TO APPEAR IN VIRGINIA HODGKINSON, ED., CIVIL SOCIETY IN AMERICA.

"The Case of AmeriCorps: Conflict and Consensus in the Civil Society/Governance Relation"

Jon Van Til

Rutgers University at Camden, NJ, USA

  1. Brief History of National Service

AmeriCorps, the national service program inaugurated in 1993, provides an important case in the emergence of governance-civil society relations in late 20th century America. The program was proposed on the first day of March, 1993, the 32nd Anniversary of President John F. Kennedy’s historic announcement of his "Peace Corps" plan to send American volunteers to work in the world’s poor countries, by President William Jefferson Clinton. Speaking at Rutgers University, the President stood before a full house of cheering students, faculty members, and community activists in the University’s arena, and announced the initiation of a massive program of youth and student service. This program, the President explained, would achieve stirring national purposes:

National service is nothing less than the American way to change America. It is rooted in the concept of community: the simple idea that every one of us, no matter how many privileges with which we were born, can still be enriched by the contributions of the least of us.

Two months previously, in his first inaugural address, the President had provided a prominent place for the idea of national service. Then he said:

It is time to break the bad habit of expecting something for nothing from our Government or from each other. Let us all take more responsibility not only for ourselves and our families but also for our communities and our country....

I challenge a new generation of young Americans to a season of service; to act on your idealism by helping troubled children, keeping company with those in need, reconnecting our torn communities. There is so much to be done. Enough, indeed, for millions of others who are still young in spirit to give of themselves in service, too.

In serving, we recognize a simple but powerful truth: We need each other and we must care for each other.

By September of his inaugural year, Clinton’s national service initiative achieved Congressional approval, and was promptly signed into law by the President. As Stephen Bates (1996: 27) recounts, this legislative triumph provided the Clinton administration its earliest clear-cut win.

The new statute created a Corporation for National Service to administer a variety of service-learning programs connecting schools, universities, and community organizations (Learn and Serve America); to integrate a set of senior volunteer programs involving more than a half-million persons over 55 into a National Senior Service Corps; and to establish a new program of national service to be called AmeriCorps. The corporation directed $155.5 million in AmeriCorps grants in the first year, principally divided among direct grants to service programs and grants to state commissions.

A. ROOTS IN VOLUNTARY ACTION

The development of AmeriCorps as a national service program built on a strong tradition of voluntary action and service learning that had peaked into a genuine social movement by the early 1990s. Standing behind these contemporary programs of national service lay a range of visions that have appeared in the literature on voluntary action since the turn of the century. Principal among those visions are William James’ "moral equivalent of war" (1910), Donald Eberly’s "non-military service" (1988), Charles Moskos’ "call to civic service" (1988), and William Buckley’s "gratitude" (1990).

Not only did such visions underlie governmental initiatives like the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s and the Peace Corps and VISTA (Volunteers in Service to America) of the 1960s, but they also informed state-level programs like the California Conservation Corps of the 1970s and New York’s City Volunteer Corps of the 1980s. As Suzanne Goldsmith (1993: 25) observes: "These programs were usually funded by states and localities, with help from foundations and corporations, as well as in-kind support from nonprofit agencies. Some received fees for the work they completed, typically mixing public service with remunerative contract labor. They also made use of federal job training and education funds."

Donald J. Eberly, a life-long advocate of national service and founder of the National Service Secretariat, recalls the importance of William James’ impact on national service in 20th century America:

(Societal) problems were less complex when William James proposed a form of youth service in 1906. In "The Moral Equivalent of War," James, while opposing militarism, said that young men are inherently energetic and have militant tendencies. He observed that these tendencies all too often find expression in war and street corner gang fights.

As a constructive alternative, James recommended, instead of a military draft, "a conscription of the whole youthful population...to coal and iron mines, to fishing fleets in December, to dish-washing, to clothes washing," and various other challenging, constructive, and energy-consuming jobs. "Such a conscription," James said, "would preserve in the midst of a pacific civilization the manly virtues which the military party is so afraid of seeing disappear in peace."

James looked forward to the day when a force other than war could discipline a whole community. To date, there have been only isolated, short-term examples such as the San Francisco earthquake of 1906, which James witnessed first-hand a few weeks after giving his "moral equivalent" speech at Stanford University. Similar expressions of community spirit and service have been seen in the wake of major floods and hurricanes.

The closest the U.S. has come to a "moral equivalent of war" on a sustained level has been the Civilian Conservation Corps with three million enrollees from 1933 to 1942, and the Peace Corps with 90,000 enrollees from 1961 to 1983. In talking with those who served in the CCC or the Peace Corps, one often gets the feeling that they as individuals absorbed James’ objective (Eberly, 1988: 188-189).

James’ view of national service focused on three major values: selfless service, the obligation to participate in community activity, and the value of experiential education and training. These values have persisted in service concepts that have been developed throughout the 20th century. One of those programs was developed under the watch of Arkansas Governor Bill Clinton in the 1980s, and was known as the Delta Service Corps.

B. STATE LEVEL INITIATIVES

The Delta Service Corps is a youth service program operating in Arkansas, Louisiana and Mississippi, and administered by the Arkansas Division on Volunteerism. This program was later used as a principal model for the development of AmeriCorps (Chronicle of Higher Education. 39(21):A30, A34. 1993 Jan 27).

The Delta Service Corps was strongly influenced by recommendations from work commissioned by the William T. Grant Foundation. In its report, "The Forgotten Half: Pathways to Success for America’s Youth and Young Families", the Grant Foundation Commission on Work, Family and Citizenship (1988) presented four major recommendations, which themselves might have been articulated by William James:

1) To enhance the quality of youth-adult relationship, both in and out of family.

2) To expand community supports (youth service, leadership activities, etc.).

3) To extend and improve current employment opportunities, for college and non-college bound youth.

4) To provide equitable youth education and training policies.

These recommendations were transformed into policy in Arkansas. The Forgotten Half called for the institution of service, beyond the scope of local and regional programs, as a tool of national policy. In 1986, the Coalition for a Democratic Majority had proposed voluntary national service to provide federal aid to college students contingent on achievement of civic goals. By 1988, the 100th Congress was grappling with H.R. 18, the proposed Youth Service Corps Act, which aimed to establish the American Conservation Service to aid public lands and resources, as well as a National Youth Service to encourage young people to actively participate in voluntary human service programs. The program which the Grant Foundation lobbied for in late 1988 encouraged states and localities to develop and implement youth corps activities, argued for matching funds from the federal government to aid start-up and planning for youth corps, and suggested that technical assistance was necessary to make the projects work.

All of the ingredients to policy development were in place for Bill Clinton. A 1988 report of the Democratic Leadership Council supported a proposal for national service. Arkansas had the resources to develop a pilot program. And the Delta Service Corps, once implemented, provided a leadership role for Hilary Rodham Clinton and a basis from which to articulate and promote a social agenda.

  1. BIPARTISAN SUPPORT OF A SOCIAL MOVEMENT

Bill Clinton was not the only Presidential aspirant to hitch his star to the wagon of national service. His predecessor in the White House, George Bush, committed his support to a program which would utilize volunteer programs to help inculcate the value of service.

Under Bush’s watch, on November 16, 1990, the 103rd US Congress passed the National Service Trust Act. It was the purpose of the Act to:

  1. renew the ethic of civic responsibility in the United States
  2. ask citizens of the United States, regardless of age or income, to engage in full-time or part-time service to the Nation
  3. begin to call young people to serve in programs that will benefit the Nation and improve the life chances of the young through the acquisition of literacy and job skills
  4. enable young Americans to make a sustained commitment to service by removing barriers to service that have been created by high education costs, loan indebtedness, and the cost of housing
  5. build on the existing organizational framework of Federal, State, and local programs and agencies to expand full-time and part-time service opportunities for all citizens, particularly youth and older Americans
  6. involve participants in activities that would not otherwise be performed by employed workers
  7. generate additional service hours each year to help meet human, educational, environmental, and public safety needs, particularly those needs relating to poverty.

