Marguerite Kondracke: Keynote Address at DukeEngage “Big Event” Meeting
November 17, 2007
“The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it — and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.”
Anyone know who said those words?
They are from John F. Kennedy’s inaugural address.
In his speech, Kennedy was referring to the Peace Corps. During his election campaign in 1960, he had issued a national call to service.
In response, a small group of students from the University of Michigan launched a petition drive. Ultimately, thousands of students signed the petition indicating they were willing to become volunteers. The petition provided the impetus for President Kennedy to launch the Peace Corps.
It’s easy to be cynical today, to throw up our hands and say there’s nothing we can do to change the grand scheme of things.
But the truth is that you really CAN change the world.
Take the example of Muhammad Yunus, recent winner of the Nobel Peace Prize. He championed the concept of microlending directly to people living in poverty in Third World countries, so they could start their own businesses. The concept has taken off to the point that you can go on a website, learn about people all over the world trying to start their own small enterprises, from clothing to brick-making, and be part of making a loan to them.
As a result of this movement, it is really becoming possible to envision a day, perhaps within your lifetimes, when structural poverty will be a thing of the past in our world.
I am reminded of something Margaret Mead once said:
“Never underestimate the power of a small but determined group of individuals to change the world.”
Do not underestimate what you can start through Duke Engage.
Today, a culture of service is gaining momentum in this country.
This movement can change the culture of this nation, from one that has become increasingly centered on “me first” to a culture of “we together.” We are at a moment of opportunity that has not appeared in this country for nearly 50 years, when JFK challenged a new generation of Americans to ask what they could do for their country.
As part of Duke Engage, you are part of this wave that is building size and strength. You can be more than participants. You can be catalysts. Never underestimate your power to change the culture and this country.
You don’t just have an opportunity to change the world. You have a CALLING to change the world. As Margaret Thatcher famously said that, “From those to whom much is given, much is expected.”
All of you here at Duke are remarkably privileged — even those of you who were like me and were able to be here only because you received a scholarship. To all you, much has been given. A remarkable opportunity has been given. And you are called to give something back.
Service is not merely a virtue, but a necessity. It is a necessity if we are to have a healthy, vibrant society. It is a necessity for your own completeness as people. I like something I heard Robert Strauss say: “To dedicate at least one part of one’s life to public service is the highest calling — to give back at least part of your life for the greater good and your fellow man.”
We live in a society that is ready to awaken to what you stand for — not making a virtue of necessity but for the necessity of virtue.
Duke Engage is a wonderful way that this university is answering the call — and encouraging you as individuals to do the same. From here in Durham to rural Kenya, you are already engaged in applying what you learn in the classroom to help change the world, one small step at a time. You are already engaged in everything from fighting the AIDS epidemic in Africa to teaching at-risk children in New Orleans. And Duke has backed you with a commitment of $30 million.
Here is what is perhaps most exciting for me. Every student at Duke will have the opportunity to contribute a summer or a whole semester — with the hope that ALL students will become engaged in voluntary service. As you’ll hear in a moment, what is happening here at Duke is a model for the rest of America.
Just as you are called to help change the world, I represent an organization that is based on a call to serve.
Ten years ago, all the living Presidents met in Philadelphia. They issued a call to all Americans to get involved in making young people a national priority. America’s Promise grew out of that summit. As our founding chairman, Colin Powell, pointed out, a promise is a solemn obligation. All Americans are obliged to help keep the promise of America to our children.
We know from research and experience that children need a critical mass of five resources in their lives. We call them the Five Promises:
- Caring adults
- Safe places
- Healthy start
- Effective education
- Opportunities to help others
Children who have at least four of these five Promises are twice as likely to be successful. They’re twice as likely to do well in school, avoid violence, go on to college, and contribute to the community as children who have only one or two Promises.
Because children need to experience the Five Promises at home, at school and in their communities, the job is too big for parents alone without support. It’s too big for schools alone, for government alone and for nonprofits alone. It takes all sectors.
It really does take the whole community — both local communities and the American community. And that’s why I say that say that service is not just a virtue but a necessity. The poet W.H. Auden put it this way:
“There is no such thing as the State
And no one exists alone;
Hunger allows no choice
To the citizen or the police;
We must love one another or die.”
Let me tell you just a bit about what we do. The America’s Promise Alliance is built around applying “the power of we” in response to the “necessity of us.” We have grown to become the nation’s largest Alliance focused on the well-being of young people. We bring together nearly 150 national partners — such as the United Way, the U.S. Chamber of Commerce, Boys & Girls Clubs of America — representing every sector of our society.
