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S P E C I A L R E P O R T: N AT I O N A L S E R V I C E
Harris Wofford
photo courtesy of
VolunteerMatch.org
WHEN WORDS
BECOME ACTIONS
National and community
service linked across generations
BY PATRICK SULLIVAN
H
arris Wofford does not care
much for the word volunteerism. “Most ‘isms’ are
things people don’t like,” he
said. “They’re ideology, not a form of action.”
The former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, adviser to multiple presidents,
one of the architects of the Peace Corps,
confidant of Martin Luther King Jr.,
world traveler and author has had a life
“nearly four score and seven years” long,
as he’s fond of saying. It has been filled
with a type of action some might call
mobilization.
By the age of 12, Wofford had already
seen more of the world than most people three times his age, because of a sixmonth tour of Europe, Asia and the
Middle East with his grandmother in
1938. He wrote his first book, It’s Up to
Us: Federal World Government in Our
Time, at age 20. He organized a group
advocating the end to isolationism and
the participation of America in World
War II, a group called the Student Federalists that would grow to a nationwide
16
organization, while still in high school.
“I was volunteering, but I didn’t think
of volunteerism,” said Wofford of the
World War II years. “The whole country
was volunteering. It was one time in my
life that I had a sense that people were
pulling together.”
Wofford depicts service in America as
a roller coaster, with peaks and valleys.
The early 1960s was a peak, with the
Kennedy administration and the formation of the Peace Corps. The Vietnam
War years was a valley, so costly in lives
and resources, diverting attention and
funding from the nascent service movement. The mid-1990s, when a Republican-dominated Congress threatened the
existence of a new program called
AmeriCorps, was also a valley. The weeks
and months after the September 11,
2001 terror attacks was a peak, as the nation mobilized, harnessing a spirit of
public service.
The first peak that Wofford experienced occurred in 1960 on the campaign
trail with presidential candidate John F.
Kennedy. In the early morning hours of
October 14, Kennedy gave a brief speech
J UNE 1, 2012
to a group of students at the University of
Michigan, challenging them to “contribute part of your life to this country”
by taking part in foreign service.
“Ten thousand students had stayed up
and shown enthusiasm,” said Wofford,
who at that time was adviser to Kennedy
on civil rights and was present for the
speech. The students responded, he recalled, and circulated a petition that garnered hundreds of signatures showing
support for Kennedy’s proposed foreign
service. Kennedy won the election
shortly thereafter, and in March 1961
signed an executive order that created
the Peace Corps, with his brother-in-law
Sargent Shriver as the organization’s first
director.
Fast forward four decades. Wofford
gave a speech to students at Cornell University in 1998, imploring them to serve
their country and the world. The students, like those at the University of Michigan who heard Kennedy, responded.
Among them was a junior named Ben
Duda. Now 34, Duda is the executive director of AmeriCorps Alums, a nonprofit
that serves as “a connective tissue” that
“knit(s) together” the 775,000 AmeriCorps alumni. Wofford’s speech, he said,
inspired him to join AmeriCorps National
Civilian Community Corps (NCCC) upon
graduation.
“It was a super-important moment in
my life,” he said. “I thought I’d go to law
school or into business. But, I heard that
speech and was pretty certain I wanted
to go into AmeriCorps. It was the passion
with which (Wofford) spoke and how he
articulated this opportunity to serve.”
Shannon Binns, founder and executive director of Sustain Charlotte, classified himself as “a wandering soul”
during 2001. Age 24 at the time, he had
just returned to the United States after
teaching English in Prague. “Nine-eleven
had just happened and I was feeling, I
think like a lot of Americans, that I
wanted to do some service. When I
learned about AmeriCorps, it seemed
like a perfect fit.”
A 2002 stint in AmeriCorps NCCC,
modeled after President Franklin Roosevelt’s Depression-era Civilian Conservation Corps, led to an assignment in
the Peace Corps promoting agroforestry
in the western African country of Senegal. “I really decided during (NCCC) that
I wanted to devote my career to community service type of work,” said Binns.
After doing tsunami relief work in
Thailand in 2004, Binns earned a Master
of Public Administration degree with a
concentration in environmental science
and policy from Columbia University in
New York City. The 35-year-old now runs
a nonprofit in Charlotte, N.C. “Without
that experience (in AmeriCorps and the
Peace Corps), I wouldn’t be doing (nonprofit work) today,” he said.
Programs such as AmeriCorps and
the Peace Corps offer opportunities for
people to enter full-time service, and
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there is a word that Wofford does like:
opportunity.