By 1990, Goldsmith observes (1993: 26), "experimentation continued at the local level," and at the end of the decade:

(T)here existed nearly seventy youth service corps in states and communities around the country. Other kinds of service programs were flourishing as well: college students were getting involved in community service in record numbers; elementary and secondary schools (public and private) were experimenting with ways to integrate service and learning; senior citizens’ organizations were starting intergenerational volunteer programs; college graduates were creating opportunities for post-college service, such as Teach for America; and youth-serving organizations in inner cities were beginning to involve disadvantaged young people in service as well as recreation and education.

Out of this rich fermentation of activism and program creation came City Year, founded by recent college graduates Alan Khazei and Michael Brown, which became a working model in its program and structure for many later AmeriCorps projects. In this program, diverse teams of youths were formed into teams to devote a year of service to communities within the greater Boston area.

In the first hectic days of organization following the passage of the National and Community Service Trust Act of 1993, which created AmeriCorps, participants tended to speak of a "movement". Community service had been developing rapidly on American college campuses, supported by such national organizations as the COOL and Campus Compact. Kallick (1993: 2) describes this movement:

In the mid-1980s, however, long before Clinton proposed his national service plan, a renewed movement for community service took hold on college and high-school campuses. A generation of young people had been roundly accused of being a "lost generation", apathetic and having no social conscience. With the federal government retreating from social responsibility on all fronts under Ronald Reagan, young people eager to make a difference said let’s do something. By the end of the decade, only the environmental movement could match it on college campuses for sheer size, vitality, and longevity."

Stephen Bates (1996: 33) observes that the operating values of national service tend toward, but do not achieve, a full consistency with each other. Summarizing the case President Clinton made for the program, Bates identifies five major goals: "getting socially useful work done, instilling an ethic of sacrifice, helping troubled youths turn their lives around, reducing the barriers between different races and classes, and reinvigorating an assortment of civic virtues (1996: 33). These are lofty goals, not always all reached by every program. But they stand proudly in a time of political upheaval and cynicism, and manage to persist with the program they underlie.

  1. The Political Context of AmeriCorps

The creation, development, and sustenance of AmeriCorps reflected a long American tradition that fosters social initiatives from a multi-sectoral set of interests and concerns. Following on the advocacy of an entirely voluntary program of national service by President Bush, Clinton proposed an effort, that while largely delivered by non-profit modalities, would be funded by the federal government. This concept was reviewed in a 1993 Cantigny Conference, convened by the Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation. This conference aimed to cement a bipartisan approach, one that would smoothly link both civilian and military components of service.

A. THE CONTEXT OF GOVERNANCE

The Cantigny Conference, attended by policy pundits and Washington influentials, offered its assent to the values that Clinton was attaching to national service, and upheld the policy of national service as an avenue through which patriotism and service to the country might be renewed. The Robert R. McCormick Tribune Foundation’s report concluded with the "hope that it will help our nation and its citizens find more and better ways to fulfill their responsibilities to each other."

With Bush and the conservative intelligentsia convened by McCormick on record that some sort of national service was an appropriate way to advance such values as service, community support, employment, and education/training (the William James values which Presidential candidate Clinton had so adeptly articulated in his speeches, and implemented in his Delta Service Corps), the way was opened for the new President to make both political and programmatic capital from his support of national service. His Republican opponents could oppose his initiative persuasively only by finding within it a programmatic flaw, a lesson that was painfully to be learned by Georgia Congressman Newt Gingrich, elected Speaker of the House in early 1995.

Buoyed by its electoral successes in both House and Senate, the new Republican majority moved quickly to implement its proposed "Contract with America", which outlined a set of free-market solutions for social problems and called for the establishment of a tight rein on public spending. AmeriCorps had no place on their agenda, for it was perceived to be a program more appropriately funded by private contributions than by public funds.

Among the most enthusiastic members of this new majority was the newly elected Senator from Pennsylvania, Rick Santorum. Santorum, still in his 30s, had bested incumbent Democrat Harris Wofford for the seat Wofford had surprisingly won two years previously, in a campaign to succeed Republican John Heinz, who had died in an airplane crash. Wofford had bested Republican stalwart Richard Thornburgh in a 1992 special election, and quickly established himself as the leading Senatorial voice for national service, a cause he had championed throughout a long and distinguished career, which included such service as the founding Associate Director of the Peace Corps and President Kennedy’s adviser on relations to the civil rights movement.

The 1994 Senatorial race between Wofford and Santorum was an unpleasant affair, filled with the mind-numbing sound bites that have become the staple of contemporary electoral discourse. Among the approaches Santorum found effective was the ridicule of national service. How better unmask Wofford as a soft-headed intellectual unsuited to the new rigors of governmental service than to depict him as a supporter of as fuzzy a concept as national service? Santorum proffered images of long-haired youths of varying genders "sitting around the campfire singing Kumbyah." His message warned the voter not to support Wofford, who had after all spent several years of his life in as dubious a professional activity as the Presidency of Bryn Mawr College. Wofford was soundly beaten in the election, and Santorum became Pennsylvania’s junior Senator.

The removal of Harris Wofford from the United States Senate provided, in one of the more remarkable ironies of recent American politics, crucial support for the establishment, and modest growth, of national service in the Clinton era. Clinton’s legislative management of the national service initiative had run into an immediate roadblock with the 1994 election, as Speaker Gingrich indicated his desire to zero out Congressional funding for the program. Led by Clinton crony Eli Segal, the newly established Corporation for National Service found itself isolated, with limited bipartisan support, as a principal target of the new Republican advocates of limited government.

Clinton responded to this massive Republican challenge with a master political stroke of his own by and appointing the recently unseated Sen. Wofford as Segal’s replacement as the chief executive of the Corporation for National Service. Within a few short months, Wofford, drawing both upon his skills of persuasion and the personal ties established by his Senate service, quickly assembled of a bipartisan legislative coalition strong enough to sustain a modest, but steadily increasing level of support for AmeriCorps throughout the Clinton years, and possibly beyond as well.

Responsible governance, the political scientist Charles E. Gilbert (1959) has reminded us, consists in the striking of a workable balance among such values as responsiveness, flexibility, consistency, stability, leadership, probity, candor, competence, efficacy, prudence, due process, and accountability. From Manor’s (1998) similar listing of concerns implicit in good governance, the AmeriCorps experience focuses particularly on responsiveness, effectiveness, and the acceptance of diversity and pluralism.

AmeriCorps seeks to be responsive to a broad social value of community service, while directly responding to staffing and program needs of the nonprofit organizations to which it relates. Its program mission is firmly grounded in the effectiveness of its programs, seeking the achievement of "direct and demonstrable results" and the operation of programs "in a cost-effective manner" (Corporation for National Service, 1997: 3-4). And it directly confronts issues of diversity and pluralism, recognized in its mission statement by the aim of providing "partnerships at all levels of society" that "build bridges among seemingly disparate groups to improve the quality of life of people in our nation" (Ibid., p. 3).

The Gallup Institute project that forms the basis of this case study, found AmeriCorps to be a program largely invisible to the American public, but one that rests on a broad, if shallow, base of public support. Part of the invisibility of the program reflects the reality of its process of initiation: AmeriCorps was founded without a single guiding vision. Rather, those who developed the program brought to it a number of varying images of what it should be about. Some 450 proposals were submitted for the first round "Summer of Service" awards in 1993, from which ten programs were selected for support. In these initial days of the program, four initial visions contended for support:

1) Some saw the work of national service as the 1990’s extension of the civil rights movement, in which young people of every race and class would work together to develop new institutions of justice and opportunity. In this camp were a few who saw this movement already betrayed by governmental bureaucracy and corporate power (Cf. Horwitz, 1993: 43).

2) Others rallied behind the flag of "experiential education", in which students would demonstrate that they learn best "by doing." "Service learning" had spread rapidly through the borders of the higher education curriculum, and many educators and committed students held to the view that the new federal program would greatly enhance this trend.

3) Yet others, also behind a flag first raised by John Dewey, found sustenance in the educational vision of the "community school", in which universities and school systems join forces in opening schools to their surrounding communities, providing job training, continuing education, recreation, and a range of other collaborative social services.

    1. A fourth vision focused on voluntary action, framed in the context of democratic institutions and civic participation. This vision of national service focused on the need to bring students directly into the fray of civic life, addressing and advancing community needs by means of the same skills they would be required to use throughout their lives if they were to be active, rather than passive, players of their citizen roles.

