A discussion of military and civilian National Service programs, from the Brookings Institution, this is just over an hour. 30 seconds. 30 seconds was particularly effective. It is my happy duty to introduce and moderate the second panel. I will begin by introducing myself briefly. I am bill gault, senior fellow in the government studies program at brookings, delighted to be a small cog in the Service Share alliance. And two people in particular, mel sawhill conceding the stand working tirelessly for six months and also john allen, for letting his vast appearance and events moral authority to our enterprise this morning and i think it is a sign that brookings is spiritually aligned with the National Service movement. Let me introduce the question this way. If National Service is the answer, what is the question . And we have heard and i think will hear three very different kinds of answers to that question. It is useful to keep them secret. The first test to do with service as an avenue of personal growth, the expansion of character. The second has to do with actual goods done for others, service and the roots sense. The paper by john bridgeland and john dilulio begins with our broader challenges, with National Service as potential response to the challenge. A decline of mutual trust, the sorts of things called General Social trust and a precipitous rise in divisive partisanship. There is a difference in the party system and partisanship and sometime in the past two generations we cross that line and now find ourselves in an uncomfortable and unproductive place. And third is what i call the erosion solving mentality. The idea that elected officials, and problems with the public is identified, the solutions the public itself cannot specify and the job of Public Services to public ends into public means and i have personally been deeply impressed with the quality of iraq and afghanistan veterans who entered Public Service, they have this problem solving mentality and one of the questions is whether the National Service experience on the civilian side can replicate that kind of we are all in it together foxhole now. How do we find a way to prevail, how will that mentality spread . Or to put it in oldfashioned language it goes all the way back to william james, National Service the moral equivalent of war or is there no moral equivalent of war. We have a fantastic panel to help us address these questions. I will begin to my immediate left with john bridgeland, former director of the White House Policy Council under george w. Bush and currently serves as vice chair of the Service Year Alliance which you already heard and from whom you heard. And john dilulio junior is professor of politics, religion and Civil Society and professor of everything. John also has white house experience as the first director of the office of faithbased and Community Initiatives in 2001 which means they were colleagues, might have been expected. To their left is the director of Government Relations for the Service Year Alliance which means she is where the service year hits the political road which is an important nexus. Peter wehner is Vice President and senior fellow of the policy center and has experience ever speech writer and director of strategery and has a moral voice, few reflected more deeply than pete what it means to have a healthy society. And what our current bills are and whether they can be traced and he will offer some reflections from a distinctively and i would add faithbased perspective on National Service and without further a do, john bridgeland and john dilulio are going jointly to present their paper, will america embrace National Service. One note, there is a broad commitment to shared ideals and goals, we cant get carried away with ourselves. The empirical inquiry matters a lot. It is where we test the feasibility of the ideas we cherish and may have to change those ideas in some respects as a result of what honest inquiry discovers a model of honest inquiry, coauthors proud and associated with. We need packed houses for National Service on across america. I want to thank bill galston without whom america with susan stroud who i see in the back, alan casey, and in the life in the country when president clinton said invest in your country, we will invest in you, it was a galvanizing moment. The social genome product, a host of initiatives, if anything is behind what happens with National Service, now that you are conducting this. I want to thank john dilulio for the greatest years of my life and having the opportunity to serve sidebyside after 9 11. And seeing emergence from the country of people all over the globe wanting to make common cause and make a better country and world together is quite extraordinary. When i came in this morning i met doctor joseph hecht and that is that all . Know. I found that the medical reserve corps after 9 11 and that is the model of what we are trying to achieve for the viewing National Service or Citizen Service as fundamental and foundational. And Civic Education reminds me the people who found that our country, George Washington who we assume the folder did not lay down citizens on adam said to serve the country ends but when jefferson penned the notion of the pursuit of happiness it wasnt just an individual right but governor Duval Patrick reminds us, a collaborative enterprise, i cant be truly happy and not worry about the happiness of the neighbor or someone who is homeless or vulnerable or worried, the spirit of we the people, is the foundation over democracy, we have to rescue that spirit. Why now, why always for National Service, we are trying to do it justice. The first panel spoke so eloquently about our civic collapse but i grew up in cincinnati, ohio just a few doors down from a man named neil armstrong. This very shy reclusive man used to come over for dinner and i was at an impressionable age and he said the audacity of this young president to go to the well of the house to put a man on the moon within a decade and return him safely within ten years, we had no idea how to pull it off and yet 400,000 engineers around the country Work Together to make it happen. I remember being a 9yearold kid on a screened porch watching neil armstrong, can actually address i dont see why we dont have an opportunity in the country to take on education and conservation and poverty and a host of other issues to help address. It is interesting to note what we are doing, Robert Putnam wrote Better Together and the third call our kids. From a historical perspective, social code hes in and social fragmentation, political polarization, economic inequality and civic collapse work in virtual lockstep. If you look at trends from the gilded age through the 1960s, 70s and today, you see them moving to gather. Similar to how we view one another, how we view inequality economically and having a political, cultural and economic nervous breakdown in the country so we see the effect of lack of understanding of the constitution. There was this wonderful book called we hold these truths, the celebration of the declaration that says the highest office in the United States is not the presidency but citizen and we need to remind young people in the country that citizenship is really the wave of the future. I want to talk concretely. A number of audiences all over the country and stand the kristin comes back rallying the court, can we actually pull it off. And widespread public support among republicans, democrats, independents, and the earth conservation corps with a full kennedy and bob nixon and work with most vulnerable kids. And we brought kids from potomac, in the mixing efforts, and have the audacity to ask what politics are you . There were republicans, democrats