“Opportunity is a big word that can
move most people,” he said. “It’s not an
ideological word. It points to something
very practical.”
That’s why Wofford sits on the leadership board of an initiative called Opportunity Nation, along with an eclectic
73-person group that includes New York
City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, Maj.
Gen. Albert Zapanta (Ret.), president of
IBM’s International Foundation Stanley
Litow and actors Nick Cannon and Kat
Graham. It is a coalition of more than
200 businesses, nonprofits, educational
institutions and military organizations
that, in Wofford’s words, provides opportunity for “young people who don’t
have it or don’t realize they have it.” It is
a coming together of all sectors to invest
in the future of America.
One way Binns sees that marriage of
public, private and service sectors is
through corporate volunteer programs.
“Employers have a really important role
to play,” he said. He cited Bank of America, which, like Binns’ Sustain Charlotte,
is headquartered in that largest city in
North Carolina. Bank of America provides grants of up to $500 for employees
Ben Duda
volunteering at least 100 hours per year.
In 2010, 15 percent of its $200 million
philanthropy budget went to volunteer
grants and matching employee gifts.
Gretchen Slusser, once a volunteer
for Cabrini Green Legal Aid (CGLA), a
Chicago, Ill., nonprofit that provides
free legal aid to low-income clients, and
now the organization’s executive director, foresees nonprofits implementing
“more organized volunteer opportunities.” She said that people are more inclined to volunteer at places where they
can see that they’re making a difference.
“The biggest thing is respecting people’s time,” she said. “You need to structure
business practices around volunteers,”
instead of just giving volunteers busy-
•June 1 2012 NPT_Layout 1 5/17/12 5:51 PM Page 17
S P E C I A L R E P O R T: N AT I O N A L S E R V I C E
work to placate them. Slusser, who has
volunteered in Cambodia and Guatemala
with Missions Abroad Placement Services
in Springfield, Mo., isn’t surprised that
more people are volunteering now than
30 years ago. “Nonprofits are doing more
of a push for volunteers because they
need them. Money isn’t there like it used
to be.”
Also needed is collaboration between
Democrat and Republican lawmakers,
and, in Wofford’s view, never was there a
taller peak in cooperation than with the
passage of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve
America Act of 2009. President Barack
Obama put the passage of the Serve
America Act at the top of his priority list
and Congress responded.
The bill was passed in the U.S. Senate
by a vote of 79 to 19 and in the House of
Representatives by 321 to 105 within the
first 100 days of his presidency. In Sen.
Ted Kennedy’s (D-Mass.) last speech on
the senate floor before he died in August
2009, he called it the most nonpartisan
experience he’s had as a senator.
The collaboration seen in Opportunity Nation is what Wofford considers
the future of service in America and even
America itself. As a young man just out of
college in 1949, Wofford and his girlfriend (whom he later married) traveled
to India to follow the path of Gandhi,
who had just been assassinated.
Gandhi advocated a threefold system
of self-government for India: spade,
prison and vote, that is, direct action on
the part of the citizens (spade), conscientious objection (prison), and democracy (vote). “Gandhian ideals became a
personal frame that’s still in me,” said
Wofford. “It’s not something I think
about every day, but it’s the lens by
which I look at lots of things.”
He has a history of putting his money
where his mouth is. When Wofford returned from India, he realized that “even
though I had been championing democracy, I had done nothing about civil
rights on the racial front,” he said. “I had
never any doubt about what I thought,
but I had done nothing. From India, it
was clear that (racial segregation) was
the great stain on the soul of America.”
He decided to enroll in Howard University School of Law, a traditionally
black school in Washington, D.C. He
thought he could accomplish two things
at once: learn the law and get to know
his African-American countrymen. He
graduated in 1954, becoming the first
white student to do so in half a century.
It was Wofford who first suggested
that then-Presidential candidate John F.
Kennedy call Coretta Scott King, wife of
Martin Luther King Jr., when the activist
was jailed in 1960. Wofford had gotten
to know King after sending him a copy
of his book India Afire after the 1955–6
Montgomery, Ala. bus boycott, and the
two men corresponded about Gandhian
ideals of civil disobedience. Many believe the phone call to be influential in
Shannon
Binns
Kennedy’s narrow victory over Richard
Nixon in the 1960 presidential election.
