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Eduardo Ochoa: Well, welcome back, everyone.
We certainly hope your conversations were engaging and
informative and we look forward to learning more about them.
I did sample each one of you a little bit over the course of
the last 45 minutes and it sounded extremely interesting.
For those at home we want to hear from you, too.
We encourage you to share highlights of your conversations
with us by e-mailing them to civic Learning@ed.gov.
Joining me on stage are the five reporters representing
each discussing.
To keep us on schedule we'd appreciate it if each person
could try to limit his or her response to about a minute.
(laughter)
I'll ask that you please introduce yourself and which
discussion group you are in and with the last 30 seconds share
with us some key highlights from your breakout.
(laughter)
Okay, go! Please.
Ron Crutcher: I am Ron Crutcher, President of Wheaton College,
the original Wheaton College in Massachusetts.
And I was in the group really advancing civic
learning P through 20.
We said K through 12, but it really should be P through 20.
We had a really good but, you know,
intense discussion because we didn't have enough,
as much time, but I think there are three points that
I want to make.
First of all, there were a lot of comments about the fact that
oftentimes civic learning or civics is looked at as being
one course or one experience and that there should be a
sequential arc throughout the P through 20 experience and that
these experiences should be just that, experiences.
Doing things as a young woman from western Kentucky said.
Being engaged.
Engagement is critically important.
Number 2, that higher ed leadership,
leadership in general is important.
That is to say that the person who -- the persons who are
leading the institution have to set the tone and that in order
to ensure that you can measure or demonstrate that you're
students are engaged in civic learning that you the develop
some ways of developing civic portfolios.
Civic experience portfolios as a means of demonstrating the
experiences that your students have had.
And then, thirdly, that inquiry about student learning -- about
civic learning, excuse me, can really be cross disciplinary.
That is, it can cross disciplinary boundaries.
That it's not, that civics should not be thought of only
in the purview of the political science professors.
And that in a sense in order for us to truly be successful at
engaging all students, because we also talked about the civic
learning being a pervasive experience,
we really have to infuse civic learning and engagement across
the curriculum P through 12 -- P through 20.
(applause)
Eduardo Ochoa: Thank you, very much.
(applause)
Tim Eatman: Hello? Tim Eatman, a faculty member at Syracuse University
and Director of Research for Imagining America Artists and
Scholars in Public Life.
We were in the public scholarship breakout group that
was moderated by Nancy Kanter and Julie Ellison and I gave
some introductory remarks.
But we had about three takeaways as well.
And one was a very astute observation that we are now at a
level of engagement with engaged scholarship and publicly engaged
work where we can probably create some market pressure that
rewards incentives and allows universities to take this on in
a full way so the groundwork is laid and there is an openness
and opportunities to solidify these efforts.
And that, secondly, we need to think about leveraging the power
of different voices, of knowledgemakers that come
out of these sorts of collaborations.
And so foundations and other philanthropic groups can help us
create a market for alternative ways to have impact in the
community and to create genuinely -- a genuine
sustainable and respectful relationships.
This matter of creating respectful relationships is
something that we struggle with and we have to do a great bit
more work in terms of studying and understanding.
And thirdly, we probably should give some attention to focusing
on early career scholar alliances and how we can
leverage graduate student and early career scholar networks
across institutions and associations to do that.
So as a national alliance, we can figure out federal as well
as philanthropic changing policies and who can get grants,
incentivizing collaborative alliances among community
alliances and taking on issues like broader impacts that
register in agencies like the NSF and other agencies.
So that's what we can report in this quick time.
Thank you.
(applause)
Blase Scarnotti: Hi, good afternoon.
I'm Blase Scarnotti from Northern Arizona University.
And our session was on "Build and Strengthening Community
Campus Connections" with George Mahaffey and Ira Harkavy.
And out of quite a few questions we developed for the session we
really, because of the time, focused on two.
Primarily, what are the key ideas and core values that bring
campus and community members together in civic conversations
to actualize public democratic work?
There are several ways of unpacking the question.
One, we're really exploring core values that motivate why we're
engaging, as higher education, why we're engaging with the
community such as play space development, social justice,
the desire to development civic agency and democratic
capacities, civic professionalism.
And also then what are the core values in how one actually
engages with the community, that there's reciprocal dialogue
that's a flat learning space, that everyone gets something
out of it.
There were cautionary words brought forward about being
careful not to colonize the communities in which
we're working.
For example, that we want to develop cooperative
relationships and a variety of other ideas that came out such
as what are the boundaries and roles for education in the
community, how do we interact?
We need to develop, move really from simple answers
to more complex answers.
Defining the mutual benefits for communities and higher
education each.
And as well as understand really that fundamentally as our work
is academic so much of it really is based in and of
the community.
For example the field of sociology was brought up
as an example.
In addition, how do we enable enthusiasm really to develop for
a civic agency in all classes and among all of our students?
The second question was really how do we incentivize
all of this.
And there was a lot of discussion about what
incentivization means within this context.
Basically coming down to breaking down the unidirectional
flow of power and knowledge and to develop the reciprocal and
long-term relationships.
Thank you.
(applause)
Jean Johnson: I'm Jean Johnson, I'm here with the National Issues Forums and
also I'm with Public Agenda.
And our group was "Deeping Civic Identity Values and Vision."
I think the cornerstone of the meeting was we saw this is a
moment of crisis but also a moment of opportunity.
But that we really need to make the case for the role of higher
education in solving this problem.
And that that means changing expectations both of higher
education institutions but also of students and faculty.
And in talking about this with a lot of very good examples,
I thought that we came up with a lot of very natural,
understandable, accessible ways to talk about this mission that
could really resonate with a lot of the public.
