The Politics and Civics of National Service: Lessons from the Civilian Conservation Corps, VISTA, and AmeriCorps

7. VISTA's Purpose and Government's Role

7 VISTA’s Purpose and Government’s Role Aprogram such as VISTA comprises multiple, overlapping elements that influence its political support and viability and communicate lessons to participants and the public, in large part through policy feedback dynamics. In short, these elements shape the politics and civics of the program, which in turn influence future policy development. Drawing again on Anne Larason Schneider and Helen Ingram’s framework, these elements include the program ’s purpose and the role the program gives to government, as well as how government’s role is organized and supported. This chapter focuses on these elements; the next chapter, on the program’s “tools, rules, and targets”—the service work it supports, its educational goals and content, the type of participants it recruits, and its obligations and inducements. Politically, VISTA’s policy design generated great controversy that worked against deep institutionalization: administrations typically responded by scaling it back or attempting to end it. Civically, VISTA embodied the principles of sacrifice and government-as-catalyst; one source of controversy was whether the volunteers and the program lived up to these ideals. Another was VISTA’s association with critical—and not just service-oriented—citizenship. VISTA suffered both politically and civically from the resulting clash of views, as well as its neglect of citizenship as an explicit goal. The Purpose of VISTA Given its long, contested history, VISTA’s overarching purpose remained remarkably consistent. As proposed under President Kennedy, created 88 07-2380-6 ch7.indd 88 12/24/12 10:44 AM vista’s purpose and government’s role 89 by the 1964 Economic Opportunity Act, and reauthorized by the 1973 Domestic Volunteer Act, VISTA was to provide full-time, yearlong volunteers who would serve in local agencies to help eliminate poverty. However, statutory consistency masks significant conflict over the source of and solution to poverty. From the CCC’s perspective, the answers were straightforward and widely accepted: unemployment was the source, and work the solution. With unemployment below 5 percent at VISTA’s founding and never nearing Great Depression levels in its history, VISTA’s answers were never either this simple or widely accepted. Was the goal to bring the poor into the mainstream of a basically just society? Or was it to change a fundamentally unjust society? In VISTA scholar David Pass’s language, the former reflects a combined compensatory-service ideology that sees the poor as needing services to overcome their deficiencies and deprivation. The latter reflects a community-advocacy ideology that says, “The poor must organize themselves . . . to redress an imbalance of power in society.”1 He argues that from its conception VISTA had strong strands of both, which generated ongoing tension. Ideological conflict ensued almost immediately, with the massive political changes of the 1960s, and then intensified with partisan changes in administration . In general, the Republicans identified with Kennedy’s early plan; President Carter’s Democrats, with VISTA’s early practice. Each group charged the other with subverting VISTA’s true purpose and promised a return to its original intent. These efforts resulted in policy change but never as much as new administrations sought: local organizations, civil servants, and Congress served as moderating influences, and any changes yielded weak results. Further, as Eric Patashnik’s work on reform would suggest, by not requiring significant investments by stakeholders or altering stakeholders’ identities or affiliations, these changes were prone to reversal with each new administration . Politically, the fact and substance of the changes worked against institutionalization , creating escalating cycles of policy conflict instead of settled acceptance and downsizing instead of growth. Civically, the ideological tugof -war translated into a dual focus on service-oriented citizenship (associated with the compensatory-service ideology) and critical citizenship (associated with the community-advocacy ideology). As dominant ideologies shifted, so did VISTA’s civic focus. However, the most important civic impact resulted from what was missing, namely, an explicit civic mission for volunteers. This shortcoming reduced its potential as civic education and made the lessons it did teach less positive. Overall, stumbling blocks to VISTA’s success as national service were set into its very purpose. 07-2380-6 ch7.indd 89 12/24/12 10:44 AM 90 volunteers in service to america The Kennedy Plan: Quietly Serving the Poor, Maybe Kennedy’s National Service Corps had four goals: to provide full-time volunteers to work with the needy; for volunteers to motivate others to serve...