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Cover Story
Harris Wofford’s back, this time trying to save the darling program of the Peace Corps/Vista set. Can he succeed? Should he?
It is only by coincidence that the man on the phone, who is talking in measured yet excited tones about what President Kennedy asked him to do for his country 34 years ago, happens to play a small but important role in a book I am reading.
The man on the phone is ex-U.S. Senator Harris Wofford. The book, President Kennedy, is the 1993 biography by Richard Reeves.
Wofford is talking to me about what he was doing on March 1, 1961.
On that day, Kennedy cabled the U.S. Embassy in Vietnam to let the ambassador know that Vietnam’s defense ranked among the highest priorities in U.S. foreign policy. But, more germane to Wofford, it was also the day Kennedy signed an executive order creating the Peace Corps.
Kennedy asked Wofford, a Notre Dame law professor and his civil rights advisor, to co-found the Peace Corps with Sargent Shriver, Kennedy’s brother-in-law.
“They will live at the same level as the citizens of the countries which they are sent to,” read the executive order, “doing the same work, eating the same food, speaking the same language.”
Wofford is telling me about how exciting it was to help create the ideal of young men and women helping poor nations develop.
Then, abruptly, he switches gears, turning the conversation to the present and to a call from Bill Clinton, another president asking for Wofford’s assistance with another idealistic government program.
This time, says Wofford, the cause is called AmeriCorps. Like the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps is designed to give Americans, mostly 20somethings, a chance to help their country through paid volunteerism, in this case a small stipend and college tuition.
Only in this case, it isn’t a matter of Americans going overseas. It is a matter of Americans helping Americans at home.
“AmeriCorps is a very successful program,” Wofford says about one of Clinton’s best, if relatively unknown and poorly understood, domestic policy decisions. “All across this country, communities are being helped out by the men and women of AmeriCorps.”
About 20,000 AmeriCorps members, lured by a number of attractions from the call to national service to a $4,200 college tuition voucher, are working for the Department of Justice, schools and non-profit agencies like the Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity in 350 communities nationwide.
In Philadelphia, more than 200 AmeriCorps members have spent the last year rebuilding neighborhoods, teaching parents how to teach their children to read, and helping North Philly residents establish safe corridors around their schools.
But, unlike the Peace Corps, AmeriCorps is in trouble.
Earlier this year, the House of Representatives voted to cut 72 percent out of AmeriCorps’ half-billion FY 1995 budget — effectively decimating the corporation. The money was only restored because Clinton vetoed the Congressional “rescission” bill that cut billions out of the federal budget.
Now AmeriCorps is under attack again, this time in the Senate, where Iowa Republican Charles Grassley is leading the charge to kill the concept of national service. Grassley is charging that AmeriCorps is too expensive, and besides, shouldn’t volunteerism be done by volunteers?
Last month, with congress slated to revisit the issue of AmeriCorps funding as it begins the tortured process of bringing a federal budget bill to an October vote, Clinton named Wofford as his nominee to replace Boston entrepreneur Eli Segal as AmeriCorps’ CEO.
“No one has dedicated more time and energy to helping others through public service than Harris Wofford,” Clinton said.
Which is true.
During his four years as the replacement for U.S. Senator John Heinz, Wofford’s crowning achievement was twisting enough arms to win passage of the National and Community Service Trust Act of 1993, which, among other things, led to AmeriCorps.
On the telephone, Wofford is talking about his biggest challenge as Clinton’s nominee.
“It’s not the nomination,” says Wofford, who is traveling the country (including an upcoming trip to Philly) visiting AmeriCorps programs. “I made a lot of friends when I was a Senator. I don’t expect any problems there. No, the biggest fight will be trying to save the program.”
A week after our telephone conversation, Harris Wofford is looking pretty sharp in his blue Polo shirt and light brown pants as he makes his way through the throngs of AmeriCorps newbies who have gathered at the Radisson Hotel on Rte 1 to spend a week learning about what they are getting themselves into in the coming year.
He has come a long way since the last time I saw him, also in a hotel.
It was in the Grand Ballroom of the Wyndham Franklin Plaza hotel: A drawn and gaunt Wofford had just given his concession speech, bidding Senator-elect Rick Santorum the best of luck.
It is much different this time.