That we want to see students and our
institutions as problem-solvers.
Students should learn to see themselves as agent of change.
They need to find a way not only to have an idea but to make it
happen and not wait for the politicians.
We need to model democracy as a way to solve problems within our
institutions and in student government.
We need to start dialogues on controversial issues and show
that those can take place and the example here was in
Wisconsin football, which I'm still having trouble imagining,
but that was the example.
We need to have relationships that create imagination.
We need to teach students that they can plant a seed
and watch it grow.
We need to encourage in our students the hunger to
understand how things work so that they can help shape them.
We need to teach our students that listening is as important
as having a voice and it's an absolute priority that we work
together to collect stories to give the American people
the sense this can be done and that there is a genuine hope and
opportunity here.
(applause)
Sarita Brown: Good afternoon, I'm Sarita Brown with Excelencia in Education.
And our discussion was focused on "Provide Evidence,
Civic Learning, and College Success."
We had a great running start because in addition to the
wonderful information that has been shared verbally by Carol
and the report from AACNU, AACNU has dug even deeper
and mined what evidence already is available.
Ashley is here, I don't see her at the moment,
but has a handout that has already looked at existing
surveys and questions of pertinence in terms of this
broad and ongoingly defined definition of civic learning,
civic democracy.
The other aspect of the evidence is evidence that we used in the
report itself.
As a person who oftentimes looks at things in a macro way in my
day job, I found that the ten indicators of anemic U.S.
civic health, which are on page 2 or 4 of the Crucible Report,
including things like the U.S. ranked 139th in voter
participation of 172 world democracies in 2007.
You can go on with this.
This is another place that if we were to consider what's the
evidence that we use to say that we have this need,
this would be a way to frame the data-gathering that we would
need to be able to respond.
That's from an external perspective.
Our discussion simultaneously looked at what would have to go
on within institutions.
What are some of the issues that we would deal with there?
And one of the aspects that I think will be part of this work
going forward is the continual definition.
President of Cal State University, Monterey Bay,
kept talking about what is "it."
What is it that we are all talking about,
the definition of engaged citizen.
How does the faculty see their place in that?
What is their responsibility?
The fact that we already know that there are impact,
there are high impact practices that are not only able to help
students navigate their place in the world and
their responsibilities, but also succeed and graduate,
is something that we want to keep at the forefront of our
problem-solving for future evidence.
And then there was a whole set of very important practical
issues that we're talking about doing this at a time that
academic institutions, public institutions in particular,
are facing pretty significant budget cuts.
And so the opportunity for us to work collectively and
collaboratively, to share each other's work,
to have surveys that can be shared across the field,
to pool our learnings to go forward,
all of this was part of our discussion and really
just the beginning.
So I think that in terms of his hard-edged notion of evidence,
there is a lot of energy here and there is a lot
of readiness to do it.
Eduardo Ochoa: Thank you.
(applause)
Well, I want to thank all of the reporters for very concise
and sharp feedback to us on what took place.
I'm going to ask them to please step down at this point and give
them another hand, please.
(applause)
Well, clearly, this was a teaser.
These sessions were very short and meant to stimulate your
engagement with this and motivate you to work even
more energetically towards the cause of civic learning.
We don't want the conversation to stop here.
And we hope that the event will serve as a catalyst for future
activities and exploring ways we can further our commitment
to the advancement of civil learning and
democratic engagement.
So as part of this conversation, we'd like to share with you some
of the commitments that we have made and are making to advance
this important mission.
And to start us off I'd like to welcome back to the stage
Carol Schneider, President of the Association of American
Colleges and Universities.
And Harry Boyte, Director of the American Commonwealth Partnership.
(applause)
Carol Schneider: You should already have received in the breakout
groups the copy of the commitments that over
75 organizations and colleges, universities,
and community colleges have made.
So I hope everybody has this.
Harry and I are both going to be referring to it as we try
to share with you the good work that has already been planned to
go forward from this launch.
Harry.
Harry Boyte: So this is just an illustration.
These are just suggestive.
As Carol said, there is a very rich body of initiatives that
were catalyzed in the last several months,
but their suggestive of the range and the richness of
possibilities and practical initiatives.
I'm going to talk about two and then Carol is going to talk
about two points of the star and then I am going to talk about
the final point of the star.
So under deepening civic identity,
which is really we think the democracy colleges for
the 21st century, just to highlight several things,
we are planning with National Issues Forums and the Kettering
Foundation and other deliberative groups,
a series of conversations across the country about what kind of
citizenship do we need and how to educate for it and what's the
role of education in the higher education in that process.
Kettering will produce materials that will be online,
the National Issues Forum will make it online.
I would say at the deepest point,
this was the theme that came out in our group,
it's really about agency.
How can people stop complaining about what's happening out there
and say what can we do; we're the once we've been waiting for
in the words of the old civil rights song.
Secondly, there is Democracy U, which many of you have
seen, we began to pass around a commitment statement but it's a
website that will continue to expand stories,
it's connected to a Facebook page and Twitter.
We want to really use this as a resource.
So during the Blair House I'm going to put up a sign-up sheet
who would make a commitment to work with the Democracy U
in different ways.
Publicize it, get out the word, write stories.
We've already had some commitments just in a couple
of minutes passing it around.
And thirdly, under the civic identity, we want to highlight
a very creative initiative which Julie Ellison and her colleagues
have begun called "Citizen Alum."
In a time of budget crisis and shortening and scarcity
consciousness, Citizen Alum offers tremendous opportunities
to shift the paradigm to abundance by looking at and
creating partnerships between colleges and universities and
their alumni.