SEEDS PLANTED DECADES AGO
Another event during the 1960
Kennedy campaign, the University of
Michigan speech, would have far-reaching implications for Wofford, Binns, Duda
and the 200,000 other Peace Corps veterans. The formation of the Peace Corps
began what George Romney, former governor of Michigan and father of current
Republican presidential candidate Mitt
Romney, called the “twin engines” of service: full-time service and traditional unpaid volunteering.
One feeds the other; AmeriCorpstrained personnel supplement untrained
staff in programs such as Habitat for Humanity, and some people such as Duda
and Binns get a taste of service through
volunteering and decide to step up to a
full-time program.
Duda and Binns both took nonprofit
jobs after AmeriCorps, just like 64 percent of AmeriCorps alumni who enter either the public or service sectors after
their tenure. Binns worked at The Nature Conservancy in Washington, D.C.,
The Earth Institute in New York City, and
The Green Press Initiative in Charlotte
between leaving the Peace Corps and
founding Sustain Charlotte. Duda
worked at KaBoom!, in Washington,
D.C., after his time in AmeriCorps and
before moving to AmeriCorps Alums.
Duda believes one of the most significant changes in store for the nonprofit
sector is the maturing of AmeriCorps
alums. “There’s a real underleveraged
and under-articulated shift that’s already
happening that can be taken advantage
of,” he said. “I think we’ll see it in all sectors. Serving in AmeriCorps, then working in human resources or running for
local government, all those places of
work benefit from people who have had
that experience.”
Sometimes the desire to serve is so
strong that it leads people to exit other
sectors mid-career. Wofford left the
Kennedy Administration in 1962, where
he was serving as assistant to the President and as the chair on a civil rights
committee, to become the Peace Corps’
special representative for Africa and director of its Ethiopia program. Before he
left, Wofford said President Kennedy
predicted, “This will be really serious
when it’s 100,000 volunteers a year
J UNE 1, 2012
going overseas.”
It was not to be.
Wofford stepped down as associate
director of the Peace Corps in 1968, a
post he’d held for four years. With the
assassinations of both Robert Kennedy
and Martin Luther King, 1968 was a dark
time for Wofford, one of the low points
on the roller coaster. The ride would dip
even further in 1971, when President
Richard Nixon and Congress slashed the
Peace Corps’ budget by $10 million and
its number of volunteers to 4,000. Nixon
was a critic of the Peace Corps who had
derided the organization as a haven for
draft dodgers during the 1960 presidential campaign against Kennedy. Wofford
called the winnowing “a failure that
goads me and others.”
WILLING TO GO
The Peace Corps has recovered somewhat, and now annually sends about
8,000 volunteers overseas, but routinely
gets almost double that number of applications. In 2011, AmeriCorps received
582,000 applications for 80,000 spots,
an increase from 360,000 applicants in
2009. “More people recognize that we
have a lot of social and environmental
problems that we need to address,” said
Binns. “We’ve lost a sense of purpose
we’ve always had as a country, and volunteerism acts as a vehicle to regain that
sense of purpose.”
Overall, approximately 64.3 million
Americans volunteered in one form or
another during 2011. The number of
volunteers fell between 2005 and 2006
from 65 million to 61.2 million, and
dropped further in 2007 to 60.8 million.
It has fluctuated since then, at 61.8 million in 2008, 63.3 million in 2009 and
62.8 million in 2010.
“National service is not at the center
of action as it should be,” said John
Bridgeland, CEO of Civic Enterprises in
Washington, D.C., and director of President George W. Bush’s Domestic Policy
Council. Said Duda: “It’s a civic opportunity that’s been missed.”
Wofford remembered the Peace Corps’
50th Anniversary Walk of Flags that took
place in September 2011 in Washington,
D.C. Thousands of Returned Peace Corps
THE NONPROFIT TIMES
Special Report, page 18
Gretchen
Slusser
www.thenonprofittimes.com
9 Decades
And Still Going
Shirley Poore has probably greeted you if
you’ve ever stopped by Interfaith Social Services’ Bureau Drawer Thrift Shop in Quincy,
Mass. Whether she is sorting clothes or helping customers, the 90-year-old has been
serving at Interfaith for more than 20 years.
“When I started volunteering in the fall of
1991 the shop was only open a few days a
week,” said Poore. Now open Monday-Friday,
she works at least two shifts a week and covers for other volunteers who might be out sick
or on vacation.
Interfaith’s Bureau Drawer Thrift Shop
provides the community with an affordable
option for clothing and household items. The
shop is run entirely by volunteers. Dozens of
individuals give their time each week to sort
thousands of bags of clothing and assist
shoppers. All of the proceeds from the shop
help support Interfaith’s various programs.
