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Georgetown University
10:15 a.m. EST

- As Delivered -

Good morning. Thank you, Nicole, I look forward to being put through the ringer. Thank you, Vice President Porterfield for that kind introduction and thank you students for such a warm welcome to campus on this rainy day. Let me also thank our sponsors, the Center for Social Justice and the Center for Public and Nonprofit Leadership, especially Suzanne Tarlov and Kathy Kretman who did amazing work getting ready for this event.

Would you join me in thanking the Saxatones for that terrific performance of the national anthem? They are not just a talented singing group, but they are also actively involved in community service here on campus.

While your fingers are still tingling, can I also ask you to give a round of applause to Nakeisha, Della, and Jorge for their inspiring stories of service—they were just amazing.

We are honored to see other special guests—Ron Tschetter, the Director of the Peace Corps; John Gomperts from Experience Corps and Civic Ventures; the vice-chair of our Board, Vince Juaristi; and national service pioneer, my hero Senator Harris Wofford. It is important to disclaim as I leave that John and Harris played no small part in convincing me to accept this job.

And I need to recognize with special gratitude for five years of loving patience, my wife, Lori. My aunt Joyce Miller, and Lori's parents, Jerry and Sharon Farber, are also here.

Later in the program you'll have an opportunity to hear from our board chairman Steve Goldsmith, who's the smartest and most innovative leader I've ever worked with– and I'm not just saying that because he's my boss. An awful lot of the accomplishments we've had over these years have come as a result of his building what I believe is the strongest and most constructively bi-partisan board in Washington, and much of the rest of our success has come as a result of his stubborn insistence.

I'd also like to thank the Corporation's executive team and staff for all your hard work over the last 5 years and for helping plan this wonderful event.

Finally I would like to publically thank and applaud my Chief of Staff, Nicky Goren who will be taking over as Acting CEO tomorrow until the next President appoints a CEO. Nicky, thank you.

What that means is today is the last time I get to greet you on behalf of our national service family—our 75,000 AmeriCorps members, our 500,000 Senior Corps participants, and 1.4 million Learn & Serve America students!

Every day these people are tackling tough problems and proudly serving our country. It has been a huge honor to serve alongside them, represent them, and fight on their behalf during these last five years.

I am delighted to be back at Georgetown this morning. When I went to night school at the Law Center, I remember being surrounded by incredibly talented and motivated people. Given the length of time it took me to get my degree here, you probably would not count me among them!

But I do recall how the strong ethic of service was at Georgetown when I was here. And it has been a great thing, for the past two years, for me be to be able to award Georgetown University with a spot on the President's Higher Education Community Service Honor Roll.

You rank first in the nation for graduates becoming AmeriCorps members with Teach for America and for students joining the Peace Corps compared to other universities of your size.

With over 40 student service organizations on campus and every week, 1,400 students volunteering in the local community, you racked up 250,000 hours of service last year. These are incredible statistics—thank you!

The power of young people, especially college students, was on full display in a major way in last week's election.

Honestly, I wasn't all that surprised. During my five years at the Corporation, I have had the privilege of visiting many college campuses, and I have shared in the kind of extraordinary demonstrations of civic engagement by youth that I don't think America has witnessed since the 1960s.

I will tell you about a couple of those inspirational stories in a minute but first let me take a little step back and consider some of the challenges that make civic engagement, service, and volunteering more important today than they've been in many, many years.

First, the financial crisis. In addition to layoffs and bank failures, consumer spending is plummeting and home foreclosures are up. Most of us have watched our life savings become reduced by a third or a half. I am sure some of you may be wondering if you'll be able to get a job when you graduate, and I'm sure across the country many parents are wondering how they'll be able to pay their kids' college tuition with their home equity having vanished.

In our communities, nonprofits are bracing for precipitous drops in giving. Food costs have driven food bank supplies to their lowest levels in decades at the exact same time that the number of people who need those food banks are growing at the highest rate in decades.

Make no mistake, it is very possible that this economic downturn is going to do to our civic infrastructure what Hurricane Katrina did to the physical infrastructure in the Gulf coast.

All of this could be particularly catastrophic to America's children who are already far too at risk. Think of it this way, last year, before this economic decline, 13 million American children lived below the poverty line. Before the foreclosures increased and the jobless rates started northward, over 3 million of our kids went to bed hungry every night and nearly 800,000 American young people joined gangs every year. We started this crisis with 15 million children missing the presence of a caring adult in their lives, and we were looking at the 7 million children of prisoners facing a 70 percent likelihood of becoming incarcerated themselves.

But I believe the greatest challenge we face is restoring equity of opportunity and hope for our children. For me the numbers that tell the story about the deep challenges America's youth faces, are our graduation rates.

One-third of American children don't graduate from high school. Nationwide, nearly half of African-Americans do not graduate. In our 50 biggest cities the drop out rate across the board averages 50 percent. Here in Washington, just 58 percent graduate from high school. Up the road in Baltimore, tomorrow if you visited a kindergarten class that has maybe 21 children, you could look into those precious faces, so full of promise, and know that just seven of them will complete high school.