And all the different kinds of work and learning and civic
agency and creative efforts they're doing can be tremendous
pedagogical resources if we broaden the paradigm of what
is involved in alumni relations.
So under civic identity, just a few of the things.
Under strengthening connections between campuses and
communities, you saw on the star video Muriel Howard talking
about the long-standing commitment of the state
colleges and universities to being stewards of place.
This next year a couple of things to highlight
in that regard.
There will be a civic health assessment which we briefly
referenced, that is, there will be a working group that the
American Democracy Project is putting together which will look
at the impact of colleges and universities on the communities
in which they are located.
Now, again, this really holds challenge possibilities to the
reining ranking systems which tend to discourage involvement
in communities, actually.
And secondly, there is a partnership forming between
groups like the Anchoring Institutions Task Force
and the American colleges and universities around how to
strengthen ties, how to develop policies,
how to work with federal agencies around how to
strengthen community campus connections.
Carol Schneider: Thank you. So moving on to two more prongs of the star,
the commitment to advance civic learning and democratic
engagement and make it, in the words of Crucible Moment,
pervasive rather than peripheral.
And also providing evidence about the difference this
actually makes to students.
There is a huge amount of energy that has gone into all of these
issues and in fact, some 13 of the organizations that are
mentioned on the commitments list have agreed to work across
their various sites of activities with AACNU in
partnership to lift up models for that developmental arc for
civic learning that we're talking about.
And just to give you one illustration of something
that is going to happen in that connection,
democracy commitments, which Brian Murphy talked about
earlier, a new network of community colleges working
directly on this issue, will be -- has been funded by the
National Endowment for the Humanities -- and we thank you
-- to work with the AACNU and all of our members which include
community colleges, but other kinds of institutions as well,
to develop models for civic learning that are particularly
applicable to those students for the first two years of college.
I also want to call attention to work that Bringing Theory to
Practice is doing.
That is a national network that across all the various
philanthropies has probably put more resources into more
institutions to lift up civic learning as a shared priority
than virtually any other.
Sally Pingree is here with us today and I want to thank her
for her long-term commitment to this and other foundations as
well that have supported it.
They will soon be announcing an RFP to support additional
institutions in work to make civic learning more pervasive,
to bring it further into the core mission and the core work
of all our institutions.
So watch for that.
I think the time is February.
And you can find out about it on our website.
And then finally in the area of learning,
I hope everyone in this room is aware that the Lumina Foundation
is putting a a huge amount of energy behind an effort to
define what the "it" is, what is it that students have done when
they are ready to receive an A.A. degree or a B.A.
degree or an M.A. degree, they are inviting institutions and
associations and the creditors to test a draft description of
what a college degree is supposed to mean in our time
and civic learning is one of the five essential components
that they are testing.
This is an opportunity for all of us to say, yes,
this is what a high quality degree includes and to be
part of that conversation.
And if we haven't got it quite right, make it better.
Make it better.
Don't say we don't want one-size-fits-all,
we'll never have one-size-fits-all.
We'll have many different ways of coming at this.
But what we have to have is a shared understanding that this
is core to our mission.
In terms of the assessment I'm just going to mention a couple
of things that you need to be aware of.
Campus Compact as been a leader in service learning as everyone
knows and has been a source of some of the important evidence
showing that the more students are involved in service,
the more likely they are to complete college.
Now, there is no higher priority for our society than to have
more people actually succeeding in college.
So to show that these kinds of things actually pay off for
persistence and completion is a very important contribution and
they are going to be taking that work further and putting more of
it in the hands of presidents and other people who are in a
position to make decisions about these issues.
Our society has already committed to college completion.
Let's show that civic learning actually contributes
to that outcome.
And then finally in the context of Lumina's work, both AASCU,
which of course has been a leader on stewardship
of place and campus community partnerships and democracy in
the curriculum and cocurriculum and AACNU which is deeply
committed to this, each have grants to work with state
systems, 12 states all together, grants from Lumina,
community colleges, four-year institutions,
to work on ways of assessing students' learning outcomes as
they move from one level to another.
And, therefore, we have agreed as to associations to create a
working group that will go deeper into what it means to
actually assess student's gains in civic competence and
capability as a consequence of their college experience.
So some things that are going to happen,
it's only the tip of the iceberg,
but we are organized to go forward.
(applause)
Harry Boyte: And finally under public scholarship,
a really deeply transformative concept,
again, scholarship in public, with public and
for public purposes.
There are several things I want to highlight.
First of all, as I understand it,
the public scholarship group discussed creating an ongoing
policy working group that we want to connect with ACP work
to look at how to develop policies to
strengthen public scholarship.
Now, there are a lot of opportunities here.
For example, as Julie Ellison has pointed out,
the scoring systems in NEA or NEH grants have
a lot of difference.
Make a lot of difference in terms of how public
scholarship is.
Universities and colleges also have policy dimensions that are
tremendously powerful in terms of promotion and tenure
guidelines, but the policy dimension is important.
Secondly, I want to hear, also highlight the civic
science discussion.
We're sponsoring in the American Commonwealth Partnership,
which grows out a number of years but it's really again
about how to understand the constitution of science and the
questions that scientists asked, as well as how they work with
different constituencies and groups.
There is a partnership of four different institutions
and centers and we will continue this,
but they include the Delta Center,
the Jan Group at the University of Wisconsin, Northern Arizona,
and especially the Teaching Climate Science and Solutions
and the Center for Democracy and Citizenship to date.
And finally I want to simply recognize Syracuse University
and the leaderships of Nancy Kanter for the concept of
scholarship in action which has pioneered a notion and practice
of engaged deeply democratic scholarship which is making a
real difference in the life of a community in tangible ways and
also transforming the institution itself in
the process.
