MODERATOR: Pablo.

QUESTION: Pablo Eisenberg from Georgetown's Public Policy Institute. Les, how serious are the White House and the administration in supporting secular grassroots organizations? Is it a tag-along to make the faith-based stuff look more palatable? And the reason why I ask that is historically in the last 20 years, Republicans have not had a very good track record in supporting grassroots organizations. In fact, many of them have opposed it. So I'd love to hear your answer.

MR. LENKOWSKY: I think it is very serious. In fact, one of the things that you may have read that went on in January before inauguration was should community come first or faith-based come first. For reasons that I was not privy to, they decided faith-based would come first. But there's no doubt at all that the community groups are an important part.

I think the key to remember here is this is actually about community groups. You can't go into Buffalo and say I want to visit community groups and wind up seeing only secular groups. Or if you went in and said I want to see faith-based groups, you would see groups that might nominally be faith-based, but are basically community groups.

I was asked by a former VISTA in Rochester, she said is this—we've got VISTAs in a community center, actually she's the director of the VISTA program in the community center. She said does the initiative mean that VISTAs are now going to go to a church in our neighborhood which, like some inner-city churches, is open Sunday morning, the parishioners come in from the suburbs, and after services they go back to the suburbs. I mean this is the fate of a certain number of inner-city churches. And I said absolutely not. The test here—and I think the White House is very clear on this—is to reach out to groups regardless of whether they're faith-based or secular that are doing good work.

I think the concern that animated the president initially was we did a pretty good job of reaching out to secular groups but not quite as good a job, for all sorts of reasons, at reaching out to the faith-based groups. So I think where you might have gotten that impression is that this is meant to redress that balance, but not create a balance in the opposite direction.

MODERATOR: Thank you. In the back.

QUESTION: Hi, I'm Steve Rabin with Common Cause. AmeriCorps has obviously been very effective at getting more young people involved in community services, and there are programs to get senior citizens to volunteer. What can be done to encourage the 40-year-old who is not a member of a church and say he's a small business person and a parent, to be more engaged in their community and to volunteer?

MR. LENKOWSKY: Well, first of all, the 40-year-old could join AmeriCorps, too. I’d be delighted to have us extend the age limit for—I mean AARP would just love it if we could declare 40-year-olds seniors.

[Laughter]

MR. LENKOWSKY: So, but I think that the way to do this—I mean we feel very strongly that the purpose of particularly AmeriCorps is not just to provide service but to do capacity-building. And part of that is—and I wish I had a better term for it, but I'm learning that government speaks a language other than English, called volunteer leveraging. So when we look at an AmeriCorps program, we don't look at just how many AmeriCorps members are there and what do they do in terms of actual service delivery. One of the things—and it's actually—we're going to go through reauthorization next session of Congress, and we are already doing this administratively, we're going to make this—put this into the law as a legislative priority, this volunteer leveraging. And obviously those volunteers could be those 40-year-olds. Could be anybody.

The test of a successful program will include how many other volunteers can you get to participate. So I think the answer to the question is, you know, through these programs—they're not meant to be—I mean these are not the only—I mean if the only people volunteering are AmeriCorps members, then I think you have given lots of ammunition to people who have charged us with corrupting the motives for volunteering by telling people you should only volunteer if you get paid. That's not what we're about.

To the contrary, what we want is to use the small amount, relatively speaking, of our resources to generate that kind of civic engagement from lots of other people.

Let me just also make one other point on young people. Obviously as a college professor this is an area of particular concern to me. We are about to release the first—we are doing a longitudinal study of who joins AmeriCorps, and we have just finished the baseline. APT Associates is doing the work for us. And the baseline will be released. It's the survey of who is in AmeriCorps, and it's good news and bad news.

The good news is that people who sign up for AmeriCorps, young people, are people who prior to signing up had been involved in all sorts of community service activities. So this criticism we have received, that all AmeriCorps does is pay people to serve, is clearly untrue, because people who join AmeriCorps already are committed to service.

The bad news, of course, is how do you go beyond folks who have already shown a propensity to serve and reach out to people, you know, who aren't there yet. And that's the challenge we face as well.