Tan, vibrant and seemingly up to the battle ahead, Wofford smiles and sticks out his hand as he and his former senatorial aide Todd Bernstein squeeze through the crowd, pressing flesh and talking up the benefits of AmeriCorps.
Most of the people in the Radisson’s main conference room are in their 20s. Most are single and nearly all say they will take advantage of the college tuition voucher offered as an incentive to work for AmeriCorps.
Not all AmeriCorps members fit that description.
Deloros Berry of Philadelphia is none of the above.
She is 63, a grandmother and one of the oldest people in the meeting room.
Berry says she joined AmeriCorps almost accidently.
“I originally picked up the paperwork for my daughter,” she says above the din of the conference hall. “But she couldn’t afford to do it, so I decided that I could. And here I am.”
What Berry has in common with her fellow members is the desire to take on the nation’s problems directly. Like most people I talk to, she realizes this is no get-rich-quick scheme nor is it simple-minded government-sponsored do-goodism.
“I know this is going to be a lot of very hard work,” says Berry in anticipation of the year ahead. “But I think this is one of the best ways to get things done.”
“Getting Things Done” — that is the motto of AmeriCorps.
And the gospel too, if you listen to Harris Wofford talk.
Just back from the West Coast, where he visited other National Service programs, Wofford is spending the day in Philadelphia to talk to recruits and to see how things are going with AmeriCorps programs in town.
It is a day significant for more than just Wofford’s visit.
It is Wofford’s 47th wedding anniversary. That he chooses to spend the day among strangers rather than with his wife is telling: Wofford, whose political career seemed doomed to the scrap heap last November, is glad to be back on the public stage fighting another good fight.
This fight, he says, preaching to the converted, will be fought not by armies, not by bureaucrats, but by “active-duty citizens.”
Repeatedly, Wofford urges the AmeriCorps members on by reminding them that it is “Better to serve than be served. ” It’s a sentiment taken right out of JFK’s Inauguration Address, echoing its most famous line: “And so, my fellow Americans, ask not what your country can do for you — ask what you can do for your country.”
Tanya Ramirez, a 25-year-old from New York City, is one of the 200 AmeriCorps members who have gathered at the Radisson. With her mixture of deep-seated optimism and real-world cynicism, she is typical of many AmeriCorps members I speak with at the hotel.
On one hand, Ramirez is looking forward to a year of what will prove to be a lot of hard work for a relatively small financial payback — a $7,600 stipend plus a $4,200 college tuition credit in return for 50 to 60 hours (or more) per week of helping poor communities develop. The real benefits — doing something to directly change a troubled nation — are rewarding far beyond anything else she could do, says Ramirez.
On the other hand, Ramirez is not sure what her hard work will accomplish.
“I’m skeptical,” says Ramirez. “Congress may not give the money to continue the program. Here I am, just starting out, and I am worried that the program may fold before I am finished.”
Ramirez is only mildly comforted by the fact that Wofford has been chosen by Clinton to save AmeriCorps.
“I feel a little better now, having just learned about Wofford’s involvement with the Peace Corps,” says Ramirez. “But he’s not in the position yet. And I don’t know how much he will really be able to accomplish.”
The next stop for Wofford is the Norris Square Civic Association, which is a laboratory for how AmeriCorps, through its members, can help a community once given up for dead revive itself.
But before we can find that out for ourselves, we have to get there.
It becomes an elusive task.
We are running late. Wofford’s efforts to sip tea and use the john are interrupted as I pigeonhole him to ask about why its taken so long to get a domestic version of the Peace Corps.
As Bernstein looks frantically at his watch, Wofford launches into a spiel on legislative history. He tells me that a number of unfortunate events — first Kennedy’s assassination, then the Vietnam war, then a string of Republican Presidents — kept the idea on the back burner for 34 years.
Oh, it came up during the Carter administration, Wofford says.
But nothing happened.
“That was just as well,” says Wofford.
“Huh?” I ask, ignoring the pained look on Bernstein’s face.
“Well, it was about the time of the hostage crisis,” Wofford answers. “Anything that Carter would have attempted after that would probably have failed.”
Bernstein interrupts.
“We have to go, Harris,” he says. Even though I am familiar with the territory, having covered a number of stories in Norris Square, I agree to follow Wofford, Bernstein and Jorina Ahmed, the state director for the Corporation for National Service, who are driving in Wofford’s forest-green Ford Taurus station wagon. Everything is fine, until we get off I-95 at Allegheny.