Ultimately, the developers of AmeriCorps chose a set of values that most clearly reflected the ideals articulated by William James in 1906. In particular, three major operating values came to predominate:

1) The value of selfless service. As did James, the designers of AmeriCorps placed primary value on the provision of concrete and important service.

2) The value of being obliged to participate. Active participation in society is seen as the keystone to a wide range of desirable attitudes and behaviors, including the ability to see beyond oneself and the chance to join with others in the building of a good society.

3) The value of education and training. AmeriCorps rests on a faith that social and human capital are closely linked in their development. That is, its supporters believe that active participation in constructive activity provides an important learning experience, both of employable skills and of general understanding of society and its processes.

A basic challenge facing the designers of any social program involves bridging the gap between program values and program realities. For AmeriCorps this gap has been widened by brutal political conflict between proponents of national service and their neo-conservative opponents. At contest here are different conceptions of civil society that deeply divided American ideologs at the end of the twentieth century.

  1. AmeriCorps and Civil Society

At play in the struggle to define a mission for AmeriCorps was the idea of "Civil Society." This concept had quickly become, following on the demise of Communism in Central Europe, the most fashionable of contemporary third sector concepts. But civil society is a very old and very slippery idea. Scarcely a week goes by without a major new publication with the term in its title, and still its meaning and implications remain difficult to grasp.

Classical political economists like John Stuart Mill and Adam Smith viewed civil society as a realm of virtuous freedom, both economic and personal, and contrasted it with the evils of the state. Hegel, on the other hand, used it to explain how government could find its niche in a market-driven society by nurturing cooperation in the face of economic and social conflict.

Marx expanded Hegel’s argument, and delineated the terrain of civil society as one of "exploitation, alienation and social injustice" (Mahfouz Abdelramen, 1998: 6). Neo-Marxist Antonio Gramsci saw civil society as the "place where the state operates to enforce invisible, intangible and subtle forms of power, through educational, cultural and religious systems and other institutions" (Mahfouz Abdelramen, 1998: 7).

The idea of civil society was rescued from the dustbin of history by its seeming fit to the needs of emerging democracies in Eastern Europe following the evaporation of Communist structures in 1979 and thereafter. But, as Ralf Dahrendorf (1997: 3, 12) has observed, it is "clearly far too early to pronounce with any degree of certainty on whether the revolution of 1989 has succeeded or not….The revolution of 1989, like other revolutions before it, was bound to disappoint those who entered it with extravagant hopes for a new world of unconstrained discourse, equality and fundamental democracy." And yet, Dahrendorf (1997: 60) observes with greater hope, "citizenship and civil society go one important step further than elections and markets. They are goals to strive for rather than dangers to avoid."

In its current incarnation, Civil Society continues to mean many things to many people. To a liberal like Dahrendorf (1997: 77-78) it is "created by grass-root initiatives" and association. To another liberal, former Sen. Bill Bradley (1996), civil society forms the "third leg" of a societal stool in which both government and the marketplace are seen to have their limitations. Bradley includes the nonprofit sector in this vision, but also the family, neighborhood, and community.

To conservatives like presidential hopeful Lamar Alexander, as well as William Bennett and Sen. Dan Coats, the issue is how to nurture Civil Society as a replacement for much of what government has previously done. Aware of the frenzy among their fellow Republicans to eliminate government from nearly every corner of American life, theirs is a voice of moderation asserting the need for government itself to play a major role in the reconstruction of Civil Society. This approach aims to subsidize charitable giving and a variety of sociable behaviors and organizations.

As a concept, "civil society" comes perilously close to being the "play-dough" of the social sciences, capable of being formed into nearly whatever shape the theorist chooses. Political scientist Goran Hyden composes a four-cell table that accommodates Marxist, liberal, associational, and libertarian renditions of the concept, as depicted in Figure 1.

FIGURE 1: THE MANY FACES OF CIVIL SOCIETY (adapted from Hyden, 1997)

STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY ARE LINKED

ECONOMIC INTERESTS ASSOCIATIONAL LIFE

DOMINATE MOST CENTRAL

POST-MARXIST

(Hegel, Gramsci)

LIBERAL (or Strong Democratic)

(Locke, Barber)

LIBERTARIAN

(Paine, Shils)

ASSOCIATIONAL (or Communitarian or Strong Cultural)

(Tocqueville, Eberly)

STATE AND CIVIL SOCIETY ARE SEPARATE

Political theorist Benjamin Barber focuses on three of these traditions, omitting only the post-Marxist view, in his recent book, A Place for Us: How to Make Society Civil and Democracy Strong. Barber calls Hyden’s associational variant "communitarian," and identifies the liberal version of the theory, the one he prefers, as "strong democratic," recalling his development of that concept in his influential earlier study of democratic theory (1984). Barber sees civil society as a voluntary realm "devoted to public goods"—the "true domain" of "church, family, and voluntary association" (1998: 44).

Policy analyst Don E. Eberly (not to be confused with national service developer Donald J. Eberly, previously quoted) develops a theory of "civil society plus" in his recent book, America’s Promise: Civil Society and the Renewal of American Culture (1998). Like Barber, Eberly rejects economic versions of the theory, and strongly prefers the "civic republican" variant. But his theory partakes far more of the "associational" and "communitarian" than Barber’s. For Eberly, civil society cannot simply be created by participation; rather, it must rest on a cultural basis of shared values and beliefs. Such a "strong culture," he asserts, best rests on a "transcendent proposition:"

That our democracy has a soul, that our nation has a creed, that our institutions must possess moral cohesion, and that American renewal draws its inspiration and power from our country’s venerable heritage of religious faith (Eberly, 1998: 198).

An appealing aspect of the civil society concept may be found the linguistic root it shares with the concept of "civility." Sociologist Edward Shils, who used the concept often, sought to establish links between the theory of civil society and "civility" in behavior. Like Hegel, Shils tended to see civil society as highly interrelated with a market economy. Shils (1997: 97-91) was concerned that civil society was declining in American life, citing its decline within universities, churches, persons of wealth, labor unions, rural communities, and among the "rather large unemployed Lumpenproletariat and the criminal and delinquent class." Shils, who died in 1995, was frankly puzzled as to whether civil society was in decline or growth:

Against this background of incivility among the various classes and major institutions of present-day liberal democratic societies, the prospects of civility do not seem to be dazzlingly bright….Civility has become somewhat stronger in the United States after a low ebb during the war in South East Asia and in the decade which followed it, but it is still under siege (Shils, 1997: 93).

No small part of the appeal of the concept of "civil society" lies in this apparent ability to grow while in decline. In later chapters, we will see how the leadership of national commissions strike similar themes in their reports. Civil society appeals to us because of its many implications: it sounds better to be "civil" to each other than to be uncivil; things civil also seem rather less regimented than what is militarized or bureaucratic; and, of course, a civil society has a welcome ring to it in a time of uncertainty and social turbulence.

But a wholesome theoretical sound goes only so far in the real worlds of policy and practice. The fact remains that the concept of civil society will have to be more solidly defined and constructed if it is to play a role in the reconstruction of modern society. An examination of the AmeriCorps program permits us to see formative processes of civil society in action. AmeriCorps is a new "civic institution," created in the 1990s to meet important social, economic, and political needs of a turbulent and still hopeful society The political activity surrounding its establishment shows it to be, in Manor’s words (1998: 2) "an essential component of the emergence of a particular type of political society based on the principles of citizenship, rights, democratic representation and the rule of law."

  1. The Social Context of AmeriCorps

The AmeriCorps program emerged from a political history of "limited bipartisanship," as the history recounted above indicates. Once formed, the program has struggled mightily to sustain a bipartisan base in an era of unparalleled political conflict, turbulence, and instability.

