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A generation ago, President John F. Kennedy called on Americans to serve their country and they overwhelmingly responded.
Today, at Cornell College in Iowa, Barack Obama is calling on a new generation of Americans to step up, serve their country, and change the world.
Of all the candidates, Barack Obama is the one who, like Kennedy, can inspire a generation of Americans to respond to a call to service. After all, for Obama, public service isn't just a campaign slogan -- it's the cause that has animated his life.
When Barack graduated from college, instead of pursuing wealth on Wall Street, he pursued justice on the streets of Chicago's South Side. After spending three years working as a community organizer, he went to Harvard Law School, where he became editor of the prestigious Harvard Law Review. With that kind of resume under his belt, Obama had his pick of any of the top corporate law firms in the country. But he chose to return to Chicago and serve his community, heading up Project Vote and helping to register 150,000 new African American voters.
Barack Obama is, and always will be a community organizer and a public servant. And today, he's unveiling a plan that will create hundreds of thousands of new opportunities for Americans from all walks of life to serve their communities as well.
Barack Obama's plan to help all Americans serve their country will:
- Expand AmeriCorps from its current 75,000 slots to 250,000 slots, enabling the program to establish five new Corps that address some of America's most pressing challenges: Classroom Corps, Health Corps, Clean Energy Corps, Veterans Corps, and Homeland Security Corps.
- Engage retiring Americans in service on a large scale by expanding and improving Senior Corps, VISTA and other programs that connect individuals over the age of 55 to volunteer opportunities.
- Double the size of the Peace Corps from 7,800 volunteers to 16,000 by its 50th anniversary in 2011 and work to partner volunteers with people from other nations.
- Establish an America's Voice Initiative to recruit and train Americans that are fluent speakers of local languages to bolster our public diplomacy efforts abroad
- Create a national online network, modeled on Craigslist, to connect volunteers to service and donation opportunities
- Establish a goal of having middle and high-schoolers contribute at least 50 hours a year to community service, and reach that goal through national guidelines for service-learning and additional resources for schools to develop successful programs.
- Connect disadvantaged youth to service opportunities and a pathway to success through the creation of Green Job Corps and the expansion of YouthBuild from 8,000 slots today to 50,000 slots over the next eight years.
- Create a new American Opportunity Tax Credit to ensure that the first $4,000 of a college education is completely free for Americans willing to complete 100 hours of public service a year.
- Promote College Serve-Study by immediately increasing the percentage of Federal Work-Study Program funding that goes to community service jobs from 7 percent to 25 percent, and helping colleges and universities reach a goal of 50 percent of serve-study over time.
- Expand the capacity of the nonprofit sector by establishing a Social Investment Fund Network to provide R&D capital to encourage innovation, find out what works, and expand successful programs to scale across the country.
- Create a Social Entrepreneurship Agency to enable nonprofits to build capacity through improved collaborations with government.
Click here for full details of the plan and stay tuned for more details from Jaime, who's at the speech right now in Iowa.
In the words of Ted Sorensen, John F. Kennedy's speechwriter and advisor, "Senator Obama’s stirring call to public service is the strongest since John F. Kennedy’s 1960 request that all Americans, especially young Americans, ask what they can do for their country.”