Reviving the Call to Public Service

John Fitzgerald Kennedy called on his fellow Americans to “ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.”

A quarter century later, however, most Americans have settled for a lesser bargain. The nation’s problems seem so large, opportunities to serve so few, and the demands of life so pressing, we forgo asking what the country can do for us if allowed to concentrate on what we can do for ourselves.

Vietnam and Watergate produced a sea of change in a generation’s orientation. I recent years a majority of college freshmen have rated “ being materially well off” a higher priority than “ developing a meaningful philosophy on life.” Baby boomers have given less to charity than other group on an age, and income adjusted, basis. And when polled this year, fewer than a third of all Americans recognized the responsibility to help the disadvantaged of the world if it meant postponing spending in programs at home.

Self-interest is a natural, essential, healthy prerequisite for public interest. The golden rule asks only that we love our neighbor as ourself. But if citizens are to reach beyond self-interest to give back to the country the minimum the commonwealth requires, we must be called to stretch. Recently neither American’s statesmen, nor our intellectual and cultural leaders have driven home the duties of citizens. Indeed, no president since John F. Kennedy, Democrat or Republican, has spoken meaningfully about the obligation to serve. Richard Nixon, Gerald Ford, Jimmy Carter and Ronald Reagan campaigned against the national government. As usual, Reagan expressed it best when he said in his inaugural “Government is not the solution to our problems, government is the problem.”

Citizens find own way

Despite the absence of public leadership in these issues, many citizens are finding their own footpaths back to public service. But rather than asking what they can do for their country, these individuals are starting closer to home. They are asking what they can do for their community. Their answers are changing small worlds, not in Washington, but in neighborhoods, towns, cities and states. President Kennedy would be proud of these modest mavericks, individuals in government, private and nonprofit sectors in communities across the country who are bringing imagination and energy to the search for solutions to some of our nation’s most urgent problems.

More profoundly than any words, these examples of community leadership offer hope for new frontiers of public service in our own back yards. Consider two community-based recently awarded $100,000 innovations grants by the Ford Foundation and Harvard’s John F. Kennedy’s School of Government, Illinois church and state efforts to spur minority adoptions and Kentucky’s public private collaboration to modernize a financially strapped court system.

Crisis in Illinois

In 1979, Illinois faced a social crisis: More than 1,000 black children throughout the state remained in foster care or institutions awaiting permanent homes. Their official ward the Department of Children and Family Services, warehoused three-quarters of the children to substitute care around Chicago, the city Martin Luther King jr. pronounced the “most segregated” in the nation. That agency, also charged with child protection, had no credibility within the black community, “with minority communities especially, the department is know as a child snatcher.” Said one department official. “We’re the ones who go in the middle of the night to take children away.”

The problem appeared hopeless, indeed. Ask what you would do if you were charged with responsibility here.

The individuals who suffered this problem invented a solution that has succeeded in finding permanent families for thousands of black children. The winning idea was expressed in a single simple declaration: “One church, one child.” In a unique partnership between the state and black churches, the program recruited families and matched them with needy children. Six years later Illinois’ list of black children awaiting adoption had been reduced down to 50.

In the fall of 1980, Gregory Coler, who was then director of the agency, and his deputy, current director Gordon Johnson, met with a half-dozen prominent black clergymen to seek their help in stemming the crisis. Out of their talks sprang the conviction that the black churches could and should embrace the needy children., one by one, each church identifying at least one child. The idea spread like wildfire and within eight months “One Church One Child” had publicly incorporated with a board including 21 pastors of varying denominations.

Pleas struck home

In many cases their pleas struck home before they left the pulpit Revs. Norval Brown and Ellen Renee Dill, husband and wife, adopted children themselves before soliciting help from their congregations. Chagrined at an initial lack of response from his parishioners, Rev. George Clements, who helped conceive the program, became the first priest in the United States to adopt a child. When he announced the program to his congregation, they listened. They thought, “This is one more thing Father us to think about” he said. “When I said I was going to adopt they sat up and took notice.”