A. Orientation, objectives and activities.

AmeriCorps itself was given the mission of engaging thousands of adult Americans (over 17 years of age) in a variety of community service activities, and provided living stipends and post-service educational awards in return for this service. AmeriCorps came to consist of three separate programs:

    1. a variety of state and local programs called AmeriCorps*State and National. This is the largest of the three AmeriCorps programs, initially placing over 20,000 individuals annually in local service programs run by nonprofit organizations, local and state governments, higher education institutions, and a variety of partnerships among such organizations. By the year 2002, the program expects to enroll up to 100,000 persons annually. Members receive an annual stipend of $8,000, and an additional $4,725 is provided to cover future college tuition costs or reduce existing college loans.
    2. 2) a full-time residential program of service called AmeriCorps*National Civilian Conservation Corps, which focuses on environmental issues and disaster relief. This program draws on the traditions of the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s, and enrolls just under 1000 youths between the ages of 18 and 24 annually. These members receive a stipend of $4000 and the educational award upon completion of a year’s service.
    3. 3) a long-established anti-poverty program (VISTA—Volunteers in Service to America) now to be known as AmeriCorps*VISTA. These members number about 3,500 annually, are of a wide range of ages, and address a range of concerns of low-income communities, including education, health and nutrition, housing and homelessness, community and economic development, public safety, and the environment. The stipend for AmeriCorps*VISTA service amounts to $8000 per year.

  1. Relations to state and policy concerns.
  2. Program understandings with Congressional supporters serve as restrictions on AmeriCorps. While the idea of "service" enjoys broad bipartisan support, opinions among policymakers vary widely as to the appropriate role of government in its development and support. For some "pure voluntarists" service is appropriately supported by voluntary organizations, but should not receive governmental support. Those who favor stipended service point to the appropriate role of government in supporting the work of service providers, and in linking nonprofit organizations to a national pool of interested workers.

    The administration of AmeriCorps involves a certain level of bureaucratic structure and functioning, as is generally the case with federal governmental programs. Forms are often confusing and difficult to complete; payments often lag behind expectations of their delivery; regulations are sometimes interpreted differently by different administrative personnel. On the whole, the administration of the program is viewed from the local level as well-intentioned and usually helpful when directly contacted.

    A national study of the workings of AmeriCorps found the program limited in the quality and quantity of public relations materials it was able to disseminate (Van Til, Gallup, and Swalve, 1998). One good reason that AmeriCorps remains a largely unknown program is that these restrictions prevent the broader population from being provided a full explanation of the program and its activities. Indeed, the only national survey conducted of opinion toward AmeriCorps found that only one-quarter of the population recognized the program by name, in comparison to ratings of 91% for the Peace Corps and 40% for the Civilian Conservation Corps of the 1930s (George Gallup, quoted in Ethiel, 1997: 15). But while only 24% of the national sample could identify AmeriCorps by name as the particular vehicle of contemporary national service, 77% reported that the program should be expanded or retained at its present level when given a description of AmeriCorps.

  3. Addressing the needs of the excluded and vulnerable groups
  4. The Congressional act that authorized the creation of AmeriCorps (42 U.S.C. S 12501) stated as its first expectation that the Corporation for National Service would "meet the unmet human, educational, environmental, and public safety needs of the United States." As the AmeriCorps program was shaped, a strong focus emerged on focusing this goal on the needs of low-income and minority communities.

    Countryman and Sullivan (1993: 29) have observed that the "service movement needs to grapple with two weaknesses that have plagued it through the past decade: 1) the under-representation of young people of color and young people from working-class and poor backgrounds in the leadership of most of the nationally recognized service organizations; and 2) the failure to develop strategies that seek to solve the problems caused by persistent poverty, rather than just meeting the immediate needs of poor people." As Horwitz (1993: 42) puts it: "All too often, service neatly separates the haves from the have-nots, those with skills from those with needs."

    It is easy to imagine that national service could become a fashionable activity of the middle class, part of a contemporary Sir and Lady Bountiful movement. It is also possible that it could become another mandatory hurdle for poor and minority youth to surmount on the difficult path toward eventual employment and economic security. In either of these cases, both youth and the nation are unlikely to gain.

    The answer, once again, lies in the path of diversity, integration, and sensitive planning, and the AmeriCorps program seems to be steering this challenging course with considerable success. The participating agency employers interviewed in our study report a sensitivity on the operations level to the different needs of the wide variety of programs that have entered the AmeriCorps network.

    AmeriCorps builds a broad range of social and economic diversity into its programs in manifold ways. While some programs are quite segregated in their membership (on grounds of class, age, race, and gender), others consist of remarkably well integrated activities. The overall result is a program of some substantial diversity, both in terms of members and those served.

    The impact of this diversity in action is often powerful within AmeriCorps, as the following comments of two members indicate. One recent college graduate recalled her first days in Chicago:

    For me race has been a huge issue in my placement. I am coming from the University of Colorado which is a predominantly Anglo school. I am working in a predominantly African-America community. I have dealt with a ton of racism. Police officers, public transportation. It has been a huge eye-opener and learning experience, in dealing with racism for the first time, and learning from a culture I am not used to. This has been a huge factor for me.

    Another Chicago member described the route that brought him into the program, and the important protective role he came to play within it. Spencer, a resident of one of Chicago’s poorest areas, had been homeless, but never gave up his interest in helping his community. A volunteer with a local church organization, he began to volunteer helping AmeriCorps members placed in his community. Before long, he signed on as an AmeriCorps participant.

    I think it’s great that we can get out into the community and serve people in the community and the residents. We can go and talk and help ‘em and educate the importance of lead poisoning. That's the field I work in and its just wonderful to be there; this program does work and it helps people especially in the schools and the churches and things like that. I work for the Chicago Health Corps. It is good to have a team because we can learn each other’s moves and how things are gonna go and who’s gonna disagree and agree on a lot of things, because in the neighborhood we're in, there's more issues than just there for us. We have to go out into the field and we have to watch each other’s back because its nothin’ to play around with; your life is at stake. And in the community you go in you have to go in on a positive note. Where you have to go and do what you gotta do and leave.

    The Gallup survey discovered that the American public overwhelmingly supports the core values of national service. Ninety-four percent of the sample positively evaluated "bringing young people of different backgrounds together" in national service, while 75% agreed that it was important for such a program to provide the opportunity of "performing worthwhile work that would not otherwise be done."

    The initial image of AmeriCorps was of a program seeking to attract middle-class youth to service in lower-income communities. While the service beneficiaries largely remain as intended, those providing the service turn out to be considerably more diverse in their backgrounds. Some AmeriCorps members serve in their own communities, some in other communities. Some live at home and commute to their assignments; others establish a new home as they enter their service.

    Participants in the Gallup Institute’s focus groups were aware that AmeriCorps attracts several distinct categories of Americans to its service. A principal category involve what one administrator called "the best and the brightest", young college students in or just after their college years. Then there are the "diamonds in the rough", young people who have grown up in the ghettos and poverty communities of the American urban wasteland, but who turn to AmeriCorps for the multiple purposes of finishing their GED, learning a skill, and giving back to their communities. A third category involves the "young at heart", persons of considerable skills and maturity who join AmeriCorps (usually its VISTA program) to provide their service.

    The degree to which the AmeriCorps programs examined in Camden, Chicago, and Colorado Springs have been able to design programs to attract and sustain each of these categories of participants is quite remarkable. These programs allow the recruitment and maintenance of participation of persons of a wide variety of income categories, racial and ethnic backgrounds, genders, ages, and life experiences

    When thinking of the future mix of AmeriCorps participants and programs, one finding from the national survey seems particularly striking. In that survey, 35% of the respondents indicated a personal interest in themselves serving in a national service capacity. Included in this group were 60% of all black respondents, and 45% of all respondents between 18 and 24 years old. If a similar program were designed for older Americans, 50% of those between 55 and 64 expressed an interest in serving, along with 41% older than 65. Clearly there are resources of untapped interest waiting to be developed by AmeriCorps, and they reach far beyond the pool of job-seeking welfare recipients that are so much at the fore of contemporary policy interest.

    AmeriCorps programs often succeed in providing participants with both the chance to serve and to advance their own socio-economic prospects for later employment. College students and graduates who are members report significant enhancement in job-related skills, and also receive a stipend which can be applied to further their formal academic education. High school drop-outs receive both formal job training and the educational stipend. Both groups engage in significant amounts of service learning activity.

    Consider, for example, Malik, the AmeriCorps member in the YouthBuild program in New Jersey, who saw the program as his "second chance" in life. To Malik, AmeriCorps offers a seamless web that incorporates both skills- and service-learning.

