Transitions

I completed my summer internship on Friday afternoon and flew back to Cambridge last night. Still not fully re-settled back in my apartment and beginning work tomorrow as an Orientation Advisor for the incoming MPP1s, I haven't had much time to fully reflect on the summer and its impact.

I feel honored to have had the opportunity to serve the White House Council for Community Solutions for the past eleven weeks, and I'm indebted to the Women and Public Policy Program and the Adrienne Hall Fellowship for their generous support, especially in cultivating a community of incredible women doing important work across the globe.

Working with the Council deepened my content knowledge about programs and networks of interventions that support youth who are disconnected or at risk of becoming disconnected from education and the workforce; about the imperative of service and civic engagement as strategies in catalyzing community development; and about the promise of cross-sector collaboration in rebuilding isolated and fragmented parts of communities. The Council also taught me a great deal about the politics of decision-making; about using strategies of negotiation and crisis management; and about the ebb and flow of progress in the unyielding global struggles to alleviate poverty, rebuild communities, and prepare the next generation of young people to be educated, productive, and engaged citizens of the world.


As the summer comes to a close, and as I reorient myself to my neighborhood (and reminisce that it was today one year ago that I moved to Massachusetts for the first time!), I'll say goodbye for now, for I'm sure that for the next nine months my life will be consumed by my coursework, my classmates, my second-year policy project, my work with the Student Public Service Collaborative, and other exciting adventures. Thanks for following my summer's work!

$173,000,000,000.00

In 2010, volunteers served 8.1 billion hours, which has a low estimated value of $173 billion.

This morning, the Corporation for National and Community Service released the latest data available on Volunteering in America. The website, updated annually, hosts the most comprehensive set of data on volunteering and national service in America, with some pretty interesting trends and demographics at the national, state, and local level.

Some highlights:

• In 2010, 8.3 million Young Adults dedicated 844 million hours of service to communities across the country -- this amounts to just 21.9 percent of young people, ages 16 to 24.
• The District of Columbia has an average annual volunteer rate of about 30 percent.
• The Twin-Cities win for having the highest proportion of residents volunteer of the 51 largest US cities -- a rocking 37.1 percent.
• 29.3 percent of women volunteered in 2010, compared to 23.2 percent of men.

The site profiles how volunteers help solve community issues through public-private partnerships and community-based organizations. These spotlighted examples amplify the founding principles of the White House Council for Community Solutions -- that all across America, individuals and community groups are finding solutions to local problems, and that every American community can create the civic infrastructure or local road map to drive significant progress on any community challenge.

An NU professor of mine always repeats the mantra, "Think globally. Act locally." Indeed, as models like Cities of Service continue to scale-up, I expect that next year's volunteering statistics will be even higher. The Cities of Service focus on “impact volunteering" -- strategies that target community needs, use best practices, and set clear outcomes and measures to gauge progress -- is particularly exciting. The philosophy moves beyond simply doing service to do a good deed and instead considers service as a mutually beneficial activity that leverages an individual's assets and strengths to address local community needs.

Is your city a city of service?

From good intentions to great impact

Over the weekend, a teacher-friend of mine from Chicago and I stopped by the Save Our Schools march/rally/festival that was taking place in the Ellipse at the White House. We didn't stay for very long, but we were both puzzled by how rapidly polarizing the rally was. A few of the guiding principles of the march -- demanding equitable funding for all schools and community leadership in local school decision-making -- are  worthy of support and noble in theory, but the words thrown around with derision towards data ("end testing now!" and "no federal competitive funding!") were unsettling.

The fatalistic rhetoric that our schools need "saving" and that joy and creativity are dead are far-fetched. I know that protests and rallies have their purpose (and, sure, I've participated in many myself!), but I couldn't help but wonder what this throng of people was gearing up for. Parents and teachers advocating for more community involvement in Washington? Posters blaming Arne Duncan and Barack Obama don't really accomplish much. Angry fear-mongering rhetoric clouds the real message that improving education is a national imperative, and reform ideas can percolate both downwards from the federal government and national organizations and upwards from local communities. First, though, the national conversation on education reform must move beyond ideologies, finger-pointing and false dichotomies. This CLASP piece on task forces on poverty and opportunity gives me hope that state-level efforts to move new ideas can have great impact.

This morning, I had the pleasure of meeting Dorothy Stoneman, founder and president of YouthBuild, a comprehensive support program in communities across the country for low-income young people to work towards connecting to education and the workforce. She is an incredible advocate in the arenas of youth development, civic engagement, and service-learning, and it was wonderful being able to sit down with her and speak candidly about this work. She expressed the growing tension between supporting programs that work and attempting to shift systems towards equilibrium change. Obviously, it's not an either/or question, but in the same way that prevention and intervention must be balanced, programs and systems must be balanced as well.

It's the economy, stupid.

With the debt ceiling deadline looming and in these generally harsh fiscal times, specific domestic policy issues don't generally get a lot of traction. The way to capture the attention of the American public, it seems, is by telling a good story.

