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Washington DC -- As the largest-ever King Day of Service gets underway with more than 500,000 Americans heading out today to volunteer in their communities, the CEOs of the two organizations leading the effort to make the King Holiday a national day of service urged Americans to help realize King’s dream on the holiday and around the year in an op-ed in this morning’s Atlanta Journal Constitution.
The call for mentors and other kinds of year-round service was made by Isaac Newton Farris Jr., president and CEO of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change in Atlanta and the nephew of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., and David Eisner, CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service. Here is the text of the op-ed:
Honor hero by helping others
By ISAAC NEWTON FARRIS JR. and DAVID EISNER
Atlanta Journal Constitution, Monday, January 21, 2008
Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. once said that "Life's persistent and most urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?' " This year, 2008, marks four decades since our country last heard his compelling voice challenging us with that question and calling us to "make America what it ought to be."
Over these 40 years, we've seen extraordinary progress, and yet our society's continued challenges remind us where we've fallen short of King's ideals. Today, 37 million Americans — including 13 million children — live in poverty. More than 3.5 million Americans are homeless. We lose too many young people to the scourges of drugs, violence and hopelessness. And, as Hurricane Katrina exposed, too many communities suffer poverty and despair as symptoms of generations of racism and institutional failure. We have work to do. Making America "what it ought to be" remains as urgent today as it was 40 years ago.
For many of us, in fact, today's Martin Luther King Day holiday will serve as a challenge to recapture what Dr. King called "the fierce urgency of now," in our commitment to making our communities stronger. That is why the King Center in Atlanta has come together with the programs of the Corporation for National and Community Service — AmeriCorps, VISTA, NCCC, Senior Corps and Learn and Serve America — to help Americans in all 50 states turn King Day into a time not just to celebrate, but to commit to take action through hands-on service in our community.
Since 1994 when Congress passed legislation calling on Americans to make the King holiday a day of service, the concept has expanded each year, with hundreds of thousands of individuals volunteering in thousands of service projects across the country last January. And, even more importantly, we're seeing these volunteers come back and serve in their communities during the rest of the year as well. Because, let's face it, you can't honor Dr. King and his call to service in one day.
This year, many of the service activities that begin on King Day will build into the future, where, as usual, young people lead the way. Young people, for example, like high school students from North Carolina, Washington, D.C., and Maryland, who, inspired by Dr. King, have pledged themselves to 40 days of nonviolence. In schools and youth organizations across the country, other young people are planning a "Semester of Service," beginning on King Day and ending on Global Youth Service Day in April.
We hope millions of Americans of all ages will follow the example of these young people and find ways to honor King and emulate his lifelong commitment to and passion for serving others.
We need you to help rebuild storm-destroyed houses. We need you to tutor a youth who will otherwise drop out of school. We need you to be a companion to a frail elderly citizen who will otherwise lose her independence and need to go into a nursing home. We need you to help a young disabled veteran prepare his job resume. On King Day and beyond, organizations and communities across America need you — your skills, your experience and your caring — to make a meaningful and urgently needed difference in people's lives.
And, if you're up for making a really big difference, think hard about committing to be a mentor to a child. Millions of young people have no trusted adult in their life — and, yet, we know that mentoring can make the difference between a life filled with despair and loss and one of accomplishment and hope. In fact, we haven't found a more effective tool for turning around a young life at risk than the intervention of a caring adult. It's fitting that King Day falls each year in January, National Mentoring Month.
Imagine, for one moment, that we could engage — in King's memory — 15 million caring adults who would each spend one hour a week mentoring a child for one year. America would, in the years following, see our high-school dropout problem cut in half, gang violence nearly ended, drug usage sharply curtailed, teen pregnancy lower than at any time in the last century — and a generation of youth surging forward optimistically to fulfill King's dreams for America.
The King Center's late founder, Coretta Scott King, called King Day "above all a day of service." She wrote: "It is a day of volunteering to feed the hungry, rehabilitate housing, tutoring those who can't read, mentoring at-risk youngsters, consoling the broken-hearted and a thousand other projects for building the beloved community of his dream."
Millions of Americans are ready to make their contribution to fulfilling the dream of an America that is everything it ought to be and an America that is at last the beloved community. We're asking them — we're asking you — to stand up for Dr. King's principles and on King Day commit to the dedicated service that will make his dreams a reality.
Isaac Newton Farris Jr. is president and CEO of the Martin Luther King Jr. Center for Non-Violent Social Change in Atlanta and the nephew of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. David Eisner is CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service, a federal agency that administers national service programs and is leading the effort to promote the King holiday as a national day of service.
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