This is not just a crisis; in the words of Colin Powell, it is a catastrophe. And Colin Powell spoke those words in September, the week before we realized the gravity of the financial crisis.

That all feels very heavy, so let's switch gears for a moment. NOW I'll share some of those inspirational stories I promised about what I recently saw at some college campuses.

At Mesa Community College, in Mesa, Arizona, I got to meet the student volunteers who, as AmeriCorps members, accomplished something unheard of at a Mesa public school where 80 percent of the kids live below the poverty line. When the college students started volunteering, only nine percent of eighth graders at this public school passed the Arizona math achievement tests – or put another way, 91 percent failed. When I visited, seven years after the volunteering started, 100 percent of the children in eighth grade passed the exam. That an extraordinary accomplishment achieved by volunteers.

And listen to this story I learned during a visit to the University of Wisconsin.

In the late 1990s, African American students across the city of Madison were 6 times as likely as white students to fail third grade literacy tests. So about 36 percent of black students were illiterate in 3rd grade, compared to only 6 percent of white students. Enter 15 AmeriCorps VISTA members. These VISTAs recruited 600 volunteers – university students and citizens – to stand up and say “I care.” By the time I visited, in 2007, that performance gap was erased. Less than 3 percent of both black and white third-graders failed the literacy test.

In each of these cases, the school and district leadership attribute these turnarounds directly to the sustained volunteer work.

These stories and many others point out an opportunity for America to tackle these sobering economic and social challenges through what has always been our best asset: our citizens—anyone who is willing to stand up and say “I care.”

Think of how deeply this is engrained in our DNA as Americans. Think of the barn raisings where every member of the community joined in restoring what one farmer lost; think of the victory gardens of World War II; think of President Kennedy's call to ask what you can do for your country and how that still resonates today; think of the enduring legacy of our Peace Corps.

Or, more recently, think of the outpouring of service that we saw after 9/11 and the more than 1 million Americans who pitched in to restore homes and hope in the Gulf Coast after Hurricane Katrina.

The power of these stories, and the power of America's service tradition are increasingly being matched by the power of what we know through rigorous research.

Today, we know through rigorous research that when a citizen stands up, says “I care” and spends one hour a week for a year as a mentor for a child of a prisoner, that volunteer cuts in half the likelihood that that child will go to jail themselves.

Today we know, that when a person comes out of prison, with no job, no place to live and no connection to the community, that it is the person in the community, who stands up, says “I care” and provides volunteer support and becomes a connect point for that ex-convict to return successfully to society--that offers the best chances for that returning prisoner to succeed in building his or her future.

Today through rigorous research, we know that schools supported by a high level of community volunteering, regardless of the wealth or demographics of that school, are far more likely to have students that succeed and graduate than schools without that volunteer support.

And this new body of service-related research tells us something else. It tells us that people who volunteer are healthier and happier than people who don't.

For kids, research also tells us that service drives increases in academic achievement, increases in school attendance, and decreases in risky behavior.

Okay, I get that I'm preaching to the choir here – but what I'm trying to do is figure out the best argument that we can collectively use to make the strongest case that getting more people to stand up and say “I care” may offer the single most effective intervention we as Americans have to tackle some of our toughest and most intractable challenges.

Today the Corporation is announcing that we have awarded $3.5 million in grants to the America's Promise Alliance, America SCORES/Up 2 Us Coalition, and Communities in Schools. We're doing this so that these organizations can better engage volunteers and youth-support organizations in pushing back against the dropout crisis. And what if we went even further?

Imagine what could happen if the mayor of a city like Washington, or Baltimore decided that every family in that city who faces imminent foreclosure should receive professional level volunteer help either to avoid that foreclosure or to make it more bearable.

Or, let's imagine this. What if President-elect Obama-- in addition to whatever federal programs he puts in place--issues a challenge to Americans to serve? What if he tells Americans that the single greatest threat to America's future security, competiveness, and place in the world comes from the number of our youth who fail to graduate high school and calls for one million Americans to sign up and each invest one hour a week for a year to tutor or mentor a child who needs a caring adult in their lives. Do you think we could change the future of our country? I think we could.

What would it take in DC to have the equivalent of the 600 mentors that changed the lives of kids in Madison? What if our energetic and charismatic mayor who has made education a top priority and talented and entrepreneurial chancellor asked 2,500 folks a year to stand up, say “I care” and help ensure that every DC child is literate by the third grade?

If I've learned anything from the five years I've spent as part of America's national and community service family, it's that it's time for American political, policy, business and education leaders to stop thinking of volunteering as a nice way to engage people to help others, and instead place a crucial bet on the ability of American citizens to tackle and make progress against some of our really difficult challenges, challenges that are overwhelming our American families and swamping our communities.