I like to use an INDEPENDENT SECTOR statistic, pretty much in context. Basically, according, I think, to the last volunteers, not the one that you are just releasing, but the one two years ago—I haven't looked at the numbers yet in the one you're releasing—the percentage of young people 18 to 24 who report volunteering is about the same as the percentage of people 75 or older. And as somebody who is much closer to 75 than 18 to 24, I know that the bones creak a little more as you get up there, and doing a lot of things you could do when you were younger is harder. And if, in fact, it's correct that young people are no more likely, roughly, to volunteer than the more senior of our senior citizens, that's the challenge we ought to be addressing.

MODERATOR: Yes.

QUESTION: Les, as you begin to entertain the notion of the Corporation not necessarily representing but speaking to the interests of the sector, writ large, nonprofits and philanthropy jointly, do you have a sense of what are some of the activities or the issues or the kinds of programs that might be appropriate?

MR. LENKOWSKY: Well, I'm hoping and trust that all of you will be telling me. We've been involved in a couple. As some of you may know, there were some issues related to a provision that might affect foundations that got very helpfully called to my attention we've been working on. Elizabeth Boris and her colleagues from the Urban Institute are coming over to see me in a week to start talking about the 990s, and we were fortunate enough when the president taped a public service ad to encourage people to volunteer and give over the Thanksgiving holiday, the White House asked to use our website as the portal. So we did a quick effort to get in shape so it wouldn't all crash, and I used it as an excuse to actually navigate around this, and as well know, you know, Network for Good, and VolunteerMatch are good steps. They're just first steps. And in two respects, we ought to think about how to improve them.

One is the basic data in those 990s, which we all know is a problem. And second is just the sites themselves, especially on the volunteer side, they're pretty good at getting—identifying volunteer opportunities for the larger charities that know how to work this, but in terms of being able to get out there to the smaller groups around the country, there is still a lot to be desired.

So one of the things that is high on Mayor Goldsmith's priority list for the Corporation is for us to take a leading role in looking at the whole set of issues related to e-philanthropy and volunteering. Not again from a regulatory point of view, but rather doing what we can with, of course, the private sector to make this as seamless as possible.

The third thing we'll be doing is working with the Chamber of Commerce, with the Council on Foundations, and perhaps INDEPENDENT SECTOR and others, is sponsor a summit on philanthropy. In his speech at the University of Notre Dame last spring, the president called for a summit on philanthropy with the intent of asking the question, okay, if we get—sort of address the question of why aren't public resources going to these grassroots groups, shouldn't we also address the question about why aren't private resources, both corporate and foundation? And so he asked for a summit on philanthropy that would look at this, and we will take the lead role within the government for that.

Obviously it is a complex question. I don't want anybody to think we're going to sit here and point fingers. I mean the idea here would be to say, okay, what is—is there a problem; if so, what's the nature; and, most importantly, what can you do about it. Can you do some things that might make it easier for private donors to identify and support, you know, these kinds of groups.

So we will be doing some of that as well.

MODERATOR: Yes, Rob.

QUESTION: Rob Hollister, University College of Citizenship and Public Service at Tufts University. I have, Les, an outreach and implementation question. I'm delighted with what you have just said about advocating the role for the Corporation in strengthening the sector, but with the prospective expansion of Federally-sponsored volunteer service, what thoughts do you have about how to strengthen and elevate the capacity of community organizations to productively use volunteers? Something that I think it would be fair to say is perhaps a limited capacity historically.

And then do you have other thoughts about how your agency might make that volunteer service experience more productive as preparation for lifetimes of civic leadership?

MR. LENKOWSKY: Those are very good questions. On the first one, what ideas do we have about strengthening the sector, those of you who know me won't be surprised, now I've got a few ideas, but I do want to say that one of the risks in the strategy I've outlined is we don't want—I mean we do want to maintain an independent sector here, right? We really don't want Washington to come down with a five-point plan for strengthening nonprofit organizations in their capacity to do volunteering.