Then, as we zigzag through Kensington and North Philly, I am reminded of Wofford’s Senate career and, particularly, his often misguided run for re-election.
First we go too far South.
Then too far North.
Then South and then North again.
In between, there are jags East and jaunts West.
We stop at a stop sign. Bernstein, who is driving, assures us that he knows where he is going.
Finally, after our accidental guided tour through the city’s seamier sections, past bombed-out storefronts and hookers working the hot day under the Frankford El, we hit our destination.
The Norris Square Civic Association, run by Sister Carol Keck, is buzzing with activity, even on this steamy day.
A group of AmeriCorps members, one young man and two young women, sit in a circle and are soon joined by Keck, Wofford and an intense, intelligent 29-year-old woman named Sondra Hollinger.
Hollinger, an AmeriCorps leader who will soon leave to join the seminary, was in Botswana with the Peace Corps when she heard about AmeriCorps and quickly packed up her things because she wanted to do what she was doing in Africa in America.
The AmeriCorps members tell Wofford about what they have accomplished in the last year. The list is impressive.
The members, after learning conflict resolution skills themselves, taught some 1,200 local school kids how to avoid fights.
“It was very gratifying to watch kids walk away or deal constructively with a conflict after teaching them how to do it,” says Hollinger.
The members also organized a “Safe Corridors” program, getting people from the community to don orange vests and take street corners back from the drug dealers so that kids can walk to school without being shot or harangued to buy drugs.
And, they help staff the “Safe Havens” program, where buildings like the Norris Square Civic Association are used to provide after-school programs for kids.
On this day, as Wofford listens to the corps members, there is plenty of evidence that this is a safe haven for children.
The squeals of school kids out in the backyard filter into the room where Wofford is sitting, the noise sometimes overpowering what the adults are saying.
The kids are about to have a sports awards ceremony. The AmeriCorps members smile proudly as the children bound about the wooden house that serves as home to the civic center.
Keck tells Wofford that, instead of cutbacks in the program, she could use even more AmeriCorps members next year.
AmeriCorps has also accomplished a lot on Wilk Street in North Philadelphia.
A small stretch of fixed-up homes in a neighborhood of blight and destitution, the 1900 block of Wilk Street is testimony to the power of AmeriCorps.
For the last year, 10 corps members, many of them living in the neighborhood, have been directing crews of local folk in Habitat for Humanity’s efforts to rebuild the area.
Oh sure, Habitat existed before AmeriCorps. And the organization rebuilt plenty of homes before anyone from AmeriCorps showed up to pick up a hammer.
But having 10 people around on a full-time basis affords Habitat a luxury it never had: skilled crew leaders who can train workers so that the work they do doesn’t have to be ripped out and redone.
“These folks have been tremendous,” says Habitat executive director Cheryl Appline as she points with pride to the rehab job done to Habitat’s 19th Street office by the AmeriCorps crew during an all-night session. “This office is a perfect example of what they have done. You know, when people want to know if you can fix up a house, they look at your office and see if you have fixed that. Well, the AmeriCorps crew spent a whole night fixing everything, walls, ceilings, new doors. Now this place looks wonderful.”
AmeriCorps work in the neighborhood extends beyond the office.
Across 19th, on Wilk Street, kids play in front of homes that used to house only rats and crack dealers. And nearby, a small park built to resemble an African shrine was carved out of a vacant, garbage-strewn lot.
To an outsider, what Habitat and AmeriCorps are doing on Wilk Street may not seem like a lot. But to the people who have come back and who are fighting to keep the neighborhood on the upswing, Wilk Street is a beachhead in the war against decay.
A war, by the looks of the little park, that is far from over.
Litter is everywhere. Walking through the park, Harris Wofford calls upon his training as a U.S. Army Air Corps officer to take care of the problem.
No, he does not bomb the park. Besides, that is a job for mayors, not ex-U.S. Senators.
“This was what I learned in my military training,” he says, bending over to pick up a piece of paper. “The war ended before I could learn to fly, but I spent plenty of time policing the grounds.”
Bending over again, this time to pick up a candy wrapper, Wofford tells the group of AmeriCorps members that, if everyone helped, the job would take no time at all.
