National service will be America at its best -- building community, offering opportunity and rewarding responsibility. National service is a challenge for Americans from every background and walk of life, and it values something far more than money. National service is nothing less than the American way to change America.

-- President Bill Clinton, March 1, 1993         

With these words, President Clinton launched AmeriCorps and the Corporation for National Service, starting a new chapter in the long tradition of citizen service in America. Since 1993, millions of Americans have served in national service programs, bringing about lasting improvements in our communities and demonstrating that service can be an effective strategy for solving problems.

Recognizing that our strength as a nation depends on individuals who act on their commitment to help others, national service provides opportunities for all citizens to do their part. More and more Americans are taking advantage of those opportunities by tutoring and mentoring children, making neighborhoods safer, helping communities recover from natural disasters, building Habitat for Humanity homes, restoring parks and doing hundreds of other things to improve lives and bring people together.

Tapping the power of citizens to get things done will be even more important as we enter a new century full of challenges. No longer will we look to government to solve most of our problems. But just because government is being reduced, it doesn't mean our problems are going away. Indeed many of these problems from crime and drugs to illiteracy and homelessness are mounting.

To meet these challenges, we need to unleash the greatest power our country has -- the energy and idealism of our people. If big government is not the answer, then we need big citizens, who can act on the problems that are mounting in our midst. This must be our aim to crack the atom of civic power, and release it to solve our most pressing problems.

The Corporation for National Service through its programs Learn & Serve America, the Senior Corps and AmeriCorps -- is working with thousands of nonprofit partners to strengthen the voluntary sector and unleash citizen power. Our aim is to make service a rite of passage for every young person, a routine part of life for Americans of every age.

The American Tradition of Service

Of course, citizen service is not a new idea in this country. Traveling across America in the 1830s, Alexis de Tocqueville observed that Americans did not wait for the government to act to solve a problem. If a school needed to be built, they built it. Tocqueville marveled at how Americans were constantly forming groups to meet common goals, and to this day, no country in the world has such a vast network of clubs, church and civic groups, and neighborhood organizations.

In this century, each new generation of Americans has risen to the challenge of service. In the Great Depression, four million young people joined the Civilian Conservation Corps, planting trees, restoring parks, and building roads, bridges and trails that we still enjoy today. In the 1940s, the GI Bill linked service with educational opportunity for the first time when a grateful nation rewarded its returning World War II veterans with funding for education.

For the next generation, the call to service came from President John F. Kennedy, who launched the Peace Corps in 1961. "Ask not what your country can do for you," President Kennedy declared. "Ask what you can do for your country." Since then, more than 140,000 Peace Corps volunteers have traveled to the poorest corners of the globe, building schools, helping farmers, treating the sick and building a global community.

The 1960s also saw the birth of Volunteers in Service to America, or VISTA. For more than 30 years, VISTA has helped low-income communities help themselves. Along with VISTA, a diverse array of service programs began to grow up from the grassroots: conservation corps, urban youth corps and service opportunities generated by high schools and colleges, businesses, churches and civic organizations.

The newest offspring in the service movement is AmeriCorps, created by Congress and President Clinton in 1993. AmeriCorps was built on the foundation of the first National Service Act, passed by President George Bush in 1990.

Since 1993, nearly 100,000 young people have served in AmeriCorps, helping solve problems in education, public safety, the environment and human needs. This year alone more than 40,000 AmeriCorps members will serve in more than 1,200 communities. In return for a year of full-time service, AmeriCorps members earn a living allowance and $4,725 to pay for college or pay back student loans.

A Focus on Results

AmeriCorps' motto is "getting things done," and that focus on results has paid off in many tangible ways. In one year, AmeriCorps members taught or tutored 500,000 students, mentored 95,000 more, recruited 39,000 new volunteers, immunized 64,000 children, helped with disasters in over 30 states, worked with more than 3,000 safety patrols, and with local law enforcement and civilian groups, trained 100,000 people in violence prevention, built or rehabilitated 5,600 homes, helped put 32,000 homeless people in permanent residences, worked with people with AIDS and other serious diseases, and carried out a wide range of environmental projects.

A key part of the AmeriCorps' story is how full-time service expands traditional volunteering. America's largest volunteer organizations including Big Brothers/Big Sisters, United Way, the YMCA and the American Red Cross engage and utilize AmeriCorps members. They have seen how full-time AmeriCorps members help them accomplish more, recruit more volunteers and use volunteers more effectively. Studies have found that every AmeriCorps member on average will generate an additional 12 community volunteers.