    The services I’m doing. There’s a lot of friends that want to enroll in the same school and do the same that I’m doing. They see that they can go somewhere, instead of always having someone on their back. They can take that extra step, change their life around. When they see me and Jerome (also at the focus group--JVT) working and going to school, they happy, they appreciate us. They back us 100%. Like "Stay in the program". It’s a good program, stay in it. It’s like when we get out of school, we talk to other people around the neighborhood and other neighborhoods. To try to join them to the program. To let them know it’s a really nice program--we let them know it’s not all about the stipend. They try to help you out with your education. If you take up a trade, so you can have a good paying job for yourself and your family. So we try to have people in our community on the right track, let them know that there’s nothin’ out on the street for you. So enroll in school, do something positive with your life and make a big step to change. Let everybody in the community know you’re giving back to ‘em because AmeriCorps can give me a chance so I want to give something back to them. I’m going to help build up the community.

    Malik describes the community response to his AmeriCorps team and their work:

    We help clean up the community, you can see the shock on people’s faces. They think that, our community is a lot of African-Americans, we don’t have a mixed group because of the population in Atlantic City. So, they have this shocked look on they face like, "I don’t believe they here to help us, to help serve us." We just let them know that we not here just to do it because of school, we’re here to help y’all because everybody need help too. So we’ve tried to give something back to them. I feel as though they feel appreciated for it because when we was on Texas Avenue cleaning up graffiti off a house and a store, and like two days later the block was totally different because there was no spray paint on the walls. A lot of people was looking out they windows, and standing on they porch looking like, "Well who are these people who helped clean up the community?" So, I guess, they probably got together and felt as though, "Well, if they can do this, so can we." So it’s like, I see this coming together, little by little.

    Malik is asked if AmeriCorps should be mandatory for all youth.

    I say for the parents in Atlantic City it should be mandatory. Because if you know that your son or daughter’s not doing it then you should make it mandatory that they sign up in the program. You know, do something with they life instead of wasting it. Like the lady said down at the end, well, we’ve had to go feed the homeless or take care of the sick, no, it’s more than just that, you know, it’s help building up the community. I feel as though AmeriCorps shouldn’t stop with their program because, for our program, see next month there’s going to be two classes coming together. So continue the effort, you know, helpin’ the youth that’s out in the world who need help gettin’ their first step in the door with these programs, you know, and lettin’ them know that there’s another way instead of going back the other way. So, I feel as though y’all should keep up the good job.

    The themes that emerge in these statements by this black, poor, ghetto-dwelling, dropout father of three would be remarkable if they were uttered by any human being: the need for personal commitment and economic advancement, the desire to give back in the form of service to the community from which one came, the willingness to involve others in advancing socially valuable work, the moral suasion to others to keep the faith and to bring along the new generation. Is Malik unique as a statesperson for the value of the AmeriCorps experience? I turn to the Chicago transcript and start reviewing the comments of Marcus, another YouthBuild AmeriCorps member:

    We feed the homeless and rehabilitate houses for them. It's really much help in the community of Gary, Indiana.

    There's about 30 of us. 2 Mexicans, and the rest African-American. And about 5 of us go to the school in the area and help out the young. We really get along with each other. There's really no interracial thing going on. Everybody is getting to know one another. Getting things done. If there's a problem we go to the counselor. We get education and studying, carpenter skills, wiring houses and such and building and community service. It's fun to me. I like it. We have a money problem though, we need more money. Yeah, in Gary Indiana, that's about it.

    I am very spiritually inclined. Psychology is what I want to take up and electrical engineering, probably a little carpentry work. I help everyone out spiritually. If you want to be a leader, you must first be a servant...."

    The survey respondents would not be surprised by the impacts AmeriCorps has made on Malik and Marcus. They strongly supported the value of the work experience provided by national service. Ninety-five percent of the sample indicated that this value was important, including 98% of the black respondents and 97% of those of lower income.

    It is unlikely that AmeriCorps will succeed if it does not squarely address the systematic inequalities and discrimination that has come to characterize late 20th century American society. Countryman and Sullivan (1993:34) strike a judicious note with their observation that "Service opportunities should not be limited to poor youth, but the central mission of national service should be to strengthen the capacity of poor communities to solve their own problems....The first step is to encourage poor youth to develop explanations for the realities they perceive in the community." One can only add that the contributions of other Americans to this process appear to be productively being mobilized, as well, to these lofty goals.

    The Gallup survey revealed several important findings pertaining to this difficult issue. First, black respondents demonstrate a far greater trust in the federal government to operate the program than do whites. Indeed, whites overwhelmingly support the management of AmeriCorps by a non-governmental organization (53%) as against the federal government (15%). Blacks, on the other hand, favor the administration of the program by the federal government (38%) as opposed to a nonprofit (33%).

    A second set of findings show that black and lower-income respondents value the instrumental gains of national service more highly than do white and upper-income respondents. No surprise there. But blacks and lower-income respondents also value the symbolic gains of national service more highly. These findings are supportive of Christopher Lasch’s view of the "revolt of the elites" in American society. Blacks and low income respondents report more enthusiasm, excitement, and outright patriotism than do those in more advantaged societal positions.

  5. AmeriCorps as a Refuge

Creating an alternative for the development of citizenship, and, indeed, citizens themselves, is a central focus of the AmeriCorps program. The terms "service" and "volunteer" are often used disparagingly in the literature on democratic participation to describe well-intentioned but ineffectual actions of middle-class individuals to relate to some societal issue or other. Long-time community organizer and writer Harry Boyte, among others (Cf. Barber and Battistoni, 1994) has questioned the degree to which a focus on "voluntarism" will achieve goals of "citizenship" (in Peters, 1993: 47).

"The language of the service movement," Peters observes, "is primarily a language of caring and concern, of private feelings and personal development, rather than a political language tied to the skills and concepts of public life" (1993: 47). He concludes: "Citizenship is not easy, but without it, there can be no democracy" (p. 50).

Focus group participants in the Gallup Institute study were divided on the relevance of AmeriCorps to the workings of American democracy. Some tended to agree with the skepticism the literature contains about the democratic implications of service. The program director who was most skittish about the advocacy restrictions put the issue baldly: "My program isn’t doing anything to help democracy in this country."

A member noted banefully that AmeriCorps membership even restrained her own ability to support her program: "I think it varies from member to member. For some people it phases them, and others it does not. Especially this year being an election year. But I do think that some members of AmeriCorps feel helpless because the budget is up for debate year after year, and they can't say anything about it."

But other AmeriCorps members tended to be more generous in their assessments of the connections to democratic practice. Malik, who came from a poverty community in Atlantic City, observed:

The program I work with helps strengthen democracy. A lot of people come up to us--and see how we take a house from being abandoned to being a furnished apartment that somebody can live in. A lot of people come past--"That’s nice work that you’re doing." We try to help build up the community and they see that we are like the future of the community. The youngsters--it’s our responsibility to help build up the community. So a lot of places that we go--we get a lot of people that appreciate what we are doing for the community. We help the senior citizens; we help the youths; we clean up the streets. We are making a big change for our community. We like other people in our city to take notice of what we are doing. We have other youths who come to sign up for our group, to do the same thing that we’re doing. Keep things going on the right track, so they can see that where we’re coming from. We ain’t trying to condemn or destroy the city but we are trying to beautify it so people can come into town and take a second look at Atlantic City. We have (public housing) projects here but can see that YouthBuild AmeriCorps will be a help in bringing this community back together.

The national survey discovered that 77% of the sample agreed that participating in national service will encourage more people to do volunteer work generally. But AmeriCorps’ capacity to generate a full and robust participation of citizens, both among its members and those in the community that the serve, remains a contentious issue in the actual embodiments of its projects.

  1. How AmeriCorps Works
  1. Multi-level TURBULENCE
  2. AmeriCorps is authorized at the federal level, and administered by the national Corporation for National Service. State-level commissions play an important role in its implementation, and local nonprofit organizations provide the program base for AmeriCorps participants. This is a classic multi-level partnership between public and nonprofit organizations, and between federal, state and local governments.

    In a time of historic governmental instability in the United States, AmeriCorps has often served as a political football booted about by Presidential Democrats and Congressional Republicans alike. Determined efforts have been made by governing legislation to restrict the policy scale and scope of the program. The program been subject to recurrent efforts by Republican congresspersons to "zero out" its appropriations. These legislative challenges, while assured of defeat, require a considerable effort on the part of AmeriCorps supporters each time they are presented. They stand as signs that the program remains under the critical purview of a vehement legislative minority devoted to the eventual removal of the program.

