- As Delivered -

Ladies and gentlemen, the volunteer sector is on a roll.

Volunteering is at a 30-year high.

The volunteer rate among Baby Boomers is the highest it has been in a generation.

We’re seeing older teens volunteer twice as much as they did in the 70s, 80s, and 90s.

College student volunteering is up 20 percent.

Our Martin Luther King Day of Service, that so many of you participated in, has achieved record growth.

Almost two years after Katrina, volunteers continue to provide life saving help that has transformed America’s understanding of the role of volunteers after a natural disaster.

And there’s more. We’re seeing greater bipartisan support than ever. Virtually every presidential candidate has declared their intent to strengthen national service.

In fact, the Corporation is on a path to being reauthorized—where Congress affirms their support for national service and volunteering-- for the first time since 1994.

I believe that there is an important teaching that’s emerging from all these exciting developments. It’s that service and volunteering is moving beyond something that’s just nice to do and is increasingly being perceived as something that is necessary for society to solve intractable problems.

I hope you all agree that nurturing this transformation from nice to necessary is essential for our country and that much of our energy needs to go to moving that needle.

So what do we need to do to move that needle from nice to necessary? That is what I want to talk to you about this morning:

First, I want to discuss why we need to set meaningful and necessary goals.

Second, I want to explore how all of us need to do a better job connecting the dots and collaborating more strategically.

Third, I want to talk about how we need to demand more of ourselves than we have in the past.

So, when we talk about goals, it’s time to go after the big ones--the goals that are crying out for action.

We’ve got 13 million children living in poverty.

We’ve got 650,000 prisoners released from prison every year -- landing on the front doorsteps of our communities with no jobs, no place to live, and no connections to our community.

As you heard from Alma Powell earlier, 15 million children need a caring adult in their lives and have none.

Nearly 800,000 young people are in gangs.

And 10 million children have one or more of their parents in prison. And here’s the rub: without intervention, 70 percent of them are likely to end up incarcerated unless we find an appropriate way to intervene.

So what does that have to do with volunteers?

We know that the most effective intervention in a troubled child’s life is a caring adult spending time with them one on one….a mentor.

Today we know the best way to keep a child of a prisoner from ending up in jail themselves is to pair them with a mentor at least an hour a week.

We know, in fact, that one of the best ways to help a child read and graduate from high school is to provide volunteer tutors.

Let’s look at one example that I have been fortunate enough to see in Madison, Wisconsin. In the late 1990s, African American students were 6 times as likely as white students to fail third grade literacy tests. It was 500 volunteer tutors led by 15 VISTA members over several years who virtually erased that performance gap. Without these volunteers, 30% of Madison’s African American students faced bleak futures. The volunteers’ contributions were more than just nice. They changed these children’s lives.

And our recent report on city volunteering –that was on your chair when you came in—demonstrates it in much broader research that cities with higher volunteer rates are safer, healthier, and better places to live.

There’s a common thread here. Citizen engagement is increasingly acknowledged to be the single most powerful intervention in solving our communities’ toughest challenges.

All of this brings me to my second point—we can’t actually capture the full power of civic engagement in our communities, and we can’t make progress against the daunting challenges that I’ve been talking about, unless we do a better job working together, connecting the dots and harnessing what we’re calling here in Philadelphia the “Power of We. “

To make the point that we ALL have work to do, I’ll use an example from my own world of national service.

I find it unacceptable that high school students who go through our Learn and Serve America program and do service-learning don’t all know that at 18 they can apply to be AmeriCorps members, serve their nation, and earn a scholarship for college.

All of us should find it unacceptable when we plan volunteer activities and don’t engage our local volunteer centers.

Here’s an interesting fact: the largest contributors of volunteers in this country are our faith-based organizations. And, 85 percent of organizations who rely on volunteers have zero relationships with faith based groups.

It’s up to all of us here in this room to connect the dots.

Doing better than before means we also have to be better about working together, and that brings me to my third point.

We all have to do a better job of demanding more of ourselves.

Imagine an entrepreneur. He or she knows that in order to sell their product, they have to know their customer base. We must do no less.

Across this audience, how many of you know the exact percentage of volunteers in your community who prefer mentoring as their activity of choice? Or prefer to provide transportation? Or what percentage prefers to prepare food?

If we are in the business of reaching out to volunteers we have to know our customers— organizations including the Corporation are investing millions to bring this research to you. We all need to know it.

Beyond our current customer base, we’ve also got to expand our efforts to go where the growth is and seek out Boomers, teenagers, and college students and connect them to volunteer opportunities right for THEM.

Many Boomers are looking for volunteer positions that use their professional skills and that show results.

Better understanding what Boomers want is the philosophy behind an announcement we are making today that I’m particularly excited about.

We are launching a new partnership between our Senior Corps programs with their 500,000 volunteers, and Volunteer Match, a leading search engine. The new “Get Involved” Web site will greatly enhance the ability of Boomers to connect with appropriate opportunities to serve.

America’s teens are ready to serve.

By engaging youth in projects they enjoy—particularly those from disadvantaged circumstances-- we can increase the likelihood that they will go to college and succeed in life.

To recruit more youth to serve, this year we launched an initiative called Summer of Service--and it’s going great. In the coming weeks we will be announcing grant funds that will be available to develop Summer of Service projects for 2008.

College students can often serve as wonderful role models for youth. They tutor and mentor and help kids get on the path to college.

You should stay tuned because at the Corporation in the next few months, we will be announcing an exciting and innovative way to engage college students to lead in their communities.

And at the same time all of us need to keep in mind that recruiting volunteers is only half of the story – keeping them is at least as important

The reality today is that 1 in 3 volunteers who served in 2005 did not come back to serve in 2006. That means we have a retention problem, or what I like to call…. a leaky bucket.

Unfortunately it’s not hard to see where the leaks come from. I have seen many non-profits assign the president to manage a $1 million gift, but assign the intern or a busy receptionist to oversee volunteers whose service could be worth 5 times as much. This is a mistake.

Investing in volunteer recruitment, management, and retention can yield vital long term benefits.

That’s at the heart of this conference—strengthening the volunteer sector so volunteers will keep coming back. Beginning in just a few minutes, you’ll be hearing announcements about some changes, some funding opportunities, and some strategies that will help all of us get stronger in these areas.

I hope that over the next few days we will all keep in mind that we are not the first in this city to dream about the necessary tasks it takes to build a democracy, but I also hope we take seriously that we are the ones who are tasked with the job today.

An Australian aborigine, referring to the charitable agencies that travel there once wrote: 'if you've come to help me, go away. If you've come as part of your own struggle for survival, well, then, maybe we can work together.'

My friends, we know that if our communities are to thrive, we must continue to grow and strengthen the engagement of our citizens. This is ultimately what it means to move from nice to necessary.

Together, we can do incredible things. It's my honor to work alongside you. Thank you.

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