AmeriCorps members feel deep pride about being involved in their communities and solving problems they didn't know they could solve. Ask Michelle Harvey, whose AmeriCorps team in Kansas City helped close 44 crack houses and keep her neighborhood free from drug dealers. Or Sean Whitten, who used his AmeriCorps training to rescue a young woman who was lost for two days in the freezing cold mountains of Tennessee.

AmeriCorps is just one part of a larger family of programs overseen by the Corporation for National Service. That family includes more than 450,000 older American volunteers serving in the three programs of the Senior Corps Foster Grandparents, Senior Companions and RSVP. America has the largest, fastest-growing, best-educated group of seniors in our history. We must do far more to realize the potential of over 50 million seniors, who bring to service a lifetime of skills and experience as parents, workers and citizens.

The other great pool of talent just waiting to be tapped is the 50 million young people in our schools, colleges and universities. Through Learn & Serve America, we're providing opportunities to nearly one million students from kindergarten through college to meet community needs while improving their academic skills and learning the habits of good citizenship. This program helps teachers integrate community service into the curriculum, a teaching method known as service learning. By serving, students develop teamwork, self-discipline and initiative skills to help them become more productive workers and more responsible citizens.

National service in all its forms is helping meet a key national education goal. In the America Reads initiative, President Clinton challenged schools and communities to see that every American child reads by the end of the third grade. The president called for a citizen army of volunteer tutors to work in local afterschool or in-school literacy programs to give extra help eeded by millions of children who are falling behind in their reading skills. He asked for additional AmeriCorps members and senior and college student volunteers to organize or expand tutoring programs and to provide direct tutoring. Congress has provided significant new funds for this expansion.

Help for Children

Nowhere is America's volunteer energy more needed than in the caring and guiding and educating of our young. Young people today are exposed to risks that were unknown to our parents and grandparents, from AIDS to easy access to guns and drugs. One of four children are victims of assault or abuse. One in five lives below the poverty line. While overall crime rates are down, crime by juveniles is up -- especially violent crime.

Mobilizing volunteers and other sectors of society to help America's children succeed was the key idea behind the Presidents' Summit for America's Future, held in Philadelphia in April 1997. With the leadership of President Clinton and former President Bush, other former Presidents, General Colin Powell, 37 governors and top leaders from business, government and the nonprofit sector, the Summit called for a new era of citizen action in America to turn the tide for millions of children heading for disaster.

The campaign launched in Philadelphia America's Promise, the Alliance for Youth is now underway, led by General Powell and backed by all the former living presidents. America's Promise aims to provide to every young person in the United States the five resources they need for success: a caring adult (a mentor, a tutor, a coach); safe places to learn and grow; a healthy start; an effective education that assures the ability to read and provides marketable skills; and an opportunity for all young people to give back and themselves to serve.

The Corporation for National Service was proud to initiate and cosponsor the Summit in partnership with the Points of Light Foundation, and will continue to be in the forefront of this national campaign. Since the Summit, the Corporation has added nearly 9,000 new AmeriCorps members sponsored by community and faith-based organizations, helped recruit 1,000 colleges and universities to send work-study students to tutor elementary students, and launched Seniors in Schools with 700 senior volunteers in nine cities.

In addition to serving youth better, the Summit also launched a strategy to engage more young people themselves in service. Martin Luther King, Jr., said, "Everybody can be great because everybody can serve." Young people need to be challenged and inspired to discover and realize that greatness. All young Americans should have a chance to see themselves and be seen as leaders and resources, not as problems or victims.

Former Michigan Governor George Romney, who had the dream of this Summit and worked until his death to make it happen, once said there is no free lunch when it comes to volunteering. It requires organization, time and resources from every sector public, private and nonprofit. Just as we invest in roads and bridges to keep our economy strong, so must we invest in service and volunteering to keep our democracy strong. Healthy communities depend on informed, active citizens.

The secret heart of America and the secret to our success has always been our belief that we can change things, we can make things better, that working together we can solve our most difficult problems. As we enter a new century and a new era of limited government, that idea and how we put it into practice will be more important than ever.

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Harris Wofford, a former U.S. Senator from Pennsylvania, is chief executive officer of the Corporation for National Service.