Working together, we can accomplish more than any of our individual partners can manage alone. Together, we have set a goal of reaching at least 15 million disadvantaged young people in the next five years with more of the Five Promises.
Let me tell you why this goal matters so much. Research shows that less than one-third of our young people have enough of the Five Promises to be confident of success. Over 20% have only one or zero Promises and are headed for failure.
A report earlier this year by UNICEF found that the U.S. ranks next-to-last — NEXT TO LAST — among 21 developed nations in measures of child well-being.
Infant mortality in this country is rising for the first time in 40 years.
These are all effects of an epidemic of unkept promises. Our children have not failed us. It is we who are failing them.
Mostly, this epidemic has flown below our national radar screen. For example, most Americans would be shocked to learn that nearly 30% of our students fail to complete high school. The rate is nearly 50% for children of color.
Young people who drop out are twice as likely to live in poverty…
They’re three times as likely to depend on welfare…
They’re eight times as likely to wind up in prison. (Did you know that if we improved the graduation rate among boys — just among boys! — by just 1%, we would save $8 billion in incarceration costs.
You can see why our Alliance has made improving graduation rates our top priority.
It’s both an economic necessity and a moral imperative.
It will take a commitment to service by all Americans to reverse the tide of dashed hopes and dismal futures for millions of our young people.
But it’s also crucial not just to serve but to teach the importance of service by word and example.
Remember that fifth Promise? To become adults who contribute to the community, children need opportunities to help others and learn the value of their own service. In fact, research shows that one important driver of the dropout rate is that young people aren’t getting enough opportunities to serve and lead in their communities. Research also shows a link between service learning and being ready to enter the workforce successfully.
So one National Action Strategy that our America’s Promise Alliance partners have agreed to pursue together is to engage young people during the pivotal years of middle school in service learning and career exploration. It’s critical if we are to change our culture.
I firmly believe that we will not be able to keep America’s Promise for all children until we restore a culture of service in this country. I also believe the moment is here — and momentum is building. Whoever is our next president will continue to move our nation in the direction of national service.
But what, specifically, should we do? Recently, Time magazine ran a cover story that offered a 10-point plan. All of these ideas are good starts toward a national service culture.
First, create a national service baby bond. Every time an American baby is born, the government would invest $5,000 in that child’s name in a 529-type fund that would help pay for education starting at age 18. The money could be accessed only if the person commits at least one year to national or military service.
Second, make National Service a Cabinet-level department. In 1993, Congress created the Corporation for National and Community Service to manage AmeriCorps, Senior Corps and Learn & Serve America. Now, we should streamline it. Nothing would show that our new president is committed to a culture of service than making it a Cabinet-level department.
Third, expand existing programs like AmeriCorps. Since 1994, over 500,000 people have served through AmeriCorps in all kinds of ways, from tutoring and teaching to working in parks to caring for the elderly. Currently, 75,000 participate each year. Let’s scale that up to 250,000.
Fourth, create an Education Corps. We need help to fight the dropout crisis. So let’s create a special corps of tutors, teachers and volunteers to lead after-school programs for the 14 million kids who have nowhere to go between 3 and 6 p.m. The Education Corps would also focus efforts on this country’s “dropout factories” — the 15% of our schools that produce 50% of the dropouts.
Fifth, institute a Summer of Service. During the summer before you start high school, you’re too young to get a real job. So let’s allow kids to volunteer for a summer “rite of passage” in organizations like City Year or Citizen Schools. There’s already bipartisan support for an initiative like this, and it will be a great way to prepare young people both for high school and the world of work.
Sixth, build a Health Corps. Over the 9 million uninsured children in this country, over 6.5 million are eligible for SCHIP or Medicaid, but they’re not enrolled — largely because their families don’t know how to access the programs. Getting coverage for these kids is one of America’s Promise’s national action strategies, and creating a Health Corps of one-year volunteers is one good way of reaching them. Volunteers could also serve as caseworkers and community education specialists in under-served areas. And the experience could lead more people into careers in nursing — where our country faces real shortages of professionals.
Seventh, launch a Green Corps. We all know that much our nation’s infrastructure is in need of repair and rebuilding. We also know that 1.5 million Americans in your age group are unemployed and not in school. A Green Corps is a way to address both problems. It would function a little like the highly successful Civilian Conservation Corps during the Great Depression.
Eighth, recruit a Rapid Response Reserve Corps. Hurricane Katrina exposed a need for volunteers who can respond quickly to disasters and emergencies. So let’s create a Rapid Response Reserve Corps — 50,000 members who would be trained and deployed for two-week periods in response to emergencies.