and even a libertarian. There were christians, jews, muslims and the project they were working on was bringing our nation symbol back to the nations capital, 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 briefly can we bring this to scale and what do we learn from various channels . Interestingly in 1933 Franklin Roosevelt told congress to do an emergency session and by summer has 250,000 young unemployed men in the woods for the conservation corps and by the end of the program, 3 million served, 3 billion trees have been planted, 84 million acres of land had been saved which is the entire acreage of our National Park system today. When you talk to a spiritual experience it changed the trajectory for the rest of their lives and it was run by the u. S. Army and George Marshall organized the ccc camps since 1943, how we marry military, civilian and National Service together is compelling. The peace corps, the thought that we have us policy to send sons and daughters and mothers and grandmothers and grandfathers to remote areas across the world to meet needs in other countries was a bold experiment but with this memo to john kennedy in 1961, didnt want to create a federal program called peace corps, agencies at all levels and peace corps remains small because vision wasnt fulfilled and then came americorps rolling along which actually took that instinct to go to the strength of america to its Nonprofit Institutions in colleges and universities and to give support to those institutions and build the strength of Civil Society and those models are instructive if we think how to marry military, civilian and Public Service and how do we go to where the strength of country is today which is Civil Society. Over to brother d to talk about other elements including mandatory versus civilian National Service. Thanks. Some of you are wondering what these socks are. They are Philadelphia Eagles socks. Go birds. I feel your pain, redskins fans. Go gnats. Im not going to say anything, no comment but i want to thank bill sawhill for inviting me and it is an honor to be here with three dear old friends and bill galston, john virgil and the brilliant and bold peter wehner. You are the one here who is practicing what people is preaching for real so it is a special treat to meet you and be with you. Yield the balance of my time, to talk a little bit about aspects of will america embrace National Service report. It deals with Public Opinion and evidence on benefits of National Service so if you look at the polling data on National Service back to the creation of americorps from 1993 to the present, looking at all the surveys that have been done it is fair to say there is one overarching conclusion, two corollary findings and one caution. The overarching conclusion is most americans do support National Service, that is every demographic description and without regard part of the identification for ideological disposition. If it is voluntary. That is unpaid, not required by law or both and majorities tend to oppose it, mandatory or compulsory, required by law or enforced and administered by the government. One corollary is in favor majorities shrink if voluntary, government supported, by the way government has a nickel and a quarter, . 25 in the dollar, turns a bit. If it is mandatory or compulsory it goes down even more. There is no question the overall finding for National Service. Another corollary is most people believe that service, whether the service is National Community, paid or unpaid benefits the servers. People believe they develop skills and enhance civic responsibility. They believe it benefits the persons, organizations and communities where people served by supplying direct services or performing vital work in the community and benefits the Wider Society and elevate citizenship, helps to model a bridge for socioeconomic, political and other divides. There is one caution here and the caution is for all the polls that have been done, we have a relatively limited universe of polls and they are not all entirely well constructed, there is stratification and sampling issues, interpretation issues. If you compare the polling and survey research, to polling data and survey research on other nontop line issues like faithbased initiatives and so forth it is a relatively anemic survey literature. What is needed there is a tuneup and if youre interested in that, look up the appendix to our report and we have suggestions how to go about a relatively inexpensive good polls are expensive. You might be able to prove the Research Survey research. Let me turn to the benefits of National Service. We could probably fill this nice room at brookings with all the studies that have been done looking at the benefits of National Service and the vast majority of those just National Service works. We need to make a couple distinctions here. We know that volunteering works. Compared to otherwise comparable people who volunteer and do the volunteering have higher life satisfaction, better self rated help or better occupational or academic outcomes, longer lives, and lots of other positive outcomes. On the benefits of volunteering, on the benefits of volunteer programs who are National Service programs in particular. For helping out on ones church or Neighborhood School or Community Elder care, what gets counted, occurs outside the context of any regular commitment or quasiformal or programmatic organizational setting or context. You have to make that distraction. That dooley said when you do look at the research and literature that does address National Service programs in particular the findings are very positive. There was a landmark literature review done in 2004. Nothing has quite been done at that level of sophistication. I looked at 139 pretty good studies and the bottom line conclusion of that literature review on National Service programs was in the vast majority of cases you have National Service program exceeding now or negative affected by 671. Many of the benefits and most of the studies if you say what benefits are documented, the servers skill development, so direct benefits to beneficiaries of the programs, Service Expansion and harder to measure improvements in quality. It is all there. We have made a promising start with respect to benefit cost analyses of National Service programs. There was a wonderful study done in 2013 by clive bellfield, a study done for the franklin project and Civic Enterprises invoices for National Service which found the benefit cost ratio of federal National Service programs of 41 and that is a gargantuan finding. Our benefit cost analyses are surprisingly in their infancy. I hate to conclude with a cliche that more research is needed but more research is needed. And i think that all said, i want to conclude before i turn it back over to bridge that i wouldnt be afraid in this particular area to go with the plural of anecdote is data and let me tell you why this is not in our report. I met one of my former princeton students who went to the Brookings Institution a moment ago in 1999, i have been in the academic dodge for 700 real jobs for almost 40 years and i can tell you that in all those years, running an Academic Leadership and Service Learning program, hundreds of former students, i get letters and emails all the time and they say the best thing we ever did was all those Service Programs like participating in human, physical and Financial Recovery process over 10 years. It was transformational. A laboratory for learning and i believe it. We are close i dont want to say we have proven it but we are getting closer and of the more research. Im not afraid of those data. Bridge, you can go from there. Very good. Into construction with cousin jimmy