Simultaneously, the department staff focused on bureaucratic change that would make the adoption process work. By demonstrating that there would be substantial financial as well as human gains in finding permanent homes rather than foster care for children, Coler persuaded the Legislature to tilt the scales in favor of adoption. One bill gave foster parent the option of to adopt after one year of caring for a child. Another extended Medicaid benefits to all adopted children, yet another expelled proceedings to terminate rights of biological parents who abused their children.

Today, the One Church, One Child concept has been adopted by more than 30 states and expanded to other minority communities. It is also being used to recruit families for children with special emotional and physical needs. Moreover, the program has shaped and ethic and enthusiasm for minority adoptions much evident at One Church One Child’s national conference this fall. Attended by pastors, social workers, and parent and child “graduates” of the program, the celebration of adoption included an evening with the “Steel Bandits” a steel drum band composed of seven adopted brothers and sisters from Georgia. At the celebration, one small observer was overheard asking his natural mother, Mommy why aren’t I adopted.”

Aid for the courts

A second partnership between individuals in the public and private sectors not only pulled the Kentucky court system from the brink of financial crisis, but blazed a trail for other states. By 1985 Kentucky’s budget constraints had reduced court reporter salaries to about half the national average. At that rate the state failed to recruit enough stenographers to keep all its courts functioning. The director of the Administration Office of the Courts Don Cetrulo, was convinced that a solution could be found in applying new technology to an old problem, and Circuit Court Judge Laurence E. Higgins volunteered his court as the gulries pig, Cetrulo queried major manufacturers of recording equipment across the country, but all concluded the project “couldn’t be done.”

Enter a homegrown firm small enough to take a chance: Jefferson County Kentucky agreed to try to develop a solution. It joined with Cetrulo, Higgins and a core group of court administrators and judges in a collaborative effort. The result is a video system with a computerized sound mixer that enables tiny, voice-activated cameras and microphones place around court rooms to distinguish throughout a proceeding who is speaking, where, and which machines should film and record them.

The cost for a day of complete and visual trial record is just $15. 2 percent of the average $750 pricetag of a written transcript. The court can provide duplicates of trial videocassettes to the months wait for an equivalent typed transcript.

Moreover, the video record is much more accurate and conveys not only litigants’ words, but their tone and comportment. In at least one appeal this proved crucial. A defendant in a criminal case appealed his conviction on grounds he was insane when he pled guilty. The appeals judge found the videotape provided convincing evidence the man was both “cogent and responsible” when he entered his plea, thus, failing the first test of insanity.

In four years, Kentucky, has created 25 video courtrooms at a total investment of $1.5 million. This cost was recouped in the first three years of savings on court reporter salaries. Meanwhile, Jefferson Audio and Video Systems in marketing its product across the nation designing similar systems for state courts in Washington, Oregon and Hawaii, and federal courts in Illinois.

Clues for leaders

What clues do such examples hold for national leaders concerned about renewing citizens’ sense of what they can do for their country?

First, contrary to dominant culture and particularly the tone set at the national level, individuals are responding to needs they can see in their communities in hundreds of cities and states across the country. Individuals are transplanting John F. Kennedy’s call into local language and fashioning answers in their own back yards.

Second, these programs and scores like them should be identified and celebrated. And they should be replicated to cope with similar problems of orphans courts or housing in communities across the country. Finally, these local success stories point the way for a national leader to fashion a convincing call to serve one’s country.

President Elect George Bush has a special opportunity to focus a “thousand points of light” into a national beacon makes incandescent a citizen’s obligation to give something back.

President Kennedy proposed that the performance of his and future administration should be judged finally by whether “all citizens participated in the life of the country.”

The recent record includes points of hope and reason for some concern. Just last month, fewer than half of the eligible voters exercised the minimum act of citizenship in a democracy. Unless the presidential trumpet sounds a more certain call, and citizens respond, scholars may someday write of the United States, as Edward Gibbons concluded of Athens. “When the Athenians finally wanted to give to society, but for society to give to them, when the freedom they wished for most was freedom from responsibility then Athens ceased to be free.”