When President Obama speaks, the nation listens.
During a campaign speech at Wesleyan University in Connecticut last spring, then-candidate Barack Obama called on all Americans to give their time to national service.
“I believe with all my heart that this generation is ready and eager and up to the challenge,” said the former community organizer to students, faculty, and citizens of their future contributions to the country.
Well, eager and ready they were. Laura Lartigue, a spokeswoman for the Peace Corps, told USA Today that applications to serve abroad are up 16% from last year. AmeriCorps applications have tripled from March to April alone, with April seeing more than 17,000 applications.
Now that the President has seen the outpouring of support for his call to action, he’s also put our money where his mouth is. On April 21, Obama signed the ‘Serve America Act’, which will use $1.1 billion in earmarks from the 2010 budget to reauthorize and expand programs offered by the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency which heads popular national service programs like AmeriCorps. A sum of $200 million was also provided to the corporation in February’s Recovery Act, a 25% increase from 2008.
The ‘Serve America Act’, co-sponsored by Massachusetts Senator Edward Kennedy, intends to extend AmeriCorps membership from 75,000 to 250,000 by 2017, increase education award subsidies to members by $625, and create groups of ‘corps’ members in key national areas like education, clean energy, health, and veterans. The Act also establishes September 11 as the national day of service.
AmeriCorps, which currently has 75,000 members and engages nearly 4 million American volunteers in service—members are paid a stipend whereas volunteers are not—consists of people young and old who work on grass-roots projects such as building affordable housing, educating and mentoring youth, and responding to communities stricken by natural disasters.
Alan Solomont, chairman of the Corporation for National and Community Service, was joined by the corporation’s vice chair Stephen Goldsmith and the Director of the White House Domestic Policy Council Melody Barnes on a conference call to discuss the Act the day the legislation was passed. All three agreed that the rise in applications and the need for the ‘Serve America Act’ is a citizen movement—not a creation of Capitol Hill.
“This is not something that is being imposed on the nation by Washington,” Solomont said. “If anything, this is a response in Washington to something that's taking place throughout the country.”
One of the things happening throughout the country is a rising national unemployment rate. According to the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics, March logged in a rate of 8.5% (http://www.bls.gov/cps). That’s 2.7% more than the 2008 annual rate of 5.8%.
Solomont was not blind to that irony.
“I will say that there's no question that the job market is one of the reasons why we think young people are looking to community service as a viable alternative coming out of high school and coming out of college for job opportunities,” he said. “We think [that] is a very good thing.”
The funds allotted to the Act was a very good thing for Goldsmith, too, who said the money could not come at a more crucial time.
“This is a really difficult and important time for nonprofits,” Goldsmith said. “So the bill could not come at a better time and allows us to provide important services to strengthen the capacity of nonprofits and allow them to manage up more volunteers.”
In addition to the Peace Corps and AmeriCorps, One Laptop Per Child (OLPC), an MIT based not-for-profit organization, has also seen an overwhelming amount of applicants for it’s first ever Africa Corps. Paul Commons, an OLPC representative, said 30 teams were chosen as the first batch of students to be internationally deployed to hand out XO laptops to children in developing nations.
“We had 700 students apply from a couple hundred universities, which is phenomenal,” Commons said. “Within a couple weeks, we’ve have a hundred universities across the world interested in the OLPC Africa Corps idea.”
Although it’s likely that the recession and citizen goodwill have contributed to soaring numbers in national and international service organizations, it’s also just as likely that most people are just supporting a summoning from America’s new favorite man.
“I think the ‘Obama effect’ is having that effect,” said Barnes. “I mean, people, even starting with the campaign, […] people became engaged as the President talked about the importance of that engagement.”
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