President Sounds Call for Citizens to Volunteer

President Clinton launched a celebrity-packed three-day summit on volunteerism Sunday by announcing some small federal initiatives and emphasizing that in a time of tight budgets, the primary responsibility for solving the problems plaguing the nation’s youth lay within each American and not with big government.

In seeking to tap the goodwill of the American people, Clinton embraced a typically Republican private-sector approach to solving social problems at a time of public disillusionment with the Democrats’ tradition of resorting to the government.

“I’m here because I want to redefine the meaning of citizenship in America,” Clinton said during a rally of several thousand people at a stadium in a blighted, graffiti-ridden neighborhood in the City of Brotherly Love.

“If you’re asked in school, ‘What does it mean to be a good citizen?’ I want the answer to be: ‘ . . . you have to obey the law, you’ve got to go to work or be in school, you’ve got to pay your taxes and--oh, yes--you have to serve your community to make it a better place.”

Community activists at the event, as well as many policy analysts and experienced charity organizers, warned, however, that while developing a massive corps of volunteers is an important part of addressing social problems of the nation’s youth, volunteers alone could not do the job.

Under bright sunny skies at the stadium, the president, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton, Vice President Al Gore and his wife, Tipper, helped paint over black, green and red graffiti--including the names of local gangs--with tan paint.

But Quran Fulton, a 16-year-old who was painting with the first and second couples, gave the president a pessimistic assessment of their cleanup efforts’ staying power.

“This neighborhood’s been real bad: graffiti, drugs, robbery, everything,” Fulton said. The graffiti is “going to be back in less than a month, I would say.”

Clinton was joined at the summit by a number of dignitaries, including former Presidents George Bush, Jimmy Carter and Gerald R. Ford. Ailing former President Ronald Reagan was represented by his wife, Nancy.

Retired Gen. Colin L. Powell, celebrities such as Oprah Winfrey and community activists from all 50 states also pitched in.

The five stated goals of the summit were to provide children who live in communities such as North Philadelphia with safe places to learn and grow, ongoing relationships with adult mentors, healthy starts to their lives, marketable skills through education and a chance to repay society by participating in community service themselves.

But some participants worried that the seriousness of the problems would be lost in the summit hoopla.

Jeremy Rifkin, a social activist and member of the steering committee for the summit, argued in a letter to Powell that with 21% of American children living below the poverty line, there was an urgent need to address the economic devastation of the communities where they live.

“This urgency is compounded by the recent welfare legislation which puts millions of additional youngsters in harm’s way, while placing an increasing burden on community organizations to find solutions . . . to avert what could become a social crisis,” Rifkin wrote.

In his speech, the president announced that federal agencies would provide an example for the rest of the country by beefing up existing mentoring and tutoring programs and creating new ones, which altogether would help about 1 million more children than at present, according to Bruce Reed, head of the president’s domestic policy council.

The most provocative of Clinton’s mini-initiatives was a proposal to urge college graduates to spend a year or two providing community service through religious organizations or other tax-exempt groups or teaching in low-income areas. The government would pay the interest on their student loans while they served.

The program, which would cost $7 million over five years and draw an estimated 12,000 participants, would primarily benefit middle- and upper-middle-income families because it would apply only to loans without federal subsidies. Lower-income students receiving subsidized loans already qualify for similar benefits.

The program stands in marked contrast to the national service program Clinton pushed through Congress in 1993. Americorps, which is criticized by Republicans as an old-style big-government program, has provided 50,000 participants with a living wage and a stipend of $4,725 per year of service--doing jobs ranging from teaching children to cleaning blighted areas--to use toward education or training.

By announcing the new proposals, Clinton was trying to distinguish his vision from that of Powell, the general chairman of the summit. Like Americorps, Clinton’s initiative stresses the need for Americans willing to engage in full-time community service and promotes government investment in these individuals in exchange for their efforts.

Powell, by contrast, stressed the traditional Republican notion of voluntary service along the lines of the Points of Light Foundation, which Bush started to provide small amounts for innovative volunteer projects.

“This is not the time to ask, ‘Is there more that government should be doing or less that government should be doing?’ ” Powell said during the morning rally. “This is the time for each and every one of us to look into our own heart, to look into our own community, find someone who is in need . . . and to lift up a fellow American and put him on the road to success in this wonderful country of ours.”

Some of Clinton’s soul mates complained that Powell’s perspective was gaining the upper hand.

“One sub-theme being pushed here is that there are so many people willing to do volunteering on their own to address social problems that we don’t need the public sector any more, but that misses the whole point,” said Ed Kilgore, political director of the Democratic Leadership Council, the relatively conservative organization where Clinton has his ideological roots.

“It’s not enough,” he said. “As citizens we have a responsibility not only for private acts of charity but also of coming together and using our collective will to solve problems.”

Helena Broitman, a paid staff member of a nonprofit organization called Woodrock, said that while the summit was a good way to encourage people to volunteer, at-risk children needed the reliability of formal organizations such as hers to offer alternatives to the dangerous streets.

“When it comes to really providing consistent after-school and weekend activities, it’s more than volunteers can handle,” said Broitman, whose organization provides such activities for children in another rough neighborhood of Philadelphia. Federal, state and local funds cover more than half of the $500,000 budget for Woodrock, which serves about 700 children.

The money is well spent, according to Celina Sanderlin, 14, and her classmates.

“It gives us a safe place to go where we can think about our futures,” Celina said. “They talk to us about colleges and even took us to a college. I wasn’t even thinking about college before they talked to us about it.”

Henry G. Cisneros, Clinton’s first secretary of Housing and Urban Development and the vice chairman of the summit, cautioned that it was unlikely many middle-class volunteers would travel to blighted urban areas to engage in regular community service.

“That’s a hard thing to do in American society today because of the segregated way we live,” Cisneros said. “But there are people who live there, and those people need to be engaged as well.”

Edward Jones, 51, who lives in the low-income neighborhood where the rally was held, is stepping up to the challenge. Retired from his city job fixing street lights, Jones spends much of his time working with volunteer groups that offer alternatives to gang life.

“We’ve helped some youngsters get off the streets by turning them into athletes,” said Jones, a former gang member who said he straightened out while in the Marine Corps in the 1960s. “We give them all the help we can--we listen to them, talk about their problems and try to solve them. Most of them don’t have fathers, so we sometimes go to school . . . and try to act like father figures.”

“I have fun doing it,” Jones said. “I love kids. It doesn’t take much to reach down to a child.”

* GOVERNOR AS MENTOR: Pete Wilson hopes to be an example to boys, and adults. A3