Thank you.
(applause)
Eduardo Ochoa: Thank you, very much, for that.
And now I'm going to have an opportunity to thank everybody
who has contributed to making this an outstanding event later
on when we close before going to the Blair House.
But now to start that process of closing our event,
we'll hear from three key administration officials leading
efforts to prepare Americans for informed engaged citizenship.
So I'm pleased to introduce now Jonathan Greenblatt.
Jonathan Greenblatt, after arriving in September of 2011,
became the new Director of the White House Office of Social
Innovation and Civic Participation at the
Domestic Policy Council.
Prior to joining the White House,
Jonathan served as the Director of the Impact Economy Initiative
at the Aspen Institute exploring ways public policy can help
enable an environment which accelerates impact investing and
a scale -- and scales social enterprising.
He is also the founder and former president of All for
Good, a nonprofit organization inspired by President Obama's
call for more Americans to serve and to help strengthen
communities and individuals through service.
Were thrilled Jonathan could be with us here today to share his
thoughts about this important initiative.
Please join me in welcoming Jonathan Greenblatt.
(applause)
Jonathan Greenblatt: Good afternoon!
How nice to see all of you here. How's the day been so far?
Audience Members: Wonderful.
Jonathan Greenblatt: Really? It's at a low energy.
I'm a little surprised.
But it sounds like you have had a good thorough day and that
Martha has worked you all well.
So I'm really glad to see that.
So first of all, I'm really glad to welcome y'all here
to the White House.
We think about this as the people's house and it is really
a great pleasure and privilege to see all of you here.
And I know many of you came from all parts of the country to be
here today and gave us your sort of best thoughts and thinking
about this issue of civic learning and this issue of civic
participation which is really an essential element of our agenda.
So I appreciate the kind introduction.
And it's really, you know, just a pleasure to be here
with all of you.
I should tell you that I also, before I get into it, actually,
let me just take a moment, and I know there will be thanks
afterwards that Eduardo will do, but it's a privilege for me to
just acknowledge Under Secretary Kanter who is doing such
yeoman's work for Secretary Duncan and helping to lead the
whole Administration to think differently about this issue of
civic education and about education in general.
Thank you, Martha, for all your good work.
(applause)
And I also think the next round of applause should go
to all of you.
I mean, that was a fairly impressive list of
accomplishments that were just rattled through by the panelists
and the report out is really quite remarkable.
To think about the breadth of things that you have all covered
in just one day, and to think about the span of activities
encompassed in that report which I have had the chance to review
and it's just quite impressive, says a lot about the level of
creativity and energy and thoughtfulness that you all
brought to this process.
So thank you for doing that.
(applause)
So for me this issue of civic participation isn't
just an idea; it's been a guiding,
sort of principal in my life.
I first got engaged in public service as a student at Tufts
University where I was working, I was studying with a generous
support of a work study program and I was motivated actually to
join the Clinton for President Campaign back in 1991 because of
his commitment to City Year and this notion that maybe,
just maybe for me rather than working as a janitor in the
dining halls, you know, and serving food and washing dishes,
I could serve my community.
And that might be a way that I could give back and help afford
a college education.
That motivated me to serve.
Motivated me to join that first campaign and move to Little Rock
and change my life.
And so I deeply think about this notion of being involved
in strengthening our communities through service and through the
public process as just a vital part of my own personal journey.
Here in the U.S., democracy really serves as a model for
the world.
And we think that the government has a role to play,
not just to govern but actually to enable and empower all of you
our citizens to learn and participate in our democracy
and to work together to solve the problems that many of our
communities face in our increasingly
interconnected world.
There are some great speakers who are coming after myself.
I want to highlight just a couple of them,
particularly my colleague Robert Velasco who is the CEO of the
Corporation for National and Community Service,
the federal agency that administers the AmeriCorps
program and the SeniorCorps Program.
How many of you are familiar with AmeriCorps?
Raise your hands.
Pretty much all of you.
It's great.
I mean, few people realize that programs that we care deeply
about from Teach for America, to City Year, to Habitat,
a lot of Meals On Wheels Program, Public Allies,
the list goes on and on of marvelous programs that are
enabled through the important work of AmeriCorps.
Robert is doing yeoman's work to lead that effort and engage
Americans old and young in national service to strengthen
their communities and develop the skills to
be long-term leaders.
Secretary Duncan will also be here this afternoon to close by
talking about the role of the department working with our
nation's schools, colleges and universities to educate students
for informed citizenship which is important.
And we have heard from also Jim Leach here today who is
doing his part.
Just about every federal agency counts, involving empowering
citizens in some way.
As the remarkable as the commitments as was already
announced makes clear, the federal government doesn't
stand alone in our determination to affecting Democracy by
preparing Americans for this notion of active citizenship
or informed citizenship.
But we have an important role to play, nonetheless.
So what I'd like to do is talk to you in my brief remarks here,
which really come at the end of what I know has already been a
very long day, and I realize I stand between you and Blair
House, so I had better be brief.
But I want to talk to you about this notion
of social innovation.
And in fact, I'd like to just throw out there,
how many of you know what that means, social innovation?
Okay.
So I should tell you that in my other life, before coming here,
I taught at the Anderson School at UCLA.
And I was renowned for cold calling my students.
So at least some of you raised your hands.
So what's your name and what do you think social
innovation means?
Johnathan Ashton: Johnathan Ashton, social innovation -- investment
in things that can become transformative and sustaining
those models for change.
Jonathan Greenblatt: Great. So investments and transformative
sustainable change.
Who else?
I saw other hands.