And, I'll share something else. After five years working on these issues, I've never been more optimistic than I am right now that this kind of entrepreneurial and innovative use of civic power to drive social solutions is on its way.

For one thing, together with many in this room, we've done some amazing groundwork. Our millions of national service participants can tell you that their service is all about solving key challenges in the communities where they're living.

And let me report on some of the infrastructure that has been put in place by this Administration that will provide the foundation for the work ahead.

The Corporation for National and Community Service has never been stronger, more efficient, more accountable and better positioned than it is today.

Our State Service Commissions, appointed by the Governor of every state, have grown strong and strategic in setting each state's objectives for national and volunteer service; California and New York have both made the leadership of that Commission a cabinet position in their state governments. We believe that other states are following suit.

Five years of partnership with the U.S Census Bureau and significant investments and collaborations around research give us better insight than ever into the best practices for engagement, the connections between volunteering and civic and political engagement, the pipeline from volunteering to public service careers, and volunteering habits and preferences of Americans in every state and city.

We've done some amazing work in disaster response. From 9/11, to Katrina, to the Iowa floods, national service has become a beacon of hope and a powerful rebuilding tool – supporting, training and supervising over a third of the more than 1.1 million Americans who came to restore communities in the Gulf since Katrina.

We've got some very strong and professional staff. The results of the last government-wide personnel survey put the Corporation for the first time on the list of “Best Places to Work in Government.”

And, I'll tell you you'll find no team of more passionate, hard-working federal employees than those at the Corporation.

And something else: when you look at our portfolio of grantees, you will see immediately that national service today is supporting the best of the best, the most innovative and entrepreneurial organizations at work in America today.

Demand for these national service slots and competition to be in the national service portfolios has never been stronger.

And remember the partisan bickering over AmeriCorps in the 1990s? Contrast that to the 44-0 House Congressional committee vote in favor of the reauthorization of the Corporation last year and the bipartisan introduction of the Kennedy-Hatch legislation this year.

However, as much as I'd like to take credit for all of that, there are a couple of other factors that are driving America to embrace service as a solution. They are demographic changes, and they are powerful.

Baby boomers are today volunteering at rates that exceed volunteering among this age group over past decades by as much as 50 percent.

More importantly, this best educated, healthiest, wealthiest, and longest lived generation we've ever seen will conservatively double the number of older Americans volunteering within the next ten to twenty years.

And, as we chart our course toward becoming a Service Nation, if the Boomers are the wind in our sails, the millennial generation is nothing short of a turbo speedboat engine.

Today's young people are serving a twice the rate of the generation that went before them. In fact, young people—students just like you here at Georgetown——are driving change in ways we have not seen in decades.

Early reports from last week's election indicate that the youth vote was the second largest since the 1960s.

They're also driving many of the institutional changes we are seeing. Do you know why colleges today are more service oriented? Because students are demanding it.

Last year more college freshmen than ever reported that volunteering in the community is important to them.

So, what we're seeing – even in extremely tough economic times – is more universities engaging and supporting students in service, and more businesses supporting more employee volunteering, more community engagement, more philanthropy, more cause-oriented marketing and more elements of the green revolution.

And when we ask these universities and businesses why, do you know what they say? That's what we have to do to attract the best and the brightest.

And let me dispel a popular myth I've heard a few times recently –mostly from reporters --that young people do service to put it on their resume so that they can get access to a better school. The truth supported by research is this: youth don't volunteer so that they can do well in the college admissions process – college admissions include volunteering because youth value it.

Before I wrap this up, let me note a couple more important things about service and youth.

First, it's really important to understand that for a young person in disadvantaged circumstances, the only thing more useful than receiving needed services is to become the person providing needed service.

When young people serve others they develop greater self-confidence and an ability to trust people. They build the skills of teamwork, perseverance, and relationship management. They can envision themselves having a successful and productive future.

All of these are skills that every one of us needs to succeed later in life.

So, it's troubling that even as service and volunteering grow as a trend among all of our youth, the gap between advantaged youth who volunteer at very high levels

and youth from disadvantaged circumstances continues to expand.

And this is not at all about attitude or approach– research is very clear that youth from disadvantaged backgrounds are just as likely to say “yes” when asked to volunteer as youth with greater advantages – it's just that we don't ask them as often.

Let's resolve to change that, because as good as you are, it's not just those of you who go to college and are looking forward to bright futures who offer powerful assets for our nation. All of our youth are assets.

And that brings me to my close. I'm sure some of you have heard before that the Chinese word for “crisis” is written by connecting the characters for two other words. One word is “danger” – and the other word is “opportunity.”

America today is facing a series of crises that also represent for us a true opportunity to innovate in a way that bets on American citizens to be a part of the solutions in ways that are both new and that hearken back to our earliest traditions.

The drivers of this opportunity are these:

The need is dire.
Our resources are scarce.
Our service and volunteering infrastructure is ready.
Our youth are ready.
And Americans of all ages are waiting to be asked.

This is an incredible moment, and we must seize it.

Thank you.

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