Worldview Magazine - Fall 2007 - (Page 13)

Commentary IF YOU ARE LUCKY You have the ambition to volunteer in this world by Harris Wofford F teaching in Kansas. With a laugh, she said something like, “Have you ever taught school for 30 years in Kansas?” or more than 50 years, going back long before the great experience of working with Sargent Shriver in the Peace Corps, I’ve been involved in efforts to create opportunities for people to serve, at home and abroad, or to challenge young and old to get actively engaged in our self-government. And some of the most challenging opportunities for me have come in these last years of growing seniority. At 65, I had the unexpected chance to represent Pennsylvania in the United States Senate, experiencing both an upset victory in the special election of l991, and then, in the Republican surge of 1994, a defeat when Congressman Rick Santorum retired me. In the Senate, we failed to get even one good next step toward universal health insurance but we did produce the National Service Act of 1993, creating the Corporation for National and Community Service, At 70, I was asked by the President to become chief executive officer of the then-embattled Corporation, including the new domestic Peace Corps, AmeriCorps, as well as student Service-Learning, and the Senior Corps with Foster Grandparents, Senior Companions, and RSVP–the Retired Senior Volunteer Program. By the end of Clinton’s term, AmeriCorps had grown from some 20,000 members to 50,000. After 9/11, President Bush called for AmeriCorps to grow to 75,000, a goal reached in 2006, and now the total number of AmeriCorps members who have served since 1964 is more than 500,000. And the Senior Corps has about 500,000 volunteers per year in its placement system. At 75, I was asked to chair America’s Promise, the campaign for children and youth that was launched at the 1997 Presidents’ Summit in Philadelphia and carried around the country by its founding chairman, Colin Powell. It seeks to help the mentoring network recruit 15 million mentors to meet the needs of children who lack caring adults in their lives. WorldView 13 I f you are lucky in the sea of life, the older ages will roll on with you well beyond the time that used to be called retirement. From the perspective of four-score-and-one years, I predict that most of you will want to do some productive work on flexible terms, with supplemental income or as pro-bono volunteers. You will want to do it for your own good and for the common good. At the triumphant end of the 1965 Civil Rights march from Selma to Montgomery, we were welcomed by a home-made sign held up proudly by Peace Corps Volunteers from Ethiopia: “ e Peace Corps Knows Integration Works.” And today, with the new push for volunteers who are 50-plus, the Peace Corps is showing that it knows why active engagement with society is good for Americans of all ages and good for our communities, our country and the world. In Ethiopia, 1962-64, when I was country director and special representative to Africa, we saw firsthand how valuable the talent, energy and experience of older volunteers can be. Emperor Haile Selassie asked President Kennedy for 300 Peace Corps volunteers to double the number of college-graduate teachers in Ethiopia’s secondary schools. Most of those first volunteers we sent were enthusiastic young B.A. generalists. Fortunately, several dozen were trained and experienced teachers, some of them in their 60s and 70s. Ethiopian teacher training schools badly wanted them, as did all the secondary schools–as well as their fellow volunteers who benefited greatly from their coaching. Beulah and Blythe, who had taught at almost every level of California schools and in Japan, were among our stars. ey called themselves “the Busy Bees” and extended themselves to advise countless others. When the Emperor visited their town of Harar, he invited them to sit on either side of him at his banquet and conveyed his great appreciation for their work and that of their fellow volunteers. e Peace Corps had selected them out, as the saying went, at the end of training because it discovered belatedly that one of these inseparable teachers had a worrisome heart condition. eir own doctor pointed out they had been regularly mountain-climbing in the high Sierra, and we had seen them on the trainees’ morning run around the Georgetown track–and we needed them. ey wrote to Sargent Shriver that they would die of a broken heart if they couldn’t go, and I offered to pay for the transportation of a coffin if one of them died while serving. ey loved their two years in Harar, were well-loved in return, and came home to become two of the most contagious Peace Corps recruiters and among Sargent Shriver’s most-cited examples. Will experienced teachers and other well-seasoned citizens respond to the Peace Corps call to service? If the word gets out that they are wanted and that there really are opportunities for such a new adventure, which they may have long dreamed of but almost given up, they will come–probably in much larger numbers than the Peace Corps can handle in its limited current budget. I remember the reply of a volunteer who was asked by a skeptical reporter, why in the world she would want to go to teach in Ethiopia after 30 years

Table of Contents for the Digital Edition of Worldview Magazine - Fall 2007

Worldview - Fall 2007
Contents
Presiden'ts Note
Lafayette Park
Introduction
Interview
Commentary
Editor's Note
Letter from Rumbek, Sudan
Listings
Letter from Yekaterinburg, Russia
Letter from Codaesti, Romania
Letter from Catia La Mar, Venezuela
Letter from Gumare, Botswana
Letter from Ridder, Kazakhstan
Letter from Rincon, Cape Verde
Letter from Port Au Prince
Another Country
Community News
Giving Back
Opinion

Worldview Magazine - Fall 2007

https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/worldview/fall09
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/worldview/summer09
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/worldview/spring08
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/worldview/winter07
https://www.nxtbook.com/nxtbooks/worldview/fall07
https://www.nxtbookmedia.com