Introduce and moderate second panel. Let me begin by introducing myself briefly. My name is bill galston. Am a senior fellow here at brookings and delighted to be a small cog in the institution. People,o introduce two bell, for working tirelessly to bring about, and also, our president , john allen, for letting his vast experience and moral authority to our enterprise this morning, and i think it is a sign that brookings is spiritually aligned with the National Service movement. Introduce the question this way. Service is the answer, what is the question . And we have heard, and i think we will hear three different kinds of answers to that question, and it is useful to keep them separate. The first have to do with service as an avenue of personal growth, the expansion, the deepening of character. Actualond has to do with good done for others, service and the roof cents. Sense. He root wheree third, and this is the work of John Richland and bridgeland and john dilulio begins, what are those challenges . First, a decline of mutual trust among fellow citizens. That surveying researchers call General Social trust. A precipitous riseus and divisive partisanship. There is a difference between party system and partisanship, and somehow in the past two generations, we have crossed that line and now find ourselves in a very uncomfortable and unproductive place. Third is what i would call the erosion of the problemsolving mentality. Andidea that elected hi appointed officials are engaged in a common civic enterprise where the problem with the public is identified, callout for responses, solutions that the public itself cannot specify, and the job of Public Service is to turn public ends into public means. I personally have been deeply impressed with the quality of the iraq and afghanistan veterans who have entered Public Service. They have this problemsolving mentality in spades. The problem is whether the National Service experience, on can replicateide, that kind of we are all in it together in the same foxhole now, how do we find a way to prevail . Will that mentality spread . It to very oldfashioned language that goes all the way back to william thes, is National Service moral equivalent to war . Or is there no moral equivalent to war . Well, we have a fantastic panel to help us address these questions. I will begin to my immediate left with john bridgeland, who is the former director of the White House Policy Council under president george w. Bush, and currently serves as the vice chair of the service year you have already heard from whom you have already heard. His partner in crime, john who is the. , professor of politics, religion, and civil society, which means you are the professor of everything [laughter] bill at the university of pennsylvania, and he serves as the commissioner faithbased initiatives in 2001, which means they were collects, perhaps brieflyes perhaps more than you would have expected. Adams, him is tai director of the Service Year Alliance, which means she is where the service year hits the political road. Important nexus that she is going to help us explore. Is finally, pete wehner, who currently be Vice President at the ethics and Public Policy center. Extensive experience as a , andhwriter, as a director also, i would say, as a moral voice, right . Very few have reflected more than pete on what it is to have a healthy society, what our current ills are, to what they an be traced, and he offers conservative and i would say faithbased perspective on National Service. Without further ado, john bridgeland and john dilulio are going to jointly present their paper, will america embrace National Service . Let me just add one note. I think there is a broad commitment to shared ideals and goals in the room, but we cannot get carried away with ourselves, right . Empiricalookings, so inquiry matters a lot, because it is where we test the feasibility of the ideas that we cherish and may have to change those ideas in some respects as a result of what honest inquiry discovers, this paper, if i may say so, is a model of honest inquiry, and it does its coauthors proud, and brookings is proud to be associated. John bridgeland . Mr. Bridgeland thank you. Good morning, everyone. It is nice to see a packed house. We need packed houses for National Service all across america. I want to thank bill galston, without whom actually americorps, susan stroud, alan casey, a lot of people in the audience, wouldnt have come into existence in a time in the life of the country where president clinton said, you invest in your country, well invest in you. It was a galvanizing moment. I also want to thank bell. She launched the social genome project and a whole host of initiatives. It seems like anything bell gets behind actually happens. So im more optimistic about National Service now that youre conducting this panel. I also want to thank john dilulio and pete wehner. I had 15 years in Public Service, greatest years of my life, and having the opportunity to serve side by side with john and pete after 9 11 and seeing this emergence from the country of people all over the globe, wanting to make common cause, to make a better country and world together, was really quite extraordinary. When i came in this morning, i met general, congressman, and dr. Joseph heck. I said, is that all . He goes, no, actually, i founded the medical reserve corps after 9 11. [laughs] mr. Bridgeland so thats the model of what were trying to achieve in america, people who view National Service, Citizen Service as fundamental and foundational. I wasnt going to go into it, but now that joe said that the commission is going to focus on