Ninth, start a National-Service Academy. Just as we have West Point and Annapolis, let’s create a National Service Academy to cultivate a new generation of civic leaders. Just like the military service academies, you’d receive four years of free college education in return for a 5-year commitment of public service after you graduate.
Finally, let’s create a Baby-Boomer Education Bond. Over 80% of the Baby Boomers in their 50s today say they plan to work during retirement, and many are interested in public service. Just as AmeriCorps volunteers receive scholarships, we could attract more senior volunteers by letting them earn scholarship funds for their children, grandchildren or a student of their choice.
In April of next year, I will be taking part in a National Service Summit. The planning is well underway. In many important ways it will be like the Presidents’ Summit I mentioned a few moments ago. A call will go out from this summit for universal, voluntary national service. It’s not mandatory service. But the vision is that we will ultimately change the culture to the point that service becomes a customary part of each person’s life experience.
At the Summit, we hope to jump-start a grassroots and “grasstops” campaign toward realizing this vision. The goal is to
have 250,000 volunteers in voluntary service by 2012 — and have universal voluntary service by 2020.
You here at Duke have a chance to be at the forefront of this movement by your leadership and example.
It’s important to recall that the signers of our Declaration of Independence pledged TO EACH OTHER “our lives, our fortunes, our sacred honor.”
Note the pledge to each other. In some ways, it made this a declaration of dependence as well as one of independence from England. We depend on each other. In that sense, the national service culture we seek to build is an idea that is as old as America. We rightly champion rugged individualism, another American ideal. But we must remember that individualism does not remove our obligation to each other. We must move toward a “we” society over a “me” society. A “me” society weakens us. A “we” society makes us stronger.
What can YOU do?
First, keep doing what you’re doing (and do even more).
Be ambassadors for service, witnesses for the word that service is not just a good thing but a vital thing. I would like to challenge you to make part of what it means to be in Duke Engage be to engage other Americans in this movement.
Help teach this value to others, especially to America’s children; serve in ways that lead others to service. You will be helping us keep one of the five essential Promises to America’s children.
Finally never forget and never doubt that you have the power to change the world. And never forget that your position here at one of America’s most influential universities gives you both special opportunities and special responsibilities.
I began with a story about John F. Kennedy. Maybe it’s fitting to bookend this presentation with a story about his brother. In 1966, Robert Kennedy made a four-day visit to South Africa. It is an almost forgotten story today — at least in this country — but it is an important story about hope and about your power to make a difference.
Kennedy was invited by student leaders in South Africa to address them on the annual Day of Reaffirmation of Academic and Human Freedom. It was at the height of apartheid. The South African government had tried unsuccessfully to deter Kennedy from entering their country. When he came anyway, they placed the head of the National Union of Students under house arrest. It did not stop Kennedy from visiting the townships, where huge crowds flocked to greet him. It did not deter 18,000 students from standing outside the 1,600-seat lecture hall on a bitterly cold night to hear his address by loudspeaker. What he said electrified these white students of privilege to the possibility of changing their world.
I want to read you just three brief snippets of what he said:
“Our answer is the world’s hope — to rely on youth… not a time of life but a state of mind… a temper of the will… a predominance of courage over timidity… of the appetite for adventure over the love of ease. It is a revolutionary world we live in, and thus you have had thrust upon you a greater burden of responsibility than any generation that has ever lived.
“These are times of danger and uncertainty; but they are also more open to the creative energy of men and women than any other time in history.
“Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope. And crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current that can sweep down the mightiest walls…”
Change, of course, did not and does not come right away. It took another 25 years for it to come to South Africa. But I wonder if it is just coincidence that it came around the time that these students were in their late 40s, an age when people so often begin taking real leadership roles in a society.
In 1992, a delegation from the African National Congress visited the JFK Library in Boston. These five men had all spent much time in South African jails under the old apartheid regime. The chief archivist of the library asked them if they remembered Robert Kennedy’s four days in their country in 1966. Then, to his astonishment, each of them stood up and recited passages of the Day of Affirmation address from memory.
“Yes, we remember,” one of them said. “It kept us strong through all the years of darkness.”
You are the ripples that will become a wave that will become a powerful current. And I believe you are building energy at one of those singularly opportune moments that history occasionally provides.
Like those Michigan students half a century ago, you can be the volunteers who lead whoever becomes our next president to make universal voluntary service a reality. If you do, I believe you will find people rallying to you from every corner of this nation. I believe that most of our fellow Americans are ready to move beyond the old politics of “me” and the culture of “me.”
So I challenge you not just to “engage” Duke but to engage this nation. You have the power to lead the change, and to BE the change, for a country that is ready for change.
Thank you.