There are some things we can do. For example, there are strict limits on the ability of AmeriCorps and VISTA members in fundraising. If you had an organization that had some of our people, like The Little Haiti Housing Association, I believe that we can help you raise private funds. There are certain nuances of the law here, but we ought to change that. If we're going to send people to work to strengthen organizations, they ought to be able to strengthen them where the organizations need strengthening.

But the other side of this is, you know, I would hope that a lot of ideas for what we would do would come from you and groups like yours around the country. You know, the thing about our nonprofit—and I'm really getting a sense of this as I travel around the country. You go to Buffalo and you see one kind of nonprofit community. It turns out it's a heavily religious community. You go to Miami, you see a different one. You go to Chicago—they all have some things in common, to be sure. But they're all rooted in local cultures and, of course, that is the critical element for attracting volunteers.

I was at a senior program at a Franciscan Sisters Hospital in Wheaton, Illinois, and one of their problems is that seniors don't like to drive at night. Well, this is a stroke patient hospital, and unfortunately stroke patients sometimes do need help at night, and volunteers are needed to help provide it.

So what do you do? Well, those of you familiar with Wheaton, Illinois know there's a very fine Christian college in Wheaton, Illinois, and I suspect the ethic of service is pretty high there. In fact, a number of members of the White House staff come from there and have been very much involved in this initiative.

Well, what we might try to do is, you know, at least make the connections. If there's a need for one of our service learning programs, maybe think about something like that. I don't know. So there are a limited number of things we can do, but it's very important that in strengthening volunteering the ideas come from the grassroots and reflect the needs of the communities.

Your second question is also important, especially for the younger people. You want people who are engaged in community service, not just to provide useful service, though I think that's an important and sometimes difficult first step, as you know, but also to have an understanding of not just why they're doing it but also some of the issues involved.

This is how I got to where I am. I was a college student and started working in low-income neighborhoods and became concerned and began to understand things about poverty and welfare reform that led me in the direction of a career. And you'd like to see other people, young people, do that as well.

Again, other than in some limited ways, I think the impetus for this is going to have to come from local school systems, local colleges and universities. At the Corporation for National Service we have a major program that's geared to promoting service learning in higher ed, and what we see ourselves do is trying to develop effective practices.

Another thing we will be doing is—how many of you were work-study students in your distant college days? How many of you were offered an opportunity to do your work off campus in a neighborhood organization rather than in the library, dining hall, or wherever?

Well, would you please tell your universities that they probably broke the law. In fact, the work-study program—I'm exaggerating here. The work-study program when it was created in the 1960s was part of the War on Poverty. People tend to forget this. And it was designed to encourage and enable college students to participate with community groups.

Now there were certain legislative modifications afterwards that moved it away from that purpose.

But we have gone back to it and today the law requires up to 7 percent of work-study students to be serving in off campus community assignments. On average—we just issued a report, and I've got a number of my colleagues here. I hope you'll meet in the reception, any one of them can get you this. We have just done a report that shows on average it's about 15 percent across the country, but there are some strange outliers. Anyone go to University of Notre Dame? It's got a terrific service tradition, right? But the proportion of work-study students who are what we call serve-study is below the national average.

Senator McCain and Senator Bayh in their bill propose to increase the slots from 7 percent to 25 percent. I don't see why we should have a percentage at all. I would like every student to be offered an opportunity to serve off campus as well as on campus, and let the student decide.

Now I am not unsympathetic to them. Even though I'm a college faculty member, I occasionally entertain a nice thought about college administrators. So I'm not unsympathetic to their concerns that have developed over the years.

So, you know, as we go forward with this—and it probably will be something on the agenda of Congress in the next session—we need to be very careful, both so that the colleges, their rightful needs, both in terms of their current expenditures but also good service programs carry with them some costs. You can't just, you know, tell people go find a place to serve. And then the point we were talking about, you might want to put some learning aspects into it.

But here is a way by which we can dramatically increase the number of college age students out there in community work, at relatively modest additional cost. And then if it could be tied into a learning component as well, it would be very valuable, I think.

MODERATOR: Yes, in the back.

