‘City Year’ May Offer Model for Clinton Youth Service Program : Initiatives: Putting young adults to work at community tasks is among President-elect’s priorities. Boston experience may provide the blueprint.

Raised in the gang-ridden streets of Boston’s Roxbury ghetto, Andre Berry had just finished six months in a prison for youthful offenders when his family decided to seek a way to keep him out of more trouble.

A few miles but a cultural world away from Roxbury, Lila Moran, a principal’s daughter who grew up in the sheltered environment of suburban Brookline, wanted to take a break after receiving her high school diploma and earn some money for college.

For both Andre and Lila, the answer turned out to be a stint in City Year, a widely acclaimed urban service program that has made diversity its hallmark. For nine months, they worked as teacher’s aides in schools in rough neighborhoods much like Andre’s Roxbury.

By recruiting young people from leafy suburbs as well as inner-city slums, City Year has emerged as a potential model for the national service program President-elect Bill Clinton has put near the top of his domestic agenda.

Senior advisers say Clinton has decided to include national service on a short list of four key initiatives he will roll out during his first 100 days in office, putting it on the same accelerated timetable as economic, health care and government reform.

And as his advisers survey existing programs across the country to find out what works and why, their gaze increasingly returns to City Year.

“It’s like the vision of national service incarnate,” raves Roger Landrum, head of Youth Service America, which is seeking to rally public support for the national service idea. “It’s the top of the line.”

Like other urban youth programs, City Year attempts to put young people to work at useful community tasks in schools, nursing homes and the like, and rewards them with an end-of-service stipend. But the program’s success in cutting across race, class and economic lines is what sets it apart and draws national attention to Boston.

Clinton himself made a campaign stop at City Year last year for a 90-minute round-table discussion with the volunteers and staff. Since the election, his top advisers on national service have beaten a path to its second-floor walk-up headquarters in an old warehouse in Boston’s down-at-the-heels wharf district.

They clearly like what they see. On one day earlier this month, volunteers in City Year’s community building division were painting, weeding and seeding as part of a drive to spruce up Boston’s Chelsea neighborhood. Members of its housing team were distributing fresh produce and bread contributed by a local supermarket. Environmental division volunteers were creating a “climbing tree” at the Franklin Park Zoo, while members of the youth leadership division were deployed around town running after-school programs.

City Year’s appeal reflects a combination of high-minded idealism and practical politics.

“These City Year kids told me that when when they first enlisted in this program, the blacks stood in one corner and the whites in another,” says Al From, chief domestic policy adviser for the Clinton transition. “After two or three days, they were working together in teams. That’s how you build bonds of community and the civic ethic in this country.”

In more pragmatic terms, fashioning a national service program that reaches out to the offspring of the middle class as well as to the disadvantaged would help Clinton keep his oft-repeated campaign promise to be a “different kind of Democrat.”

It also would help him build a broad base of electoral support for the idea of national service. “Basically, the more universal impact a program has, the more public support it generates,” says Democratic pollster Mark Mellman. “That’s why Social Security is a lot more popular than welfare.”

Potentially, at least, Clinton’s plan for adapting the GI Bill concept to civilian life by allowing young people to pay off college loans with money earned through community service appears to have sweeping appeal. It was a standard item in his campaign stump speech, and one of his surest applause lines.

In fashioning their initiative, Clinton’s advisers can draw on the experience of about 75 existing programs that provide service jobs for about 17,500 participants across the country. The largest is the California Conservation Corps, whose 3,600 volunteers clear trails, plant trees and maintain forest properties.

The Los Angeles Conservation Corps, with about 110 full-time participants and 200 part-time junior high students, focuses on neighborhood beautification, tree planting and recycling projects.

Within the Clinton transition team, the order of the day is full speed ahead.

“We’re going to have a national service plan on Capitol Hill by January,” says Clinton adviser From, “and I’m sure shooting to have something ready by Jan. 20,” the day Clinton will take the oath of office.

Here are the major problems Clinton’s advisers are grappling with as they design their service initiative:

Money: It will cost the government an estimated $20,000 a year for each volunteer to cover living expenses, administrative costs and a $10,000 incentive bonus. “One of the biggest obstacles we have to deal with on national service, and on everything else, are limits on budget,” acknowledges From.

Federal outlays could be reduced by assigning volunteers to existing organizations willing to pick up some of their expenses. Another source of savings could come from reduced levels of defaults and interest subsidies connected with the student loan fund, which Clinton ultimately wants to replace with the National Service Trust Fund. The defaults and subsidies currently cost roughly $6 billion a year.

From envisages a program that initially costs about $1 billion a year for 50,000 volunteers, rising to $2 billion for 100,000 volunteers after four years.

Timing: Clinton’s stump speeches seemed to imply that volunteers would pay off their college loans with money earned in service after graduation. But many of his advisers believe that young people should be encouraged to perform their service prior to college.

“This would follow the GI Bill principle of service first, education later,” says Charles Moskos, a Northwestern University authority on national service who has been involved in the Clinton transition planning discussions.