  3. Developmental AND service oriented.

Following the conceptual distinctions presented by Manor (1998: 11), AmeriCorps’ predominant "activity" is that of "developmental and social action" and its most appropriate "type" is as a "service provision organization." The Gallup Institute study focused considerable attention on the tension that exists within AmeriCorps between the social action of community "advocacy" and the direct provision of social service.

America’s third sector has long prided itself on providing services to those in need, and in helping them find their voices to address larger institutional forces that work against their aspirations for a fuller life. This "third space" is seen to be "located beyond the formal organizations of government and the profit-crazed world of business," as I have described it elsewhere (Van Til, 1996, forthcoming):

In the third space of the basement of Ebenezer Baptist Church, for example, Martin Luther King, Jr. rallied what became the core of a great movement following the arrest of Rosa Parks. In the third space of the Magic Lantern Theater an ex-convict named Vaclav Havel met with his peers to design a peaceful revolution that led him within several months to the Presidential Castle. In the third space of an organization called PEN, fellow writers stood bravely to share the hit placed by an Iranian ruler on Salman Rushdie. In the third space fronting Upper Darby (Pennsylvania's) 69th Street Terminal, citizens of Delaware County have nightly, over the past five years, offered meals cooked in their own kitchens to their hungry and homeless neighbors.

As we seek to build social capital by means of community-based and nonprofit organizations, we work to assure that our social economy thrives, and that fewer of our fellow citizens either bowl or suffer alone. Such are the rewards of acting in the many and often surprising corners of society's third space.

That a proper balance between service and advocacy has not yet been achieved within AmeriCorps is apparent from the conversations with the agency people who administer these programs. In the Chicago discussion, for instance, program directors spoke frankly about the difficulties and dilemmas the AmeriCorps prohibitions on advocacy created for their agencies’ work with AmeriCorps members:

Female-- I think AmeriCorps could speak to many other problems if that limitation wasn’t there. You have to be very careful in what you get AmeriCorps members involved in terms of activism. If we didn’t have that prohibited, there could be other things we could do.

Male-- For me as a project director, I am scared to death of political anything--any discussion that involves politics. Anything--whether talking about alderman races or the mayor or Congress. They say we are supposed to encourage our members to register to vote and I don’t even want to get into that, really, because that’s close to a line of having a discussion and endorsing a candidate. It’s such a big issue that they’re always sending us memos on from Washington. I don’t want to get involved in that because I don’t want to jeopardize what we have going, which is a very good thing.

Female--One of the things we do is to let people know what kind of things in government is available. Our community is so split enough it is not easy to find out who our officials are. We try to let people know who these officials are and the kinds of issues they deal with. We take our members down to City Hall and give them a tour and it’s not political--it’s just to show who is there and what kind of services they can provide. We don’t get into who to vote for, but we do show who they can raise questions with.

Male--How do you differentiate between community service and what the leaders of the community do? It seems to me that you all need to work together in the community. But it’s a nationally funded program and you can’t take sides. But to try to split community service from democratic participation doesn’t work.

Female--I think what’s most important is that we educate people and give them information. What happens so much is that people don’t have the basic information.

Male--The thing that ties our hands, and we try to juggle the best we can to get the learning experience in there, is that a couple of prohibitions really hurt us. Organizing is exactly one of them. We would love to spend our time teaching our participants to organize, and we do a little of it. Can they put it into action? is a totally other thing. I think this social change comment about AmeriCorps is totally false because you can’t organize. Additionally, the AmeriCorps member can’t fundraise to support the organizing project that you would love to see. So there are these things in place that keep you from moving.

Male--What needs to be done is to be able to shake the cage and say "Here’s what’s really going on in the community, I want to say something about it." I think AmeriCorps members have a talent in being able to relate to folks. How far can we take it? I’m not messing with it at all is what you’re saying, and I respect that. You’re doing a good thing.

Male--Education is our mission, and my members are educating each other. Our community is going through this welfare thing and so they’re teaching each other about the new child care regs, the new food stamp regulations, the new cash benefit. In terms of influencing where that’s going to go, I’m completely hands off. If they want to do that on their own time, that’s up to them. But for our program, we say ":We are here to educate the children of this building," and that’s it.

Male--YouthBuild and our state commission encourages us to bring politicians in an view our site. We have Q and A with our members. We also take our members to City Hall for Town council meetings, which is after our hours at 6:00. We tell them the class will be taking a trip to see how government works. The biggest drawback in our community is apathy--they say "My vote doesn’t count." It’s part of our awareness to let them know why decisions are made--that it’s better to strike a match than curse the darkness. We try to let them know the process: These people work for you. You are the reason they are in office.

We also partner with the city during clean-ups. We like them to provide dumpsters for us. Our members serve as coordinators to administer the projects; they need to know who to contact. They poll the community to see what they would like to have done. Plant vegetables? Flowers? They go to the city. Ask councilmen for assistance. Can you contact someone? It is becoming aware of being a citizen. They have been paying rent most of their lives. They don’t understand a sense of ownership. They tie into the process it brings up their awareness. We don’t tell them go vote this person or that person. But for them to stand up in the process of coordinating things. We also ask officials to join us in the service projects.

Male--AmeriCorps members can’t be excused from work to engage in politics. But on election day we close down. If they want to participate in a rally on their own time, that’s OK as long as you don’t have your AmeriCorps gear on. Be a citizen.

Female--It’s very clear you can’t demonstrate. When the Democratic convention came, we got a lot of directives to be very clear as to how AmeriCorps was used. Members understand that, we are open as to prohibited activity. We spend time going over those activities.

Male--Maybe it was a really intelligent person who thought of this, and though let’s do something about this innately American behavior to have someone else solve this problem. OK I have a hole in front of my house--get a politician to do it. Making a separation makes it possible to do community building in the truest sense. Let’s do something about this hole, not to demonstrate about it or write a letter about it, but just figure out what resource we can use in the community to solve this problem.

Male--The nature of Red Cross is to be neutral. But how about sharing information about resources, the process? Networking, teaching principles about organizing, educating themselves, countering apathy. It is a fine line.

Female--Most AmeriCorps programs are clear about this. You do help people connect with resources. Welfare reform is with us. Now everyone will have electronic cards. Some haven’t been charged up right. We got involved and gave them information and access. It’s information sharing.

Male--I just think it’s about having a little more latitude to do the things just mentioned. We do those already. It would just be nice to have that little more latitude.

AmeriCorps members are also troubled by the advocacy restrictions placed upon them. Their response, however, tends to be more moderate and understanding than those of their supervisory elders. They seem to accept these restrictions as "something adults do", and work their way through their relations with the communities they serve in a pragmatic and productive way.

Consider these comments by Camden AmeriCorps members:

Female - This is been the biggest and the hardest struggle for me as an AMC member, that you can’t advocate at the legislative level. Our sponsor is an important advocacy non-profit organization. So we model the way we get volunteers after the way they get volunteers. We are doing straight service work, and it’s very frustrating when you can’t go and hold a protest somewhere or you can’t hold a protest at City Hall. Then, when you try to work together with (the host organization), a lot of times you can’t because we’re afraid that someone will get confused, and then our funding would get cut. So, it’s very frustrating, and I wish we could be more actively involved at the legislative level, but unfortunately we can’t.

Female - Having been a member for the past three years, it seems that every year the rules get more strict about our political participation. The rules for this year are so strict that I’m not even sure if we can go to the Stand For Children which is a non-partisan activity, which is directly linked to our goal of stopping violence among children. AmeriCorps is a activity that makes a lot of the college students in our corps more aware politically of what’s going on. When we can’t even try to send a letter to our congressperson, and if they don’t cut our budget, it’s frustrating.