QUESTION: Les, Ron Field from Volunteers of America. We talked a lot about capacity-building, and it's very important, and I think what Rob just asked is a nice segue to the whole concept of capacity-building, utilizing perhaps resources that are already out there. We all know that there are a number of established, larger, both faith-based and secular organizations that could be tremendous partners in helping to do this.

Would you like to tell us what your thoughts are about how we can partner?

MR. LENKOWSKY: It's not as good a softball as the president got yesterday when he was asked about eating with his family at home, but I'm not going to use it to talk about how I didn't like my mother's cooking.

[Laughter]

MR. LENKOWSKY: Yes, I'm glad you asked that question, because I do think that one of the unfortunate elements of the way the faith-based community initiatives program came forward—and it was not the intent of the White House to do this—was it seemed to suggest that some kinds of charities, including some that are religious faith-based ones, such as yours, such as Lutheran Services, Catholic Charities, and others, were somehow irrelevant to all this, that there was some preferred group out there, and that's unfortunate. It was not intended; I know that.

Ideally what you'd want to do is work with existing groups, whether they're faith-based or community groups, that are already doing a lot of work and through creative partnerships with groups that either might come from different religious backgrounds or might have different ways of approaching some of these problems, you get the benefit of the experience and know-how of the existing groups for the groups that are at the grassroots that are perhaps trying kinds of methods that for the larger groups might not be appropriate, for any number of reasons.

So I hope that we will see a much more creative use of—and again, one of those awful terms, this probably comes from the academy—of intermediaries, trying to work together, rather than pit one against another, which I think was a kind of unfortunate—you know, some of the words, an unlevel playing fields and elsewhere suggested that. And it was not really intended.

I'd even like to go beyond that. I'm from Indiana, and I think one of the—I don't know if it's on the council's great grants lists yet, but one of the great foundation grants I know of is the Lilly Endowment's effort to seed community foundations throughout Indiana, and Kellogg did something similar in Michigan. I think this is a wonderful idea, not that it will work in every county, but it really gives a county a capacity to do two things, one, to raise and grant funds, and secondly it does provide a basis for places that might not have it for a kind of technical assistance and capacity assistance organization.

Well, I asked Mayor Goldsmith how many sort of county-size units are there in the United States, and he told me he thought it was about 3000. And the latest number of community foundations I've seen is about 600.

Well, why don't we take as a national goal having a community foundation in every county in the United States? Not that it will be succeeding in every one, but is this something worth doing as a vehicle for doing exactly the sort of thing you're talking about?

I don't know, but that I'd like—you know, it would be interesting to talk a little bit about that.

MODERATOR: Yes.

QUESTION: I'm Tom Nelson from AARP, and I appreciate the earlier plug, although we're actually quite content with age 50 as being the membership age.

I actually raced to get over here and cleaned myself up, because we did something for the first time as an employer today, and my question is about employer-based volunteerism and service. For the first time we at AARP had a day of service, and so we took our 2000 employees around the country. When they reported to work, they didn't go to the office, we were out in community agencies today. And given that half of our membership is actually working, we're keenly interested in how do we stimulate greater volunteerism among the older 50-plus population? And we're in part interested how do we stimulate it in the workplace.

So I would be interested in what kind of leadership role we could look to, the Corporation and to the administration, as they talk very effectively to the private sector about employer-based volunteerism and service programs.

MR. LENKOWSKY: I think one of the nice things about this Task Force on Citizen Preparedness I referred to earlier is in addition to the Corporation being at the table, all the major agencies were, and they were all challenged to think along those lines. So suddenly you hear the folks from the Department of Labor saying, well, you know, we have contacts with all sorts of employers. Maybe we could mobilize them—and again, the mission here would be to make the workplace safe. It's not quite a community mission, but it's a step in that direction. Maybe we could mobilize through the employer network and the union—now let's not forget unions. I mean trade unions in this country are a great and a very early example of a voluntary organization. As we talk about service, let's include labor unions in this as well.

You know, maybe we could mobilize them at the workplace to do security type things. Well, that's a start toward exactly what you're talking about. But what's interesting here, the Department of Labor has always had relationships with employers and unions, but now they have been thinking about what do we do to not tap their capacity as employers or workers but as members of a civic entity called a company.