In a moment, a half dozen or so follow the garbage-picking lead of a man who was once a member of the most exclusive men’s club in the world. They are soon also bending over, picking up bottles, cans and even a used diaper, which are all tossed into a pile which is later picked up and thrown out.
With that bit of work out of the way, Appline sweeps her hand through the air and shows that, little by little, brick by brick, Habitat and AmeriCorps are cleaning up the whole neighborhood, turning it from a place people want to flee into one they want to call home.
Speaking of home, that is what a number of AmeriCorps members call the neighborhood.
In another weird coincidence with things Kennedyesque, Jen Parks, a member from Chicago, moved into Bouvier Street.
“At first, some people were suspicious,” says Parks. “Some people thought we were college students from Temple. But our neighbors have always stood up for us.”
The experience has been helpful in a number of ways, says Parks.
“I’m from the city, but I have never lived in a poor neighborhood like this,” says Parks. “And I think that people in the neighborhood got a chance to know us.”
AmeriCorps, however, is not just for white kids from wealthy backgrounds who want to help poor kids.
Derrick Hicks is a 23-year-old from the neighborhood Habitat is rebuilding. He says being an AmeriCorps member here has not only given him a chance to fix up his neighborhood, but it has taught him some marketable skills and given him a chance at college. Neither, he says, would have happened without AmeriCorps.
“I don’t know what I would be doing without AmeriCorps,” he says. “I guess I would be hanging around.”
Before leaving for a meeting in Montgomery County, the affable Harris Wofford turns into a “close talker” and gets right in my face to tell me his strategy for overcoming political opposition to AmeriCorps.
“We need to build on the 20 or so Republican Senators who already favor this,” he says. “We need to convince Dole that he can show he has a benign side by supporting this. I am not too optimistic about the House, though.”
The trick, says Wofford, is that when the issue comes before the House-Senate conference committee, AmeriCorps supports squeeze out enough of an appropriation to keep going.
On the surface, the ideals of AmeriCorps match the ideals espoused by the Republican Contract with America, which talks about people helping themselves to better themselves.
And its half-billion-dollar annual budget is about enough money to buy a couple of wheel struts for the B-1 bomber.
But it barely survived this year, and there is a real question whether AmeriCorps can survive another assault in congress.
Iowa Senator Charles Grassley is leading the charge against AmeriCorps because, he claims, the program is inefficient and more costly than originally advertised.
“When other federal government programs to help veterans and the poor are being asked to accept tough fiscal realities, neither those beneficiaries nor taxpayers should be asked to lay out $19.81 an hour for government-paid volunteers and big bureaucracy,” Grassley said last month.
Grassley, citing a preliminary Government Accounting Office study showing taxpayers are spending nearly $27,000 per member to fund AmeriCorps, said other programs already in place can do the job for less money.
“The president’s goal of helping more young people go to college and serve their communities are commendable,” said Grassley. “However, when compared to other proven programs, both public and private, AmeriCorps is by far the most expensive and least effective way to achieve these goals.”
For the money used to send one AmeriCorps member to college, Grassley said that “federal Pell grants could be awarded to help 18 young people from low-income families attend college.” Grassley added that Department of Commerce statistics show that 3.9 million Americans between the ages of 16 and 24 already volunteer “without this expensive government program…The private sector could support seven Boy Scouts for an entire year for the cost of supporting a single AmeriCorps worker for just one week.”
Eli Segal, departing AmeriCorps CEO, rejects Grassley’s math and asks, how many Boy Scouts are going to move into places like North Philadelphia and spend 60 hours a week rebuilding the neighborhood?
“The GAO will conclude that AmeriCorps costs exactly what we said it would cost in terms of federal dollars,” says Segal. “We said it would cost about $20,000 per member. In fact, it will be less. More like in the high $19,000 range. We have never figured out how Grassley has the nerve to say what he is saying.”
Segal’s version is supported by staunch conservatives like Leslie Lenkowsky, president of the Hudson Institute and a member of the board of directors of the Corporation for National Service. Lenkowsky, whose conservative credentials come as an appointee of Presidents Reagan and Bush, says that AmeriCorps is “right on budget.”
“GAO suggests that AmeriCorps is right on mission,” Lenkowsky wrote two weeks ago in the op-ed section of the ultra-conservative Washington Times. “The audit teams found local programs doing exactly as intended: rehabilitating housing, tutoring, analyzing crime statistics and developing prevention measures, strengthening communities, encouraging responsibility and expanding opportunity.”