Female - I agree with what’s been said here. It is frustrating, and it almost feels like censorship. In order to be in this program you can’t make any big waves, you have to be quiet. We can as private citizens, but not under AmeriCorps. I understand them not wanting us to lobby, but I feel as though, as a group, and especially when it’s something that we participate in. Each AmeriCorps group has a specific focus, and I think that we should be allowed to say, "Hey, this is what’s going on here with this focus that we’re dealing with, and this is what needs to happen." We need to be able to say that, we need to be able to bring to their attention what is really going on, and what changes could make it better. We actually being as close to it as we are, because basically we’re putting in those hours, we’re right on top of the situation almost 24/7. We could give great insight to that, but in this program it can’t happen and that’s a problem.

A Chicago member echoed the same themes as the Camden participants:

Female- For me it raises a lot of questions. I work for "I Have a Dream". I believe that we have gotten to where we are because we have tried to stay middle of the road. We need AmeriCorps because we have been there. I find it weird that they don't suggest that we get more involved through alternative routes.

Even though the restrictions on advocacy seem "weird" to many participants, they tend to learn to work within them such that their effect is minimal on the basic relationship that counts for them: their relation to the individuals in the communities they serve. Some, like a Chicago member, come to see service itself as the subject of advocacy. He observed that "AmeriCorps is definitely is an advocate for community service--serving the community and giving back to the community." A woman in the same group added, "I also take it as becoming a responsible working adult."

Another Chicago woman recalled that a training session was not successful in persuading members that service really is advocacy:

We had a workshop about being role-models. They were looking for a specific part of activism. Sort of that everyone must agree on a norm and that is the model of activism and act on that. I am not sure that that is teaching you to be active. If you are agreeing (or doing) something that you may not necessarily normally agree with. But as far as the idea of community service, it has a sort of trickle down effect.

The AmeriCorps members learn to work around their restrictions, and they tend to be quite creative. As one Chicago woman member recalls:

Last year we were trying to teach the kids voting responsibility. We had to phrase it in such a way that, well, we brought in an outside speaker so we the AmeriCorps members were not doing it. It was bi-partisan. It is protection so that we do not influence the people we work with. Allow them their own right to free speech.

And a Colorado Springs member observed that the major impact of AmeriCorps is an indirect one, but that ultimately the community is empowered: "AmeriCorps has helped community members be aware of their own community in such a way that they have the resources which they need to be involved. In that way they get more active."

  1. Assessing Civil Society and Governance in the Case of AmeriCorps
  2. The case of AmeriCorps forms a remarkable success in an era of contentious, failed, and timid public policy. Despite many challenges to its form and content, AmeriCorps is up and running, and the field evidence presented in this paper supports the conclusion that it has become a successful and viable program.

    In a somewhat paradoxical way, AmeriCorps as a program has proved to be both confrontational and less than adversarial. The legislative process governing AmeriCorps has been highly confrontational, and has formed a major difference between Presidential Democrats and Congressional Republicans in the Clinton era. In its implementation, however, the program has presented a low profile and has steered itself remarkably well through the shoals of an adversarial politics to a sufficiently firm base of political support and a remarkably harmonious set of relations with state and local agencies, both nonprofit and governmental.

    AmeriCorps has become established as an effective program that blends the contributions of national, state, and local agencies. It embodies the "partnership" approach described by Salamon (1995). National service tends to be highly valued by those who see as appropriate a partnership between government, citizen and voluntary organization in enhancing individual commitment to service and participation. For those suspicious of the role of government, however, national service takes on a more menacing appearance. From this perspective, it is seen as an arm of an intrusive and overarching state, seeking to extend governmental power in realms properly left to governmental action. As such, then, national service, tends to be viewed as an appropriate policy by liberals and a more suspicious one by conservatives.

    As a multi-partnered structure between governments and nonprofit organizations, AmeriCorps has proven itself able to attract a wide and talented range of individual citizens to its programs. These stipended volunteers consist of the principal "employees" within its structure, and the role of managers is played by administrators in a wide range of public and nonprofit organizations.

    Perhaps the most important reason that AmeriCorps works is that it has succeeded in constructing that rarest of human organizations: one that is based on the needs of its members. AmeriCorps clearly gives the citizenry something it highly values—a program that harnesses the energies of youth to social renewal. But it also gives its workers a set of incentives and a level of compensation that they find appropriate. AmeriCorps participants bring a variety of personal and financial needs to their service: seeking experience, finding themselves, supporting themselves and their families. The stipending system AmeriCorps provides hardly permits an opulent lifestyle, and requires some members to seek public assistance, work two jobs, or borrow even further from parents or banks. As AmeriCorps becomes more diverse in its membership, these problems seem likely to increase. Moving to an "all-volunteer" basis would disqualify many thousands of the most important members of this movement—those who themselves come from backgrounds of social and financial distress.

    In a limited way, it is possible to see AmeriCorps as enhancing the workings of American democracy. It addresses a widespread willingness among the population to engage in service to those in need; it builds a connection with communities into the lives of those who serve as its participants. But the conception of democracy involved is not a fully robust one, as the participation of AmeriCorps members is limited by a set of restrictions on the involvement of members with the processes of the communities they seek to serve. The citizen service thereby provided by the AmeriCorps program is somewhat more fearful and constrained than the democratic rights and responsibilities established by the Constitution might suggest.

    The AmeriCorps case also illuminates three important issues in the civil society/governace interrelation: advocacy, taxation, and political control:

    ADVOCACY is a central issue in AmeriCorps, as the grudging support given the program by many in Congress is conditioned on the setting of a strict boundary between service and advocacy. Service is permitted; advocacy is not. AmeriCorps members learn to approach this issue pragmatically, but their nonprofit employers live in constant concern that the line will be inappropriately crossed.

    A follow-up survey completed by focus group members showed that the advocacy restrictions clearly concern employers more than members. Participants tended to rank their own ability to encourage activism, advance social change, and strengthen democracy considerably more highly than did their supervisors. But both members and employers are more likely to characterize AmeriCorps as a service program rather than an advocacy or change-oriented program. Clearly the legislative compromise engineered between the President and a handful of Republican moderates has heard the voice of those farther right: No advocacy shall be sponsored by the federal government! But, equally clearly, the ingenuity of AmeriCorps participants has allowed them to find ways of encouraging activism and advancing social change that fit within the bounds of whatever administrative constraints Washington is able to devise and proclaim. Advocacy, it would seem, is a persistent part of the repertory of third sector participants.

    The provision of service is important, and often essential, to a thriving third sector. As Dorothy Height, the long-time President of the National Council of Negro Women, has often put it: "If a person is bleeding, they need a Band-Aid. But Band-Aids don’t do much for cancer." What the American tradition of voluntary action provides its citizens is the chance both to dispense Band-Aids as needed and to stand tall in the call to action when required. It is this dual legacy of service and advocacy that governments confront when they seek to institutionalize national service programs. The issues raised in this process have troubled AmeriCorps as they earlier troubled community action programs in the War on Poverty. It is very difficult, if not impossible, to work with communities in need without entering, if only indirectly, the world of advocacy, protest, and direct action.

    TAXATION. AmeriCorps, as legislatively established and funded, is a program of the federal government. By the late 1990s, the cost of supporting an individual member for a year’s service, when costs of the stipend, training, and administration are all included, came to about $15,000 (though this figure remains in some controversy between supporters and opponents of the program). With 40,000 participants expected by 1999, the total annual program cost came to about $60 million, or a good bit less than $3 per citizen.

    This cost seems eminently reasonable to Americans. Our Gallup survey in 1995 asked a national sample if they felt "the country is getting good value for the compensation" it pays for AmeriCorps: 76% agreed, and only 9% disagreed. When asked if the "money would be better spent on other programs," 16% agreed, and 71% disagreed.

    On the whole, Americans see the benefits of AmeriCorps far outweighing its costs. Primary among the benefits are the following, with percentages of respondents agreeing:

    94% Brings together young people from different backgrounds

    94% Gives young people useful work experience

    91% Raises self-esteem among the young people participating

    83% Encourages healthy lifestyles among the participants

    78% Helps reduce crime among young people

    77% Encourages more people to do volunteer work generally

    77% Helps reduce restlessness among young people

    75% Participants perform worthwhile work that would not otherwise be done

    Costs of the program are primarily considered in terms of undesirable values being inculcated, but are perceived by many fewer respondents:

    29% Delays the start of the careers of the young people who participate

    19% Sends the wrong message to young people—that they should be paid for volunteer work

    19% Diverts some participants from further education

    PARTNERING DYNAMICS. The national sample questioned in the Gallup survey of AmeriCorps was asked to assess a number of criticisms of AmeriCorps that had been raised regarding problems of government-nonprofit partnerships. With the exception of only one item, most respondents did not perceive these criticisms as serious.

