But even hardheaded veterans of failed social policy left Philadelphia guardedly optimistic last week. The Summit actually brought some hope of coherence to a haphazard, fragmented, often infuriating sector of American life. Long after the hype fades–after George Bush’s goofiness and Oprah’s exhortations are forgotten–I’ll take odds that we’ll look back at this gabby media event as the start of something important.
Amazingly enough, a large chunk of both the corporate and nonprofit worlds is now focused on the same specific needs of children with the same specific numerical targets. Goal-setting might sound like insignificant cheerleading (“Two million more children helped by the year 2000!”). But it’s essential. “For the first time the bottom-up is meeting the top-down,” says Bill Milliken, a longtime community organizer who runs a group called Communities in Schools. “I never thought in my lifetime I’d see this emphasis on kids.”
Critics of the Summit are teeing off on the fact that the only specific action to come out of the extravaganza was the scheduling of 150 mini-summits in communities around the country. More jargon-fests–how typical! But this is an example of an easy shot that happens to be wrong. To achieve the goals, each community’s nonprofits must reorganize around them and begin directly challenging local corporations to join in service projects. That’s the next logical step in advancing a new national movement.
This is where Colin Powell’s self-described “guilt tripping” comes in. Standing before Independence Hall, Powell, the most popular leader in the United States today, explained that some executives believe they have no duty beyond maximizing shareholder return. “For those corporate leaders who feel that way,” Powell said with an appealing smirk, “please invite me to your next shareholder meeting. I’d like to speak to them.” That was a shot at “Chainsaw Al” Dunlap, the Sunbeam raider who recently told NEWSWEEK’S Allan Sloan that corporations have no business doing charity work. If Powell sticks to his guns, then he has the potential to stimulate the most serious discussion of corporate responsibility in a generation.
You can almost hear the exasperated sighs of business leaders: “Employees volunteering on company time? That’d kill productivity.” Which is exactly what they said about family and medical leave–about 2,000 Dow points ago. And several new studies show that everything from recruitment to sales is affected by a company’s reputation for having a social conscience. “Cause-related marketing” and “strategic philanthropy” are hot topics at corporate seminars. Rosabeth Moss Kantor of the Harvard Business School reported in Philadelphia that companies giving their employees time for community service reap greater loyalty and can actually increase productivity.
Chainsaw Al’s view might be starting to take a beating politically, too. The Summit was chockablock with Kennedys and Cuomos, but also with conservatives like Sen. Dan Coats and Rep. John Kasich. Whatever their differences over the proper role of government, all agree that one-to-one contact by volunteers is absolutely essential to any change in the lives of young people. And they agree that the manpower necessary for such tutoring and mentoring is simply not available without the help of business, which must move beyond writing checks to providing warm bodies. The Rush Limbaugh argument against this–that it is “coercive” to expect corporations to participate in the community–is sounding cold and tinny even to many conservatives.
In one of his classic formulations, Edmund Burke once made the case for what he called “little platoons” of community spirit, germinating “public affection” from the bottom up. He would probably have approved of virtual communities. (Try www.servenet.org for volunteer options in your Zip code.) Andrew Cuomo, the new HUD secretary and an unlikely Burkean, said the Summit marked “the choice of community over individualism.” That’s a stretch; the tension between the two is ancient and unresolvable. But with “community” beginning to take on the aroma of apple pie, executives are in a pickle. If they don’t agree to offer some kind of commitment to Powell’s post-Summit umbrella organization (called America’s Promise: The Alliance for Youth–www.americaspromise.org), they risk looking stingy.
And woe unto any of the 300 or so firms that don’t make good on the commitments they have already undertaken. The biggest result of the Summit may be a little old-fashioned accountability. Of course, that requires reporters to pick up the book of commitments, identify those made in their area, then scrutinize which are real or phony, fulfilled or left empty. Any company that promises volunteer hours, for example, without giving its employees paid “release time” is essentially committing its workers’ evenings and weekends without their permission. Not a bad story–just one of many potentially juicy tales in which the stakes are not a candidate’s winning or losing, going to jail or getting off, but the future of the country itself.