“I used to do other things besides the thrift
shop,” said Poore. That includes just about
every service offered by the organization.
Poore was introduced to Interfaith Social
Services by one of her friends from church
who was a volunteer at the time. She asked
Poore to help her transport some donated
clothes to the shop. As soon as Shirley found
out that she could volunteer in the thrift shop
she was hooked on helping wherever she
could.
She has had to slow down a little since
fracturing a hip while on a cruise in 2002.
However, she is still very active. Since 1991
she has walked or volunteered in Interfaith’s
annual South Shore Walk. Also, each week
she transports the donated food from her
church, Quincy Community United Methodist,
to Interfaith’s food pantry.
“Many people really love and care for
Shirley and I am one of them,” said Bureau
Drawer Thrift Shop manager Cindy Lee.
“Shirley is an important member of Interfaith’s family of volunteers.”
“Shirley is an example of real dedication,”
said Volunteer Coordinator Paula Daniels. “We
are blessed with an amazing group of volunteers here at Interfaith; our programs depend
on these great people. Every week over 80
dedicated volunteers staff our food pantry, career closet, thrift shop and front desk.”
According to Daniels, many of Interfaith’s
volunteers become a surrogate family for
each other. “We have fun. Whether they are
feeding hungry people or throwing the occasional birthday party we are always looking
for compassionate people to join our team,”
she said. NPT
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S P E C I A L R E P O R T: N AT I O N A L S E R V I C E
Continued from page 17
Volunteers (RPCVs, the Peace Corps’ title
for its veterans) walked from Arlington
National Cemetery across Arlington Memorial Bridge to the Lincoln Memorial,
carrying the flags of the 139 countries in
which the Peace Corps operates.
Wofford looked from the Lincoln Memorial and saw that walkers were still traversing the bridge a half-mile away. “It
was a spectacular sight,” he said, “at once
a great joy, thinking what it’s meant in
(the RPCVs’ lives) and the lives of others
around the world. But what if it had been
two or three million?”
“Volunteering soared, and not just in
the year after 9/11,” said Bridgeland.
“Fifty-nine million Americans served
during the year right after 9/11. We know
it was an artificially high baseline, but
what’s great about it is Americans not
only sustained that number but also increased it. In 2005, the numbers were
still going up, to 65 million,” he said.
VOLUNTEERING HAS COSTS
A passage in Charles Dickens’ classic
A Tale of Two Cities, “the best of times,
the worst of times,” is how Bridgeland
describes the current service landscape.
Volunteering in America is robust, with
more than one-quarter of the country’s
population participating, but funds are
scarce and budgets are limited.
Binns was surprised at how difficult it
was to get funding when he started Sustain Charlotte. “That’s been the biggest
change,” he said. “It’s become a lot more
difficult to sustain financially.”
Most presidential administrations
have significantly advanced national and
international service. Kennedy had the
Peace Corps. Lyndon Johnson started
VISTA -- Volunteers in Service to America, which was folded into AmeriCorps
upon the latter’s creation in 1993 -- as
part of his War on Poverty in 1965.
Nixon, though a vocal opponent of the
Peace Corps, created Senior Corps as a
way to encourage Americans age 55 and
older to volunteer, and established National Volunteer Week in 1974. Jimmy
Carter was a champion of Habitat for
Humanity where volunteers build
homes, and his mother, Lillian, served in
the Peace Corps in India at age 68 from
1966 to 1968.
Ronald Reagan did little of note to
further service in America, but said the
spirit of service “flows like a deep and
mighty river through the history of our
nation,” one of Wofford’s favorite
quotes. George H. W. Bush helped to
create the Points of Light Foundation
John
Bridgeland
and bestowed a daily Point of Light
award, and Bill Clinton was responsible
for the creation of AmeriCorps, muchmaligned by Republicans including Rick
Santorum, the man who defeated Wofford in his bid for re-election to the U.S.
Senate in 1994, and the Corporation for
National and Community Service
(CNCS, of which Wofford was CEO from
1995 to 2001), as well as stewarding
Points of Light.
George W. Bush created Citizen
Corps, USA Freedom Corps and Volunteers for Prosperity, and ramped up the
number of AmeriCorps openings from
50,000 to 75,000. His administration
also provided the largest budget for the
Peace Corps in 35 years. Barack Obama’s
greatest contribution thus far has been
his championing of the Edward M.