    The only item receiving agreement by as much as 50% of the sample was hardly a criticism: "Adds more bureaucracy to the federal or state government." Unless one takes an Aesopian view of government and expects it to provide services without expense, this is hardly a major criticism. A similarly empirical statement, "Diverts national resources from other worthwhile programs," received the agreement of 27% of the respondents.

    The most substantial criticism pertaining to the impact of AmeriCorps on nonprofit organizations, "Makes it more difficult for private organizations to find volunteers," found only 23% of the respondents in agreement.

    Survey respondents were not convinced, however, that the federal government should be the lead agency in assuring national service. When asked which one of the following "is best able to organize and manage AmeriCorps," the respondents’ choices were:

    50% Non-governmental organizations

    18% Federal government

    13% State government

    11% Local government

    The national survey reveals several important findings pertaining to this difficult issue. First, African-American respondents demonstrate a far greater trust in the federal government to operate the program than do whites. Indeed, whites overwhelmingly support the management of AmeriCorps by a non-governmental organization (53%) as against the federal government (15%). African-Americans, on the other hand, favor the administration of the program by the federal government (38%) as opposed to a nonprofit (33%).

    Interviews with nonprofit managers and governmental administrators of the program suggest that the partnering relationship, while not always easy or smooth, usually proves workable.

    Choosing which agencies will become suitable receptors for national service participant is an important decision. In the public-voluntary partnership of AmeriCorps, this choice is made in a joint fashion between national and state governing agencies. Federal shapes and constrains the fields of placement, which were initially limited to education, recreation, law enforcement, and elder care.

    The Corporation for National Service sets the policies that place AmeriCorps participants in programs throughout the land. Strong political forces may compel them to choose among only those agencies whose purposes are so bland and generally acceptable that they arouse little political opposition. Considering the power that "veto groups" exercise in American democracy, it would seem unlikely that service participants will ever have the chance to work for such agencies as Greenpeace, Focus on the Family, or the National Abortion Rights League.

    The issue of the selection of agencies is one that was addressed only indirectly in the present study. But the range of agencies who provided members and employers to our focus groups suggests a wider range of agencies and programs than might have been expected in the context of AmeriCorps’ political controversy. Some agencies that provided us respondents were primarily oriented toward advocacy, though they made certain to assure that the AmeriCorps components of their programs conformed to the advocacy proscriptions. Others focuses on citizen education, and yet others provided core services the basic fields of education, recreation, law enforcement, and public health.

    A major issue facing AmeriCorps policy during the period of study (early 1997) in the selection of agencies and programs that fit administration initiatives of welfare reform. As one Chicago employer described the situation:

    We went to D.C. for a new program directors’ conference, and it seems to be the trend in AmeriCorps to use it as a "welfare to work" program. So I don’t see it just as a program of college grads providing service. I see it as a program to get some folks child care and some money for school and skill development--a program that brings people together for a lot of reasons. Some people who care about service and have had some advantages in life, some getting into program for other reasons.

    A state director noted that the introduction of a program that focused on bringing in welfare recipients met with considerable debate within the state commission, and was ultimately approved only with great caution. AmeriCorps would innovate, he asserted, but it would also seek to stay faithful to the spirit on which it was founded.

    When the 1999 Reauthorization proposal was sent to Congress, mention was sparse on the impact of welfare reform. But principal among the goals were two pertaining to partnering dynamics: "Giving more authority over national service programs to the states," and "Strengthening partnerships with traditional volunteer organizations." Devolution is clearly an important dynamic in the continuing evolution of the AmeriCorps program.

  3. Conclusion: Assessing the Partnership

The image of the circle is a powerful one in AmeriCorps. It was used by then U.S. Senate candidate Rick Santorum (R-PA) as a criticism of then Senator Harris Wofford in their bitter 1994 campaign. Santorum, it will be recalled, warned that public funds should not be used to support young people sitting around campfires singing "Kumbaya". A few years later, the defeated and yet unbowed Wofford, now the Director of the Corporation for National Service, told of visiting an AmeriCorps group high in the California Sierras, where they had been clearing trails. They planned a campfire to regale Wofford, but needed to send a delegate down from the high country to the nearest library to find both the words and the tune of "Kumbaya".

By the middle of the 1990s, national service found itself in the uncomfortable position of having become an issue of considerable political controversy. On the one hand, President Clinton clung tenaciously to its support, calling it one of the most important pieces of legislation passed during his administration. In opposition to this view, the Speaker of the House, Congressman Newt Gingrich of Georgia, identified national service as a prime example of the kind of wasteful government spending the new Republican majority had been brought to power to eliminate.

This debate is an ongoing one, addressed annually in Congressional struggles over budgetary appropriations and legislation. However, the issues raised by the President and the Speaker will continue to face American society whatever the fate of the current national service initiative: Does the federal government have a role to play in supporting service? Or should service emerge only if initiated and entirely supported by voluntary organizations? Should the federal government play a direct role in helping equip youth to serve others? Or should such service be left to state and local governments to provide in a redesigned welfare state that sees a greatly lessened role for the federal government.

To the participants in the AmeriCorps program who joined the focus groups of the Gallup study, the value of their mission seemed clear. They were distressed, however, that so few people took the time to learn about that mission and the work it provided in the communities they served. They complained that the media consistently failed to report the work they accomplished, even when painstakingly invited to visible community events. They feared that the impact of their contribution was vanishing into the miasma of a nation fixated on the lives of the rich and famous and the violence of the slums and ghettos of America’s cities.

The invisibility of so much of AmeriCorps’ work was dramatically underwritten by the interviews we conducted with a purposive sample of community leaders in each of the three cities. Time and time again, major leaders of educational, business, governmental, and civic organizations admitted that, while they knew in general about the national struggles over AmeriCorps, they could not identify a single AmeriCorps program in their own community. In Chicago only one of the sixteen leaders interviewed had a strong knowledge of local AmeriCorps programs. In Colorado Springs, that same situation was replicated, one in seventeen. In Camden, five of sixteen leaders showed an informed knowledge of the workings of at least one AmeriCorps program in their community.

Time and time again, the local leaders rehearsed the same position. It sounds like a valuable program, but it hasn’t come across my screen here in Colorado Springs, here in Chicago, here in Camden. When the interviewer filled in a few of the blanks about the workings of AmeriCorps, and asked the leaders if the program sounded like one that would assist their community, the responses were overwhelmingly positive. Even in conservative Colorado Springs, that bastion of limited government, only one of the 17 leaders interviewed held to the view that the fact that AmeriCorps members were stipended meant that community agencies should not find considerable advantage in bringing them to service.

AmeriCorps has a difficult road ahead, if it is to survive the Clinton years and enter the 21st century. It must learn continue to serve effectively, even if that means participating in an occasional act of surreptitious advocacy. It must continue to receive legislative funding, even if that means convincing reluctant Congresspersons to bring their thinking into line with the overwhelming majority of their constituents. And it must remain sensitive and vigilant to the dynamics of partnering in an age of rapid devolution. None an easy task—but neither an impossible one to accomplish them all.

Clearly, AmeriCorps represents a significant attempt to create a multi-sectoral partnership organization in the United States. It took an idea, national service, that had long intrigued thinkers who believed that voluntary action was a critical component in the building of democracy and civil society. It built on the momentum of a national movement toward service learning and citizen service, a movement nurtured in universities and nonprofit service organizations throughout the 1980s. And it built a national program that invited nonprofit organizations to place program participants within enriched organizational spaces created for them by a wide range of nonprofits within a variety of American communities.

Advancing the initial success of this endeavor will be important in the sustenance of American democracy on the cusp of the millennium. If the AmeriCorps experiment can be sustained and expanded, it will form an important addition to society’s "third space"—that seedbed of consciousness, collaboration and citizenship that lies between the confines family and the vastness of mega-organization . (Cf. Van Til, 2000, forthcoming). . Coming in an era of public cynicism and private withdrawal, this accomplishment would be significant in itself, and would importantly energize the prospects of the future vitality of American democracy.

 

 

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