So I think we are headed in that direction. We have a lot more to go. I think it's very helpful that the U.S. Chamber of Commerce is going to be involved with us in this summit on philanthropy. The Chamber in addition to being a fine group in its own right, of course, has a network. They've got legs out there. They are in all our communities. So as we formulate ideas about philanthropy and volunteering through meetings that involve the Chamber, and the same would be true of NAM and FIB, get them into this discussion. To the extent these ideas take, you have a network through which they will build. So that's the sort of thing I think we'll be doing, and I'm glad that AARP was doing that today, I'm glad you did.

MODERATOR: Yes.

QUESTION: I'm with the Alliance of Children and Families. Do you have any kind of predilection for replicating services and programs that you are already doing, or do you prize innovation and looking for new things to do in the community? And the second part is what can you do to strengthen your communications system so that we hear more about you?

MR. LENKOWSKY: Well, we're working on the latter. We are working, and we have a terrific director of public affairs. Some of you may know her from her days at the National Civic League or the Target Foundation, Christine Bennaro, and a couple of our public affairs people are our new members. Amy Holmes is here today. So we're going to work on that, and certainly electronically.

I think on the first, replicability, let me say two things. You know, we are always going to be a small place. We see our role as really helping to highlight effective practices. Again, you have to be careful. You know, we don't want to dictate around the country what organizations ought to be doing, but through sensible grants, you know, highlight and develop effective ideas that might be right for certain communities. They may not be right for other communities.

I started really taking seriously the point I made earlier, that Harris Wofford made about thinking of the Corporation as a grantmaking foundation. And so I have been giving reading assignments to my senior staff. Chris Letz' article and a variety of others about how foundations work and how people think about foundations, and how they invest in communities.

I even gave them a test. Bob Payton created a little test for Jane Addams fellows, and I gave the senior staff a test that includes questions such as what great philanthropist created the University of Chicago? I will not tell you how my staff did, but we are starting to change a culture around our place. I don't want us to think of ourselves as a government agency. We are a government agency, and for certain things we have to be scrupulous, particularly on management and accounting and so on. But I want us to think of ourselves as part of the philanthropic world, investing in community groups, so as to strengthen them.

One of the courses that I taught at Indiana University was how foundations and corporate givers and such like work, and I always told my students—I asked my students what is the most important piece of equipment a foundation program officer has? Anybody know the answer? His or her suitcase. Get out on the road. And I am telling you my folks have been hearing an awful lot of that from me.

One of the nice things—and all of you can actually help me with this. You know, when I travel on the road, I get the Catherine the Great effect. I already declared I am not Catherine the Great. You know, people want to show me their best. And I'll see some of that. But I'm fortunate to have lots of students around the country, and so the way I found out about Little Haiti is I had a former student in Miami. I asked him where I should go, and that's where he sent me. Our own people didn't know very much about Little Haiti.

I hope all of you will tell me of interesting things you hear about in communities that might benefit from a visit from me, partly so that I'll learn about them, partly again, remember, when I show up, often the press comes with me and you can get a little nice publicity or Congressional leaders come with me, or their staff, so you get a little publicity from some good groups. But mostly as well so that I can drag some of my people with me.

In Buffalo we visited a couple of places that will now have VISTAs. My people just didn't quite know about them. And that's understandable. I'm not faulting our people. It's a very complex world we have there, but the only way to change it is to go out and look.

So I think to the extent all of you can help me out a little bit and say, you know, if you are ever going to, here's a place that's really doing something innovative. Whether they have Corporation people or not, I'd like to hear about it.

So I think that answers your question. I think we see ourselves really in the—you know, that tired old expression, of venture philanthropy here, but I'm one of those as Dot and others know who realize this is not exactly something that was invented in Seattle three years ago.

MODERATOR: I think on that note we will draw this part of the program to a close. I want to invite all of you to join us downstairs on the first floor at a reception with Les, but please join me first in thanking Les very much for being with us today and for his comments.

[Applause]

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