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It is such an honor for me to share the stage with Mayor Franklin, Congressman Lewis, and Director Tschetter.
Each one of them has been a leader in events that have transformed us as a nation.
And, it has been rewarding today to hear how each has had a transformational moment in their lives that spurred them to action.
And while you and I likely didn’t march with Dr. King, or lead a city, or blaze a service trail in India, we are among the millions of Americans who are experiencing a transformational moment right now.
And let me particularly thank my brilliant and transformational Chairman Steve Goldsmith, who has kept our eyes unerringly on why the Corporation exists in the first place.
Let me also thank our Board of Directors. We have so many of them here: Alan Solomont, our vice chair Vince Juaristi, Jim Palmer, Leona Whitehat, and Stan Soloway. They’re here and we’re so grateful.
Today I want to spend a little bit of time talking to you about what’s happening across America and how we can embrace this as OUR transformational moment today.
As Steve mentioned, I’ve had the privilege now of being the CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service for a little under 5 years.
During that time we’ve seen several important trends catalyze significant change in the role of service and volunteering in America.
So in the little time we have now, let me focus on two of those trends.
The first is that the twin demographic waves of engaged youth and retiring baby boomers share something very important: they both have an increased desire for and heightened expectations from meaningful social engagement.
The second and related trend is that the social sector is accelerating its adoption of entrepreneurialism – with a focus on impact and business models and efficiency – and that entrepreneurialism is driving new models of engagement and forging new alliances and consolidations among existing organizations.
The reason these trends are related is that our young people, with their exceptional technology acumen, and our boomers, with their life and work experience – they are the ones who are injecting greater entrepreneurialism into the non-profit sector.
So let me start our discussion of America’s young people by sharing something I’ve experienced not once, but many times.
I find myself in a room talking to hundreds of angry 18-24 year olds.
They are AmeriCorps members and they are mad at me!
Here’s the way it goes: I ask them “Do you wish you’d heard about AmeriCorps at some point earlier than you did.
At first I get nods – all around.
Then they get furious.
They start talking all at once, shouting over one another!
“Yes, I would have joined earlier!”
“Yes, I didn’t know about it.”
“Why don’t more people know about this opportunity?”
And, my personal favorite: “It’s YOUR fault – why aren’t you making sure everyone knows?”
The first time it happened, I thought the reaction was a little extreme.
Since then, I’ve come to realize how many young people are just waiting for an opportunity to serve, to be part of something larger, to engage in something meaningful.
And let me share the piece of research that drove this home to me, really hit me in the gut.
Kids from disadvantaged backgrounds volunteer significantly less, even though the research tells us that when these kids are asked to serve, they respond every bit as enthusiastically as middle class kids.
The problem is, not enough people are asking them.
As those angry, young AmeriCorps members made very clear, our young people today—some of you call them Millennials or Generation Y – they have the ability to be passionate about service.
You know, these Millennials are having an extraordinary impact on the environment that all of us are operating in.
Service today is newly relevant and becoming, in an accelerated way, more relevant in education and in the business community.
Why?
Because young people are demanding it.
We are seeing a generation of change being driven by the change generation.
And these young people have found common cause with the boomer generation that will double over the next 20 years, yes DOUBLE the number of older Americans who are volunteering for our organizations.
And, by the way, if you enjoyed the thought of me getting yelled at by AmeriCorps members, you have to be there when older Americans find out they've never heard of Foster Grandparents,
Senior Companions, and RSVP.
What all these generations are telling us is: we want meaningful opportunities to engage where we are able to experience and connect to the results and to the change that our service has brought.
If the last generation said “show me the money,” both Boomers and Millenials are saying: “show me the impact.”
Show me the impact. That is also the call of the social entrepreneur, who represents the last trend I want to talk about this afternoon.
And let me first acknowledge that there are many social entrepreneurs among us here at this conference.
These innovators and leaders are passionate about solving some of America’s toughest problems.
They know that, for all our great progress in recent decades, there are problems we’ve yet to make a dent in, much less solve.
Let’s be clear – we celebrate our youth programs and, yet, in 17 out of the 50 largest cities in America, half of the high school students don’t graduate.
If you visited a fourth grade class in Detroit with 20 students, you could look those kids in the eyes, see their young, happy faces, and know – KNOW – that only five will eventually graduate from high school.
The odds are stacked against so many of these kids from the beginning.
Nearly 800,000 of them are involved in gangs.
25,000 kids age out of foster care each year.
15 million children need a mentor and don’t have one.
Social entrepreneurs know that we have solved these problems in some places, for some Americans, and they are determined to do what they can to make these solutions become community-wide, regional and ultimately national solutions.
One of my favorite recent entrepreneurial initiatives is something that many of us are involved in with the President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation, and that’s skills-based volunteering and the pro bono movement.
It’s a simple enough idea: what if the nonprofit organizations that are really good at delivering a quality solution to a critical social problem could lean on the know how of a Fortune 500 company in the areas of marketing, business planning, human capital and technology?
Imagine if a successful mentoring program could scale and reproduce like Home Depot.
The newly re-minted Points of Light & Hands on Network is a partner in that pro bono initiative, and more broadly a key leader of the social entrepreneurship movement.
The merger of the Points of Light Foundation and the Hands On Network reflects nothing so much as the action of really smart, strategic and optimistic entrepreneurs who understand their core strengths and know that together they can do more, reach further, go faster and have greater impact – with more efficiency and focus – as one organization than as two.
And so I applaud Chairman Neil Bush and CEO Michelle Nunn for their courage, their leadership, and their entrepreneurship.
And I thank them for something else as well – for the urgency and the passion with which they are helping turn all of us and all of you in this audience into a unified and galvanized force for change.
The wall that has too long kept the national service programs and the volunteering community apart is coming down for good.
As I get set to turn this over to Neil Bush, Michelle Nunn, and the exciting launch of a new volunteering brand, let me come back first to the nature of the changes we’re experiencing. Now is the time that we must be compelled to act.
Or, in the words of Thomas Paine, each of us has to figure out how to lead, follow, or get out of the way.
I hope this conference gives you the tools to turn the Urgency of Now into practical and real action steps.
After you leave here on Tuesday, make a phone call to a local business leader who can help you through pro bono support.
If you want to use social media to recruit volunteers and connect with Millenials and drive change, click on the “I’m a Volunteer” widget on our nationalservice.gov Web site and give it to everyone you know.
If you’d like to see King Day become the day that inspires our communities to action, become a partner with one of our seven worthy national MLK Day grantees – who, by the way, we announced today.
If you want to stand on the shoulders of yesterday’s leaders, today’s best practices, and tomorrow’s social entrepreneurs, go to our newly launched Resource Center, a “one stop shop” for tools to help programs go to scale, improve efficiency and create impact.
Together, we can take advantage of our urgency of now, to do these practical things.
Because when we do all of these things we can expect to involve a new generation of Americans in service so early in their lives that they are serving alongside us to create a better America for their kids.
Together we can, as Dr. King said, “Make America what it ought to be.”
Thank you. (Applause)
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