The GAO, adds Lenkowsky, “shows that it would be disingenuous to kill AmeriCorps on the basis of cost. It isn’t costing the taxpayer any more than was intended , and it is difficult to premise fiscal salvation on a savings that amounts to less than one-thirtieth of a penny on a tax dollar.”
Public/Private Ventures (P/PV), a Philadelphia-based non-profit policy analyst group, released an independent study of AmeriCorps in June that, for the most part, praised the Corporation for National Service, which oversees AmeriCorps, and AmeriCorps itself.
P/PV found that “to an unusual degree, the corporation sought not just to establish AmeriCorps program priorities, but also to make quality an important aspect…of decisions regarding programs.”
The report states that “this was not just a one-time bureaucratic step. The corporation followed up energetically and consistently on the quality theme…Thus, in a manner not commonly found among federal grant-making organizations, the corporation, rather than establishing minimum standards for acceptability, set ambitious quality criteria…”
There were, of course, some problems as well, according to the P/PV study.
The ambitious goals, combined with the short time to implement them, set up a state of confusion
“In most of the study states [PA was not included in the study] the pressure to get programs operational in a year precluded careful strategic assessment, thinking and planning during the first year.”
Segal, who will be an unpaid member of AmeriCorps’ board of directors, says he can live with P/PV’s findings.
“We had about 7 percent of the programs we were working with knocked out,” he says, explaining that those were community agencies that, like the Youth Service Corp. in Philadelphia, either went out of business or were in other ways incompatible with AmeriCorps’ goals.
As for the future viability of AmeriCorps, Segal is upbeat.
“At the risk of sounding pollyanna-ish, I am optimistic on the Senate side,” says Segal. “Primarily because we know that these partnerships are working with major American institutions like the American Red Cross and Habitat for Humanity. We feel that when this bill reaches the Senate, it will do well. And we have allies in the House as well. I think it is unlikely that we will lose funding.”
Harris Wofford is starting a strip-tease act.
Unbuttoning the top buttons of his shirt, he is following the act of Sarah Helfman, executive director of the Eagles Youth Partnership, which is trying to raise money to help area youth.
Helfman, a former AmeriCorps member and no stranger to community service, peeled off five layers of shirts that identified the groups she worked with.
Wofford, though never going all the way, started to take off his shirt to show that, underneath, he is an AmeriCorps member all the way.
Later, in a harried conversation amid a flurry of handshaking and goodbye-saying to AmeriCorps members who will get on with their lives after a year in the program, Wofford tells me he is taking no chances when it comes to funding his baby.
“We are working on a report that will answer the questions raised by Grassley,” says Wofford, again doing the close talker thing, getting in my face at a farewell picnic for the first class of AmeriCorps members in Philadelphia.
Wofford says that first he will work on his confirmation to the $123,000-a-year job, which should take place around the same time as AmeriCorps’ first anniversary, in mid-September. Then, by the end of September, AmeriCorps will deliver its response.
Meanwhile, in between munching burgers and hot dogs and some of the best bean pie you ever want to eat, the AmeriCorps members laugh and joke and recall the past year.
“This is the best thing I ever did,” says Sondra Hollinger. “I am really going to miss everyone.”
Finally, it is time to move on.
For Wofford, that means a private meeting with Eagles owner Jeff Lurie in the owner’s box before flying on to Denver to view yet another AmeriCorps program.
For the AmeriCorps members, it means hiking to the tippy-top of Veteran’s Stadium, where Lurie has donated the dregs of unused tickets as a thank-you to the AmeriCorps members.
Teri Arnold, a 29-year-old self-described “Navy Brat” who spent the year teaching literacy in Philadelphia, says she is used to the lousy seats.
“That’s the way they treat us,” she laughs, acknowledging that the long hours and low financial rewards of AmeriCorps are not for everyone.
“I am no 21-year-old kid,” says Arnold. “My boyfriend thinks I’m crazy, but he supports what I am doing.”
She does not feel slighted, though.
She volunteered.
Besides, she realizes that without the Teri Arnolds on the front lines and in the cheap seats, and the Harris Woffords working the luxury boxes, there would be no AmeriCorps.