I will call on you.
Anybody from this side of the room?
Any brave soul?
The gentleman from Syracuse.
Audience Member: Sir, thinking creatively about ways to ameliorate in some
cases entrenched dysfunction.
Jonathan Greenblatt: Um-hmm.
Audience Member: Not only necessarily looking at dysfunction,
but also thinking about leveraging other means to
make a difference in society.
Jonathan Greenblatt: I think that's excellent --
I think it's an excellent response.
I know I'm in an audience of college and academics,
but ameliorate entrenched dysfunction as the way
it's described --
(laughter)
But I think that's pretty good.
I think the President likes to talk about it as finding new
ways to solve old problems.
And I think that represents pretty well what you said.
(laughter)
It's okay.
You're a brave soul, because I called on you.
But I also think what Jonathan said is true, too,
is how do we do it in a way that is truly transformative and that
is sustained?
And it makes it not sort of a temporal difference,
but one that's indeed enduring and changes systems.
So that's how we think about social innovation.
It's about trying new approaches that leverage market forces that
cultivate evidence-based models, and that drive cross sector
collaboration to seek new outcomes,
to seek long-term impacts, to seek systems change.
In this context, we aim to serve the President about focusing on
a clear mission.
Did you all know there was an office of social innovation and
civic participation before you saw that slide?
No? Yes.
Some nods, some shrugs.
Well, let me tell you what we do.
We focus on one clear mission, which is elevating
community solutions.
It's about identifying what works and scaling it where
it needs support, maybe spotlighting it where
that's appropriate.
Maybe seeding a promising program
or a high potential initiative.
We're not here to invent.
We're not here to create.
We're not here to prescribe.
The President likes to say that the solution's
already out there.
Their typically on the ground, in communities,
on campuses where people come together to solve problems,
where people aren't constrained necessarily by the conventions
that dominate in a place like Washington,
but just about making a difference.
It's our job to lift that up and amplify wherever we can.
And we try to do that by coming up with models that harness all
of our human capital.
Strategies like national service or civic participation.
We also focus on, how do we increase the flows of
financial capital?
How can we bring more resources to bear to tackle
our toughest problems?
And how do we ensure the efficient utilization of those
resources so we're preserving the public interest and not
wasting the taxpayers' dollars?
So in the context of our work on human capital,
let me briefly mention the crucial control of
civic participation.
We believe, I deeply believe in this idea of a civic continuum,
from those of you in this room, for example,
represent I think one aspect or one spot on that continuum.
Those of you who dedicated your lives and your careers to the
public service, to those folks who participate in
programs like AmeriCorps.
Are there any former AmeriCorps members in the room?
Raise your hands.
Where did you serve?
Audience Member: Boston.
Jonathan Greenblatt: Boston. With what organization?
Audience Member: City Air.
Jonathan Greenblatt: City air. In the back?
Audience Member: Los Angeles.
Jonathan Greenblatt: With what --
Audience Member: Teach for America.
Jonathan Greenblatt: Teach. You next to her, one over?
Audience Member: Sacramento. AmeriCorps.
Jonathan Greenblatt: With who?
Audience Member: AmeriCorps, National Civilian Community Corps.
Jonathan Greenblatt: NCCC. Who else over here? I saw hands. You?
Audience Member: (inaudible)
Jonathan Greenblatt: Excellent. Over here?
Audience Member: (inaudible)
Jonathan Greenblatt: Great organization. You, behind her?
Audience Member: (inaudible)
Jonathan Greenblatt: Wonderful. How about over here? Yes?
Audience Member: Portland, Oregon, (inaudible)
Jonathan Greenblatt: Wonderful. I mean, you guys represent some of our best and
brightest, people who take the time to spend an oftentimes
immersive experiences working on the ground in our communities.
We -- I also applaud episodic volunteering,
those of you who take time out of your own busy lives to spend
an hour, a week, a month, a year,
maybe this Monday on MLK day working in your communities.
And I also, we're fascinated by the new techniques of engagement
enabled by technology.
On a civic continuum, there are opportunities for everyone to
engage and contribute to the ongoing project of our democracy.
Our role in the government here is not to make the
choices for people.
I would suggest that elevating community solutions,
the role that the President has asked me to undertake,
is about ensuring that our citizens have the widest set
of options available to them, so they can make informed,
smart choices that align with their own values.
And we can encourage entrepreneurs and we can
encourage innovators to develop the products and the services,
the programs, the platforms, that make
civic participation easier.
So the message is simple, and President Obama deeply
believes it.
If we make it easier for people to participate in democracy and
solve our common problems, they will.
And I would actually say to you, it was that spirit that elected
the President just three years ago.
And it's that spirit that I think will guide us for the
next five years.
(applause)
By the way, this is consistent with what we know from research
and behavioral economics and it's confirmed by some
recent examples of social innovation.
I mean, there's been a surge in this body of work that's
made civic participation more possible and more productive for
U.S. citizens.
And whether you call them social entrepreneurs or social
innovators or impact investors, there's all kinds of words
floating around.
But more and more we've seen mavericks,
we seem almost like revolutionaries,
from the private sector and from civil society,
for seizing opportunities to create transformative change
that scales, to find new strategies to ameliorate
entrenched dysfunction --
(laughter)
He'll never live that down.
(laughter)
But really, to simultaneously create
change and transform communities.
And it's role -- I would actually say to you that I'm
here and it's a privilege to be here every day.
It's my responsibility to do what we can to create the
conditions in which that kind of enterprise can flourish.
Daniel Goldman has written about radical transparency.
The idea that only by exposing the true price of goods and
services can we -- that we produce and consume will we be
able to make really, deeply, profoundly informed choices
guided by our commitments for a clean planet and for
healthy relationships.