civic education, it just reminds me that the people who founded our country, George Washington said when we assume the soldier, we did not lay down the citizen. When jefferson penned this mystical notion of pursuit of happiness, it wasnt just an individual right. As governor patrick reminded us, it was a cooperative, a collective enterprise that we help one another achieve. I cant be truly happy if im not worrying about the happiness of my neighbor and someone whos homeless or vulnerable or worried. Its that spirit, you know, we the people, that really was the foundation of our democracy and the foundation of this country. I think we have to rescue that spirit. So why now . Why always for National Service . Whats the problem were trying to address . The first panel spoke so eloquently about our civic collapse. But i want to share a story. I grew up on drake road in cincinnati, ohio, just a few doors down from a man named Neil Armstrong. And this very shy, reclusive man used to come over for dinner. And when i was at a very impressionable age, he said the know, the audacity of this young president to go to the well of the house and summon the nation to put a man on the moon within a decade and return him safely, you know, within ten 10 years, and we actually had no idea how to pull it off. And yet, 400,000 engineers around the country worked together to make it happen. I remember being a 9yearold kid on the screened porch watching Neil Armstrong land on the moon. And it seems to me that, as governor patrick and others mentioned, we have so many challenges in this country that National Service can help address. I dont see why we dont have an opportunity, millennium goals in the country, to take on education and conservation and poverty and a whole host of issues that National Service theres evidence that National Service could help address. It is also interesting to note, you know, whats the problem were trying to address . Robert putnam wrote two wonderful books, actually a third called our kids. When i asked him for an historic perspective, he said, you know, social cohesion or social fragmentation, political polarization, economic inequality, and civic collapse all actually work in virtual lock step. If you look at trends from the guilded age through the 1960s and 1970s, and even today, you see them moving together. So what we do as a nation civically, how we take care of our communities matters significantly to how we view one another, how we view inequality economically, and of course i think were having a political, cultural, and economic nervous breakdown in this country. So we see the effects of a lack of understanding of the constitution. There was this wonderful book called we hold these truths on the 200th anniversary of the celebration of the declaration that said the highest office in the United States is not the presidency. Its citizen. We need to remind young people of this country that citizenship is really the wave of the future. I want to talk concretely, though, because i know and i cant tell you the number of audiences we speak to all over the country, and stan, whos our chair, comes back from speaking, rallying a chorus of union, but theres always this wonder, could we actually pull it off . Why, for such a big idea, that colvin, our ceo, has mentioned attracts widespread public support among republicans, democrats, independents. We talk about the civic healing effects. I have cochaired the earth conservation corps for over a decade. We work with the most vulnerable kids in congress heights, kennelworth. Interestly, one day, they were serving and we brought kids from mcclain and potomac and had this great mixing in our service efforts. I sort of had the audacity to ask, what politics are you . There were republicans. There were democrats. There was even a libertarian. What faiths are you . They were christians, jews, muslims. And the project that they were working on was actually bringing the bald eagle, our nations symbol, back to the nations capital. We have bald eagles who fly over this beautiful landscape day in and day out because of the work of those National Service participants. But i want to talk just briefly about could we bring this idea to scale, and what have we learned from various models . Interestingly, in 1933, Franklin Roosevelt calls congress into emergency session. By summer has 250,000 young unemployed men in the woods through the civilian conservation corps. By the end of the program, 3 million had served, 3 billion trees had been planted, 84 million acres of land had been saved, which is the entire acreage of our National Park system today. And when you talk to the ccc boys, it was a spiritual experience for them. It changed the trajectory of the rest of their lives. It was also run by the u. S. Army. And a young george c. Marshall organized the ccc camps. So the thought that we would have, for the First Time Since 1933, a commission looking how we marry military, civilian, and National Service opportunities together is really compelling. Second, the peace corps, the thought that wed have u. S. Policy to send our sons and daughters, our mothers and fathers, eventually our grandmothers and grandfathers to remote areas all across the world to meet needs in other countries was sort of a bold experiment. But when shriver sent his memo to john kennedy in 1961, he actually didnt want to just create a federal program called peace corps, he wanted to run peace corps through nonprofit organizations, colleges, and and universities, agencies at all levels. And peace corps remains small today, because that vision was not fulfilled. And then came americorps roaring