Last night, I had the opportunity to attend an informal discussion with Racquel Russell, Special Assistant to the President for Mobility and Opportunity at the Domestic Policy Council. She spoke very briefly about her work on a range of issues at the White House related to widening the social safety net and improving systems supporting children and families, but she spent the majority of the session answering questions. The main takeaway seemed to be about messaging. In this economic climate, we have to get creative about funding -- leveraging public-private partnerships has the opportunity to multiply investments in an unprecedented way. At the end of the day, though, telling the right stories well is an important part of how to change the way we think about any issue.

NPR has been running a short series this week on how school dropout rates add to the nation's fiscal burden. The story is familiar to anyone in the field: failing to address the dropout crisis costs taxpayers billions of dollars in lost wages, increased use of social services like health care and welfare, and higher incarceration costs -- not to mention the more intangible costs to personal well-being, community connectedness, and overall civic health. Inaction is perilous, yet little has changed. The features highlight stories of the faces behind the numbers.

Whichever philosophy you prefer -- whether to focus on helping those who are already disconnected from education and the workforce (intervention) or those who are at risk of becoming disconnected (prevention) -- the message is plainly and simply that we have an economic imperative to address community challenges that are leaving behind so many young people every year, costing them and the nation billions of dollars.

Earlier this week, the Task Force on Job Creation highlighted youth unemployment as a key area to address the jobs crisis. One of the pull-quotes in the report rings true to the relevance of the Council's near-term focus on disconnected youth: 

Young people who do not have a successful work experience by age 25 are at a greatly increased risk of lifelong poverty.

Commentary this week by Algernon Austin in the Spotlight on Poverty and Opportunity only reiterates this point:

Once youth get into the habit of working, they become less likely to stop. Making an investment in teens now will ensure they have a better chance of continuing to work throughout their lifetimes.

The quantitative case to the nation has been made, and reiterated again. The qualitative case to the nation has been made, and reiterated again. The question remains to be seen whether community leaders will act on this message and do their part to support this so-often forgotten population with untapped potential.

Totally unashamed of my giddiness...

This evening, thanks to one of my wonderful CNCS/WHCCS colleagues, I got to go bowling at the White House!

The Bowling Alley is underneath the EEOB,
but that's the West Wing!

The entrance to the bowling alley.

The backdrop of the two lanes has a a pretty awesome illustration
of fireworks behind the White House. There are also photographs
of Presidents and First Ladies playing all around the room.

Take a step back and refresh everything.

It's absurdly hot in DC this week. Looking out of the window from one our office rooms, I felt bad for the construction workers outside somehow working through the midday heat. Meanwhile, I was inside all day.

Since I work in an office, there aren't usually that many things to document in images. When I'm not at my computer, what I'm looking at is usually something like this --- scrawled notes on Corporation for the National and Community Service stationery with my Global Engagement Summit "engage." water bottle nearby [and more often than not, an unnecessarily purchased chai].

The first item on my work calendar this morning was a "Whiteboard Brainstorming Session" with the Executive Director and the four of us who support her. As a follow-up from last week's public conference call where the Council presented its proposed interim recommendations to the White House, we started to work on delineating a clearer and more detailed work plan that would outline the work that the Council could accomplish to support the interim recommendations. In doing so, we realized that we needed to rethink (again?) how the various ideas were organized and what the broader umbrella announcement / recommendation / big idea really is.

Thus, the brainstorming session.

Four hours, a few bagels, and many iterations later, we ended up with this:

And then we turned that into understandable words.

One hand knowing what the other is doing

I surprisedly ran into a former classmate while waiting for the bus this morning. When I told her that I'm supporting the Council's work, she asked me whether I work with the other White House Councils (two of our classmates work on the White House Council on Environmental Quality). Funnily enough, just today our Executive Director attended a meeting of the designated federal officers of all the White House Councils!

Navigating all of the cross-agency
initiatives can get a little confusing.

There's always an incredible amount of overlap in policy since at some level, the challenges and opportunities facing communities, our nation, and the world are interconnected.  In this example, the various White House Councils were all created for specific reasons, but they have some natural overlap. Our Council's efforts on skill development for youth who are neither in school nor in the workforce naturally align with some of the work of the President's Council on Jobs and Competitiveness, which was created by executive order just one month after the Council for Community Solutions was created.

As I've mentioned before, the Council is currently working on its interim recommendations to the President. Part of this effort has involved outreach to federal agencies whose work is relevant to youth policy and community development. This afternoon, we hosted a conference call with staff from a few cabinet-level agencies to gather their feedback. My main takeaway from the call was that there is a great deal of ongoing interagency collaboration in just these areas where policy areas align. Still, there was some mention -- and detailed description -- of initiatives in which the Corporation for National and Community Service is a key partner. With so many cross-agency efforts, lines are easily blurred and crossed.

Collaboration across institutions is difficult -- and it takes time. As the Council works to create a framework for how communities can collaborate more effectively across sectors, one ongoing challenge is to what degree organizations in collaborative efforts should have an inclusive big tent that encompasses everything and everyone while still having enough specificity to make a tangible impact.  I read a new 99% tip yesterday on "How to Break Through Bureaucracy to Keep Projects Moving" that suggests how innovation can surface regardless of organizational size, process, and procedures. While that is definitely true, I still wonder how to successfully build collaborative systems that avoid the need for a body that coordinates the coordinating bodies.