He argues, and I'm sure many of you are already familiar with
his work, that to provide people with more accessible
information, to make the choices in the marketplace that reflect
their values, they will make the right choices.
And we see this in all the time.
As I said, this is part of the spirit that animates the
President every day.
By creating pathways for people to participate in Democracy,
they will.
And we see this in the grocery store on the shelves where
innovators have taken commodities and found
ways to imbue them with meaning and purpose,
creating brands that are not just about consumption,
they're actually about creating a better world.
I was involved with one of these,
a business called Ethos Water.
And I cofounded with the idea of using a bottled water,
who every time you consume it, it would donate dollars to fund
humanitarian water projects around the world.
Today, because of the results of scores of millions of consumers,
scores of millions of dollars have been devoted to water
related projects in Asia, Africa, Latin America.
We see it -- we see policy driving some of this, too.
The higher fuel standards advocated by President Obama
have really helped to catalyze the evolution of clean cars from
Toyota, to the Prius, to the Tessla -- the Toyota Prius to
the Tessla, the Fisker, and lots of other hybrid models.
Policy choices have created the conditions in which
consumers respond.
And it's not only good for the environment,
it's good in terms of economic recovery and job creation,
as we've seen Detroit really thrive in the past 12 to 24
months, in part shaped by policy.
But make no mistake, creating real,
meaningful opportunities for the people of Detroit and the
manufacturing base of our country.
At the same time, we have to provide people with tools to
make it easier, not just to buy and to consume,
but to actually take part in public life.
And sometimes social innovators are the creators
of new technology.
But sometimes they're simply the ones who find an existing
technology, a platform that's already out there,
and find innovative ways to use it.
So for example, and these are sort of torn from the headlines,
think about Twitter.
Imagine this for a moment when Biz Stone and his cofounder
created Twitter, they were thinking about a better way
to text message to each other.
Today, there are more than 200 million messages exchanged on
that service a day.
And it's evolved from a way to get in touch with your friends.
Now, it's become a democratizing platform that gives voice to the
masses and has allowed ordinary citizens in the Middle East,
in central Europe, and around the world to be heard,
despite the policies of their governments who might otherwise
feel different.
Think about donor shoes.
I am going to guess there isn't a single person in this room
who's not familiar with donor shoes.
It's, I think one of the most fascinating examples of this new
modalities of civic engagement.
It was an ordinary schoolteacher in the Bronx who needed dollars
because of the, he was a high school schoolteacher,
I should say.
He needed supplies for his students.
He went online to post his needs to see if anyone would donate
money so his kids could have books and supplies.
It was a simple idea in 2000 when Charles Best
created DonorsChoose.
Today, over $100 million have moved through that platform.
$100 million in small contributions,
helping nearly 6 million kids and funding -- are you ready for
this -- a quarter of a million projects.
And it all came again from very humble origins.
A teacher who simply said we need a better way to fix
an old problem.
We need a better way to create change and scale.
I'm also fascinated but those folks who simply take ordinary
tools and put them to work.
You know, Undersecretary Kanter met Mark Hanis just
the other day.
Mark Hannis is the founder of genocide intervention network.
How many of you know if you have genocide intervention at work on
your campuses?
Raise your hands.
A couple of you.
For those of you who don't know, my guess is it's already there.
It's the largest network of college students.
It's operating on universities as well as the campuses of
community colleges, bringing together young people to fight
against genocide.
And how did it grow?
How did it prosper?
By using the old technique of phone trees to make it easier
for young people to call their Congressmen and make an impact.
It's a pretty remarkable platform.
We see other companies, as well, like Timberland, Ratheon,
Whole Foods, lots of businesses are making civic engagement,
are making volunteering part of their ethos,
part of what animates all of their workers.
So looking ahead, I think you'll see the White House,
this office, continue to elevate community solutions to create
the conditions in which companies and colleges,
in which ordinary people and professional investors,
in which philanthropists and citizens can come together to
elevate community solutions and use social innovation as
a propellant to advance our domestic priorities.
We'll accelerate impact.
We'll create the outcomes we all hope to see.
As we look ahead, I know the President and all of his staff,
including myself, are excited to collaborate with all of you,
with all of you, as we take this report to the next level,
as we turn these recommendations into realities,
and demonstrate the administration's commitment
to preparing citizens to strengthen our communities,
our democracy and our nation.
Thank you very much, and enjoy the rest of your evening.
(applause)
Eduardo Ochoa: Thank you very much, Jonathan.
Our next speaker is Robert Velasco,
acting CEO of the corporation for national
and community service.
In that role, he oversees the federal agency that engages in
more than 5 million Americans -- engages more than 5 million
Americans in service through its senior corps, AmeriCorps,
and other programs, and leads President Obama's national call
to service initiative, United We Serve.
Prior to being tabbed for this role,
Robert served as chief operating officer and acting chief of
program operations for CNCS.
During nearly two decades of dedicated federal service,
he has also worked in management program and regional operations
across the U.S. department of health and human services.
Robert is a public servant at heart and a true champion of the
value and impact of service.
Robert.
(applause)
Robert Velasco: Good afternoon, everyone.
Thanks for that introduction, Eduardo.
It's been said that the world is run by those who show up.
Today's conference is about preparing the next generation
to do just that.
This is a critical conversation about the future of civic
learning and democratic engagement.
And I want to thank Secretary Duncan and Undersecretary Martha
Cantor for the invitation to join you today.
I'm speaking immediately before one of the most passionate
education champions in the nation so I'll be brief.
But I'd like to talk for just a moment about why the work of
preparing students for lifelong citizenship is so important.