Kennedy Serve America Act, which,
among other things, seeks to grow
AmeriCorps to 250,000 volunteers by
2017. The Obama administration also
created FEMA Corps earlier this year,
which will train an additional 1,600
AmeriCorps NCCC volunteers in disaster
response and relief.
Politics and service have gone handin-hand since Franklin D. Roosevelt created the Civilian Conservation Corps,
and it’s why Wofford entered politics.
But, he said, “Politics is crucial to get the
investment (in service), but if we don’t
succeed in politics the idea is still one
we need to invest in and would put a
huge test to the nonprofit world.”
A 2011 survey of more than 11,000
RPCVs, A Call to Peace: Perspectives of
Volunteers on the Peace Corps at 50,
showed that the majority of respondents
do not favor shorter service terms (a
Peace Corps tour is 27 months) or having private organizations administer
Peace Corps projects. Wofford supports
both. “So many people with the talents
that could be viable would respond if
there was a shorter term,” he said.
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J UNE 1, 2012
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S P E C I A L R E P O R T: N AT I O N A L S E R V I C E
Sargent Shriver’s original plan was to
have the Peace Corps administered
through nonprofits, colleges and universities, faith-based organizations and the
United Nations. “That’s the road not
taken, but we’re pushing for it,” said
Wofford.
Motivations for serving are as varied as
the opportunities to serve. Cabrini
Green’s Slusser had money to donate in
2005, and one of the clients of her management consulting organization was on
CGLA’s board. The client suggested donating to the organization, but Slusser
wanted to know more about what they
were doing and how they would use her
donation.
She began volunteering with CGLA as
a way to vet the company, and she never
left. Now, the 40-year-old is CGLA’s executive director. Slusser cited her upbringing
as the reason she got involved with Missions Abroad Placement Services; she first
heard about the organization through her
parents’ church. Duda also credited his
upbringing for instilling in him the value
of service to others.
According to “A Call to Peace,” the
most popular reasons for joining the
Peace Corps are living in other cultures,
gaining a better understanding of the
world, and helping people to have a bet-
ter life. Career development (68 percent) and learning new languages (71
percent) motivate current RPCVs. Compare that to RPCVs from the 1960s
where the numbers were 38 percent and
26 percent, respectively.
When President Johnson convened a
24-person council to review the Peace
Corps’ recruitment practices in 1965,
one of the goals was to recruit true altruists with pure motives. But the sociologist David Riesman, a member of the
council, told them they were designing a
selection process for saints, who don’t
need a Peace Corps; they do it themselves. Riesman thought what was
needed was healthy, normal Americans
who have mixed motives.
Wofford hopes that adventure will
motivate people to serve. “Active duty
citizenship should be fun,” he said. “Sacrifice” is another word of which Wofford
is not fond. “Sometimes I hear the service world talking about ‘sacrificing’ a
year of your life. The idea of service as
sacrifice is not something that stirs people,” he said. He talked about living and
working in Ethiopia saying, “It was hard
but fun, and I don’t think anyone felt
that they were sacrificing.”
“I got the fun out of the challenge of
(service) in the same way my friends get
fun out of being involved in or participating in sports,” he continued. “I view
participating in self-government as the
great American game.” NPT
Michael Rothenberg Fellowship Started
he Board of Directors and Emeritus Board of New
York Lawyers for the Public Interest (NYLPI) in New
York City will create the Michael Rothenberg Fellowship to honor of the organization’s executive director, who
unexpectedly died Feb. 23.
Individuals chosen to serve as a Michael Rothenberg Fellow will work as attorneys in the field of disability justice, a
topic that carried great significance to the late executive director. His interest in this area of civil rights came from his
parents’ struggles to get the necessary services for his developmentally disabled brother.
“The breadth of Michael’s talents, the clarity of his vision,
and the inspiration of his example helped shape not only
NYLPI but all of us who were fortunate enough to have
known and worked with him,” said John Siffert, Emeritus
T
Board Member, via a press release from NYLPI. “Michael
worked tirelessly to break ground in the area of disability
justice, and this fellowship will serve to honor his legacy by
advancing this important civil right.”
Born in New York City, Rothenberg joined NYLPI in 1997
and was appointed executive director in 2001. In 2010, he
was one of six legal services leaders to be selected by
Jonathan Lippman, Chief Judge of the State of New York, to
a task force to expand access to civil legal services in the
state. His leadership at NYLPI was honored that same year
by The New York Times, which awarded him the Nonprofit
Excellence Award. NYLP was the first organization to win
this award.
To learn more about the Michael Rothenberg Fellowship,
go to www.nylpi.org NPT
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