The Politics and Civics of National Service: Lessons From the Civilian Conservation Corps, Vista, and Americorps by Melissa Bass

Author:Melissa Bass [Bass, Melissa]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Public Policy, Public Affairs & Administration, Social Services & Welfare, Social Policy, Social Science, Political Science, Disasters & Disaster Relief
ISBN: 9780815723813
Google: dcMzBGupLSkC
Goodreads: 17472467
Publisher: Brookings Institution Press
Published: 2012-12-31T00:00:00+00:00

AmeriCorps and National Service Writ Large

The fact that AmeriCorps grew out of advocates’ vision for comprehensive national service but differs significantly from their ideal raises questions about AmeriCorps as national service. To what extent has it been seen as national service? And to what extent has national service been considered a good thing?

More so than either previous program, AmeriCorps was not only billed as national service in its planning stages (as VISTA was) but has largely been able to keep that framing over time. The language of national service was especially prominent during the Clinton administration. In Clinton’s many speeches on the topic, he never failed to connect AmeriCorps the program to national service as an idea. Officials within the Corporation for National and Community Service shortened its name to simply the Corporation for National Service. And this rhetorical emphasis seeped down to AmeriCorps members, whose T-shirts were emblazoned with the program’s seal: a circle with the words AmeriCorps National Service.

On the other hand, in its design AmeriCorps was the least national of America’s three programs. As AmeriCorps policymaker Bill Galston explained, “This program was designed as a federal, and not a national, program. It was a program designed to be run substantially at the state level” as well as the local level, with “communities … hav[ing] the flexibility to make their own programs work.”43 For this reason, some have found AmeriCorps’s national service aspects lacking. “Indeed,” national service scholar Michael Sherraden argues, “AmeriCorps … is not a national service program at all.” Instead it is a “loose affiliation of a tremendous range of service programs…. All AmeriCorps [members] wear an insignia, but their primary identification is with particular programs,” not with the national program.44 Within the Republican Party, “national greatness” conservatives—most prominently McCain—have shared this view and strongly advocate “putting the ‘national’ in national service.”45

On the other hand, “civil society” conservatives such as Leslie Lenkowsky, President Bush’s first Corporation head, found the Clinton administration’s “national” emphasis excessive, preferring greater stress on community. As a result, Lenkowsky reintroduced Community into the Corporation’s title and National Service was taken off AmeriCorps’s seal. But given many Republicans’ antipathy to both the idea and fact of civilian national service, it is more surprising that the changes were so few. The Bush administration continued to positively identify AmeriCorps as national service, to a greater extent than the CCC or VISTA ever was.

Still, the debate continues, over whether national service is truly a good and whether AmeriCorps is truly national service. While Clinton’s officials saw decentralization as a strength that certainly did not preclude AmeriCorps from being national service, from Sherraden’s perspective AmeriCorps needs fundamental restructuring to become national service. For others, the issue is not AmeriCorps’s structure but its size. Although the number of participants fell short of Clinton’s goals and he pressed for more, he still proclaimed it “national service.” However, the bar keeps rising—just as it kept rising in VISTA’s day. In 2002 UPI ran an article titled “AmeriCorps Can Become National Service [emphasis added].

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