I want to talk about why what you do as educators to engage
students in the world around them matters.
There is something special happening with our young people.
Last year, according to our volunteering in America report,
3.2 million college students dedicated more than 307 million
hours of service in their communities.
Service valued at more than $6.4 billion.
More than $6.4 billion to our economy.
The number of millennial volunteers has increased by
almost a million per year since 2006.
And recently, applications to AmeriCorps,
our program that engages more than 80,000 Americans
in intensive service each year, have nearly tripled.
The message is loud and clear.
Our nation's youth want to be more than spectators in society.
At the corporation for national and community service,
we see the impact of young people every day on some of
our country's most pressing problems.
More than half a million students serve through our
programs every year.
They're teaching, tutoring and mentoring children and helping
individuals and communities rebuild after disasters.
They're expanding access to healthcare and economic
opportunity for our most vulnerable citizens,
and preserving the environment for future generations.
And after their service, they're continuing their commitment to
make this nation a better place.
60% of AmeriCorps alumni go into public service careers.
Today, we have a few AmeriCorps members here.
Can you please raise your hands?
Great. Thank you for your service.
If you're ever looking for some hope for the future,
or to see why civic learning and engagement is so important,
just spend a few minutes talking to one of them.
Service works.
It helps shape the lives of young people and positions them
to be lifelong active citizens.
Just last week, there was a report about the growing number
of students graduating with law degrees who are going
into public interest jobs.
The experts were asked what's behind the trend.
Is it the economy, the desire for younger generations to have
more work-life balance, or something else?
What David Stern, executive director of Equal Justice Works,
and an AmeriCorps grantee thinks is there's a generation of young
people entering law school with an established commitment to
public service.
This means that by the time these students take their LSATs,
by the time they apply to their short list of schools,
by the time they take their first year courses,
they've already decided that their education can be used
for the common good.
And that just isn't happening with law students.
Young people are choosing earlier and more often to
take up public service careers.
That's no coincidence.
That's the result of the work of many of you.
Teachers and schools and organizations that take students
out of the classroom and into the community,
that teach our young people that they can do more than just study
and analyze problems, they can help solve them.
Our schools, our colleges and our universities play a powerful
role in engaging students in the world around them.
That's why every year, the corporation for national and
community service invest more than $550 million or more than
half of our funding in education.
It's why we train, support and mobilize thousands of
professional educators who work in k through 12 and college
classrooms across the country.
And it's why for two decades, we've worked to bridge service
to education through all of our programs.
We'll continue to do our part to cultivate the next generation of
active citizens and public servants,
including the tens of thousands of AmeriCorps members.
We'll continue to support some of the most innovative and
proven strategies to put more young people on the path to a
brighter future through programs such as our social
innovation fund.
And through the President's higher education community
service honor roll, the interfaith challenge,
and other initiatives will continue to challenge educators
to make service a central part of the student experience.
Thank you for being a part of today's conversation and for
what you do to connect classroom to community,
and community to classroom.
For making civics come alive.
The corporation for national and community service believes in
your work, we support your work, and we look forward to being a
partner and a resource to you as you continue this
very important work.
You are helping to shape our nation by shaping our young
people to be better citizens.
And so as many others have said today, our success,
the future of our democracy, depends on it.
Thank you.
(applause)
Eduardo Ochoa: Well, our program is supposed to end right now,
but something tells me you're going to stick around for our
next speaker.
It's really an honor for me and a pleasure to introduce the man
who certainly brought me to Washington along with Martha
Kanter, and who I think arguably -- and I know I shouldn't be
making comparisons, but arguably you could say that he's the most
effective Secretary of Education we've ever had in this country.
There's been some tremendous changes in the past few years
that have really energized our community toward meeting the
President's visionary and transformative goal for 2020 --
education goal for 2020.
The secretary was confirmed by the U.S.
Senate on January 20, 2009.
And prior to his appointment as Secretary of Education,
he served for almost ten years as the CEO of the Chicago Public
schools, becoming the longest serving big city superintendent
in the country.
Secretary Duncan, I think, we're looking forward to hearing your
take on the subject we've been talking about today.
(applause)
Secretary Arnie Duncan: Thanks so much for having me.
I know it's the end of a long afternoon,
and I have a beautiful eloquent speech,
which I probably won't give, because I think you guys have
had a long day.
So I'll have it online tomorrow, I'll wing it here,
and I apologize if I make any mistakes.
But keep it relatively brief, you've got a nice reception
after this.
I first want to thank Martha and Eduardo and our team for all of
their hard work.
Please give them a round of applause.
(applause)
It has been an amazing couple of years,
and none of this stuff would be happening without their hard
work, their passion, not just in the Department of Education,
but across government.
Robert and his team have been amazing partners and we're all
in this together.
I know this is the choir here, so I'll try not to
do too much preaching.
But I think simply put, this anecdote unfortunately is true,
I won't get my numbers right, but a vast majority -- a much
higher percentage of Americans can name the Three Stooges than
can name the three branches of government.
And so that's our collective responsibility is to change
that basic fact.
And this work is real personal for me.
My first job when I went to work for the Chicago public schools
was to institute a service learning requirement.
And we required students to do 40 hours of community service.
And there was a bunch of controversy and push back
around that.
But I have to tell you as we got rolling,
I can't tell you how many young people came to me who said,
I hated this, I didn't want to do it, and they ended up 500,
700, 1,000 hours of service because they had the
opportunity, they had never had that exposure.
And for me, it's sort of going back to where Robert started.
To me, we have this tremendous imbalance.