that, which actually took had that instinct to go to the , strength of america, to its Nonprofit Institutions and colleges and universities, and to give support to those institutions and build off the strength of civil society. So i think those models are really instructive as we think about how do we marry military, civilian, and Public Service and , and how do we go to where the strength of the country is today, which is in its institutions of civil society. So over to brother d to talk about other elements of our report, including mandatory versus civilian National Service. Prof. Dilulio thank you very much. Thanks, bridge. I know some of you are wondering what these socks are. They are Philadelphia Eagles socks. I fee so go, birds. I feel your pain, redskins fans. I really do. Go nats. Well, im not going to say anything. No comment. But i want to thank the wonderful bell sawhill for inviting me to participate in this. Its a special treat and honor to be here with three dear old friends, the amazing bill galston, the inspiring john bridgeland, and the brilliant and the bold the winner. Pete wehner. You are the only one up here who is practicing what everybody is preaching, for real, for real. It is a special treat and honor to meet you and be with you. What im going to do is take a little time. I will, as they say in congress, yield the balance of my time back to brother bridgeland, and just talk about two aspects of this will america embrace the national b service report. The part that deals with Public Opinion and the part that deals with evidence on the benefits of National Service. So if you go back and look at the polling data on National Service, all the way back to the creation of americorps from 1993 to the present, so im looking at all the surveys that have been done, i think its fair to say that theres one overarching conclusion. There are two corollary findings and one caution. Im going to be very brief in expressing these. The overarching conclusion is that, indeed, most americans do support National Service. That is every demographic description, every socioeconomic status. It is without regard to partisan identification or ideological disposition. They favor National Service. If it is voluntary. That is, unpaid, not required by law, or both. And majorities tend to oppose it if it is mandatory or compulsory, defined as in required by law or enforced , administered by the government. One corollary finding is that the infavor majorities shrink if voluntary is government supported. If you say expressly, oh, by the way, governments got a nickel on the quarter or 25 cents in the dollar, it shrinks a bit. And if it is mandatory or compulsory, again, it goes down even more. But theres no question that the overall finding still is that americans of every demographic description favor National Service. Another corollary finding is that most people believe that service, and thats whether the service is national or community, paid or unpaid, benefits the servers. People believe that, that it develops skills, enhances civic responsibility. They believe it benefits the persons, organizations, and communities where people serve by supplying direct services or performing vital work in the community. And they believe it benefits the wider society. That is, that it elevates citizenship, helps to model civic responsibility, helps to bridge, which weve heard a lot about this morning, socioeconomic, political, and other divides. So thats what the folks believe. But there is one caution here. And the caution is that for all the polls that have been done, the fact is we still have a relatively limited universe of polls, and theyre not all entirely wellconstructed and wellconducted. There are all kinds of stratification and sampling issues and interpretation issues and so forth. In fact, even if you compare the polling, the research, the survey research on National Service to polling data and survey research on other not top, top line issues, like faithbased, it is a relatively anemic survey Research Literature. So whats needed there is a tuneup. If youre interested in that, you look at the appendix to our report, youll find that we have some suggestions about how you could go about at a relatively inexpensive because good polls are expensive and doing them right is expensive how you might be able to improve survey research on National Service. Let me now turn quickly to the benefits of National Service. We know i mean, we could probably fill this very nice room here at brookings with all the studies that have been done with empirically looking at the benefits of National Service, and the vast majority of those suggest that National Service works. But we need to make a couple of distinctions here. We know that volunteering works. We know that, compared to otherwise comparable people who volunteer, right, people who do the volunteering have higher life satisfaction, higher selfesteem, better selfrated health, better occupational and academic outcomes, longer lives. Getting to elder elder myself these days. Longer lives and lots of other positive outcomes. But we need to remember that the evidence on the benefits of volunteering is not, of course, synonymous with the evidence on the benefits of volunteer programs, per se, or of National Service programs in particular. So whether with respect to helping out at ones church or Neighborhood School or Community Elder care facility or in other ways, much of what counts and gets counted as volunteering occurs wholly outside the context of any regular commitments and any quasi formal or formal programmatic context. Organizational setting or context. We have t