So much is happening on the political front. So many taken for granted issues are now featuring in our conversations about the future. Let us add another key topic to the conversation, service, and its role in prospering the nation.
History might mislead if one traces the official account that says that the idea of national service arose in the years of FDR battling the depression and “putting the nation back to work” with the Civilian Conservation Corps and the Workers Progress Association. That is true but that is not where it began. Not by a long shot.
One only has to think about a young, ambitious and restless nation, moving ever westwards, into indigenous territories and terrains, trying to survive. Their only resources were themselves and their ingenuity. There are rightfully many controversies over their sometimes violent means, but service was the only way they survived.
Unless citizens learned to band together to support each other in churches and clubs, unions and fraternities, they knew they could not eat or meet, farm or harvest, educate their kids, or populate a future. The more spectacular projects of railways, factories and telephones, or the mythical wild wild west tend to soak up the dramatic energy that Hollywood so loves.
But firefighters were voluntary. The abolitionist movement was voluntary and nursing was voluntary. Anyone who cared about a local issue and wanted change didn’t have a lobby group or a professional association. They just posted a notice on a post calling for a public meeting- the original post office. Service was not a commitment of your leisure time so much as dedicating part of your own work time to the communal work that benefitted everyone. Service was not volunteering. It was the local conscription demanded by the common good.
When the French writer De Tocqueville travelled across the young republic in 1831, this tendency of Americans to join associations stood out for him. He wrote:
“Americans of all ages constantly unite. Not only do they have commercial and industrial associations, in which all take part, but they also have a thousand other kinds: religious, moral, grave, futile, very general and very particular, immense and very small.”
In our turbulent times, it would be sad if “Service” was called into question, or came to be just another political controversy. When President Clinton passed the National and Community Trust Act in 1993, he knew he was not inventing something new. He saw an opportunity to build a win-win, public-private partnership that could expand service, so that more people could serve more people. In a time of war, the nation calls its fittest and finest to fight. In peace, it calls its fittest and finest to serve the community.
Perhaps the military overtones start to sound a little off or antiquated, but the idea remains as relevant as ever. The community that learns to help itself is the community that empowers itself. It develops its own leaders. It knows that it does not have to wait for some outside government expert to tell them what to do. It is Emerson’s gospel of “self-reliance” at the local level.
Local needs are usually best met at local levels, or what is known as the Principle of Subsidiarity. Project CHANGE exemplifies that principle, being a program started by Montgomery County MD, staffed and funded by local partners, recruiting local members educated in the county to serve the neediest students of the county. It is a win-win for everyone, with many graduating members being hired by the schools and non profits in which they served. It ensures that the local talent is retained and every member of Montgomery County has a path to service.
In AmeriCorps week, we celebrate Project CHANGE and its 18 members. We celebrate the 500 or more alumni who have served Montgomery County MD since 2001 with almost half a million hours. We salute the members, past, present and emerging, who will remind us again and again, that no nation can thrive without calling forth the talents of all. That is not controversial.
We know we can measure the health of the economy with S&P figures and Dow Jones, but the service economy is about people, not dollars. It creates resources and delivers results that are beyond measure.
Service created this great nation. It is high time that service created it again.