Our young people have an appetite, they're committed,
they want to be engaged, and somehow systemically at the
elementary level, the middle school level,
the high school level, and the university level,
we've walked away from providing those opportunities.
Somehow it's been a distraction, somehow it hasn't been seen as
part of sort of the core set of knowledge that they
should understand.
But for me, education has always been so much more than about
book knowledge.
It's really about how do we engage in a vibrant democracy.
And you can teach some of those things using textbooks.
But hands on learning experiences that engage young
people in the community and have them at very early ages start to
see the impact they can have, I think is probably the best
way to teach that.
And so we're going to do everything we can to try
and create more of those opportunities,
to make those more the norm than the exception.
And part of the issue I struggle with so much,
and this is just another example of it,
is so often opportunities happen for the wealthy and for the
privileged and not for the poor and not for minority students.
So in my home town of Chicago, historically service learning
of service was seen to be the activity of the
private school students.
And my public school students were seen as the recipients of
the service.
And we want to try and flip that on its head so that every single
young person, whether they came from privilege or not,
had an opportunity at 10 and 12 and 14 and 15 years old to
demonstrate the difference they can make in their communities.
Right now unfortunately when you survey freshmen in college and
then seniors in college, they feel they've had
less opportunities to make a difference,
less opportunities to be engaged over their time in college than
when they entered.
So that passion is there, that desire is there,
but somehow we're not meeting that need.
And so collectively, we have to do something very,
very different.
And what's so interesting to me is the exact same skills that
young people learn through civic participation,
through being part of a vibrant democracy,
those are skills they need to be successful in the economy today.
They need to be able to work as part of a diverse team;
they need to be able to ask hard questions,
they need to be able to think critically.
And I think rather than being a distraction,
or something that pulls them off course,
these are exactly the kinds of opportunities that are going to
prepare them to do well, whatever they do.
Whether they go into AmeriCorps or whether they go work in
corporate America, they are going to need these skills and
these opportunities that we collectively, government,
private sector, nonprofits, entrepreneurial,
social service agencies, we have to provide many more of those
opportunities going forward.
I saw Brian Brady here.
Brian, do we have some of our students here?
Speaker: (inaudible)
Secretary Arnie Duncan: We've got Chicago Ag students?
Can we ask our Chicago Ag students to please stand.
We'll give them a round of applause, and Brian.
(applause)
This is off topic, but Chicago Ag is one of my
most favorite high schools in the heart of Chicago,
on the south side, we actually have a working farm and there we
had a cow give birth to a calf.
So we felt we were really proud about that.
But that's not why we're here.
(laughter)
We're here because I just didn't think this was important,
I was able to witness what a huge difference these kinds of
opportunities made.
So Brian (inaudible) challenge did an amazing job of working
with young people around Chicago to do a couple things.
They set up a student advisory council.
They met with me on a monthly basis and to push me and my
management team in some very significant policy ways.
And we thought we were passionate,
we thought we were hearing all the issues.
But let me tell you, when you have 15, 16,
17 teenagers telling you, Arne, you don't get it,
you're missing what's really happening, you know,
in our schools and on the streets.
That's profound.
And that information was so helpful to us as we thought
about policy.
Brian also trains hundreds and hundreds of young people to go
be election judges all across the city.
In Chicago, that's tough work.
(laughter)
But young people, 16, 17, before they can even vote,
are participating in democracy.
They're out working on a whole host of different campaigns,
bipartisan, nonpartisan, but getting that exposure.
These are young people who most people might say might be more
likely to drop out, coming from tough communities,
single parent homes, you know, all the disadvantages.
But they are so actively engaged in what they're doing,
I was absolutely confident about what they were going
to accomplish long term.
And so we have to continue to find ways to make these kinds
of opportunities the norm.
Please challenge us.
We want to be a good partner.
We've laid out this roadmap and call to action.
It has nine steps that I won't read to you,
you can go through it yourself, that we're committed to doing,
many of which we're already trying to do.
We want to take it to the next level.
But please challenge us.
If you see us missing a beat, if you see something we're not
doing, we want to hear about that.
Eduardo and Martha, our entire team,
we want to be good partners.
The final thing I'll say is as passionate,
as committed as our team is, we know we can't begin do
this all alone.
And we need you.
That's why we're all here.
We need to work on this together.
Right now as a country what would we give ourselves?
C minus? D plus? D minus?
I'm not quite sure.
But not a grade we can be proud of with what we're doing.
This is not a time for incremental change.
This is not a time for tinkering around the edges.
We've got to think radically different.
We have to do it together.
Hopefully today is the start of a conversation,
by no means an ending point, but the start of a conversation.
So these kinds of opportunities for 10-year-olds and
22-year-olds can become much more the norm rather
than the exception.
Our children need it, their families need it,
their communities need it, our country needs it.
There's a thirst out there, there's a hunger out there.
We have to do a better job of feeding that together.
Thank you so much for having me.
Thank you for your creativity.
Let's get to work together.
Thanks for having me this afternoon.
(applause)
Eduardo Ochoa: Well, now I really am the only one standing between
you and reception.
(laughter)
So I just want to take a couple of seconds to thank a number of
people that have helped make this possible.
Thank you, especially to Harry Boyte and Carol Schneider for
their leadership in this process.
(applause)
Thank you to Karen Musel, Jim Leach, Dave Mathews,
Jonathan Greenblatt, Robert Valesco,
and finally and thank you to Martha Kanter.
(applause)
And once again, thank you to Secretary Duncan for his
leadership in our department.
(applause)
And now I'm going to direct you to the reception,
which is going to be at Blair House.
And so you have to go north on 17th street and turn right on
Pennsylvania Avenue.
And we are adjourned. Thank you.