Rep. Dave McCurdy (D-Okla.) argues that volunteers would be better off doing their service stint first. “Many educators say young people are just not prepared for college work in a meaningful way when they first get out of high school,” he says. The argument for post-college service is that the pool of volunteers would be more skilled and able to perform more significant work. On the other hand, they probably would expect greater compensation.

The betting right now among Clinton advisers is that the final plan will offer both options.

Benefits: In his campaign trail comments, Clinton cited only benefits that could be used for college. But many national service advocates believe the program should be expanded to help cover such things as down payments on homes or tuition for job-training courses.

The argument for broader benefits is that they would attract low-income youth to national service and make for a more inclusive program.

“The foundation of the nation has to be people of all different incomes and backgrounds getting along, and this would give young people experience doing that,” says Toni Schmiegelow, executive director of New York’s 675-member City Volunteer Corps. Her organization offers volunteers a choice of $5,000 in scholarship funds or $2,500 in cash; about three in four take the money.

The case against non-college benefits, says one transition planner, “is that you would be giving poor kids another incentive for not continuing their education.” Transition advisers expect this argument won’t be settled until it gets to Clinton’s desk.

Work: Proponents of national service want to make sure volunteers take on significant jobs, not make-work tasks. “To win broad public backing, voluntary service must meet the needs of society first,” asserts Mandate for Change, a policy manifesto released this month by the Progressive Policy Institute, a centrist think tank that has been a longtime advocate of national service.

Some critics think this will be a tough standard to meet. “What are some 100,000 young people going to do?” jeers Douglas Bandow, an analyst at the libertarian Cato Institute. “It’s clear they can’t do the most important things that need to be done because you would have job displacement, which means labor unions get mad at you.”

Clinton aides concede that opposition from public-service unions is a potential obstacle. But they argue that Clinton, who enjoyed good relations with unions during the campaign, can avoid such problems.

Whatever disagreements they may have on such issues, Clinton’s advisers are in accord on the need to create a program that will avoid the traditional pitfalls of federal bureaucracy. Diversity, flexibility and decentralization seem to be the watchwords in their planning.

The federal government would set national standards and rules for service, but From wants the program to be administered at the local level. Clinton advisers say their hope is to build as much as possible on the foundation already laid by local organizations such as City Year.

Volunteers for national service could join these existing groups, and others that are likely to spring up in coming months in cities around the country, or they could be placed directly in city and state social agencies under the national service aegis.

For City Year’s leaders, this guiding philosophy presents an opportunity to expand their program here in Boston and to encourage imitators elsewhere, a phenomenon for which they have long been waiting.

City Year was founded in 1988 by Harvard Law school graduate Michael Brown. Too impatient to deal with think tanks, Brown says he wanted to create an “action tank” that would blaze new trails in the national service field.

“A lot of theory on national service has always been that if you could bring together people from different backgrounds, that national service would be a way to unite the nation,” says Brown. “Testing that idea was the No. 1 strategic breakthrough we wanted to make.”

City Year was well-positioned to carry out that test. In the beginning, it was supported entirely by private-sector funds, in contrast with other urban youth groups that rely heavily on federal funds and therefore must focus their efforts on low-income youth.

In Brown’s view, cutting across racial, social and economic differences in a service organization is an extension of the civil rights movement. “The civil rights movement ended discrimination within the law, but not within the heart,” he says. For that task, Brown says, “we need more opportunity to work together as equals.”

Diversity pays off on the job, too, Brown claims. “One of the aspects of being diverse,” he says, “is that we draw on all aspects of society and show that a common solution to problems is possible.”

City Year volunteers back up that assertion with testimony from their on-the-job experiences.

“I think diversity is always better,” says Roxbury’s Andre Berry, recalling his assignment as a teacher’s aide helping to teach violence prevention in a school about as tough as the one he attended. “One of the main reasons I got my point across to those kids was I could understand where they were coming from. I’d been there myself.”

In addition, Berry says he learned some things from his exposure to City Year co-workers from upscale environments. “I thought violence was part of everybody’s life,” he says. “But there were kids on my team who had never even been in a fight.”

Similarly, Lila Moran from suburban Brookline found that work alongside City Year comrades with inner-city backgrounds helped her get along with the young urban students she was teaching.

“I didn’t grow up in the inner city, and so there are some things I can’t understand right away,” she says. “But I’m learning, and I’m opening my eyes to a lot of things I never saw before.”

BACKGROUND

President-elect Bill Clinton’s concept of national service is often compared to the GI Bill enacted after World War II, but its origins go back even further to the Civilian Conservation Corps established during the 1930s. While the CCC’s mandate was to convert marginal farmland into forests, President Franklin D. Roosevelt cited a loftier rationale: “More important than material gains will be the moral and spiritual value of such work.” The CCC was shut down in 1942, but the spirit of service was revived with President John F. Kennedy’s Peace Corps, success of which led to establishment of VISTA--Volunteers in Service to America--as part of President Lyndon B. Johnson’s War On Poverty.