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III AmeriCorps Since 1994 more than 775,000 Americans have served in AmeriCorps, working to meet the nation’s pressing educational, public safety, health, environmental, and other needs. AmeriCorps both drew on and is distinct from its predecessors: it incorporated VISTA as one of its programs , included another—the National Community Conservation Corps (AmeriCorps*NCCC)—that had been modeled on the CCC, and created a major new program (AmeriCorps*State and National). Because AmeriCorps is the nation’s main domestic civilian national service program, understanding its creation, its development over time (including through President Obama’s first years), its place in national service history, and its lessons as public policy for democracy is vital for assessing its current state and future possibilities. Like its predecessors, AmeriCorps influences how its participants and the public understand their relationship to government and the meaning of citizenship . Central to AmeriCorps are the principle of reciprocity, a commitment shared by the CCC, and the idea of government as catalyst, shared by VISTA. The belief that both the nation and the program’s participants should benefit was especially strong under AmeriCorps’s founding administration, and it has continued while administrations’ commitment to government’s investing in and building the capacity of local institutions has grown. With respect to citizenship, AmeriCorps draws on multiple traditions: it strongly emphasizes the service perspective, as VISTA did, but also incorporates aspects of the constitutional, patriotic, and work perspectives, as the CCC did. Further, in its attention to citizenship, AmeriCorps shares Part 147 09-2380-6 ch9.indd 147 12/24/12 10:44 AM 148 americorps similarities with both programs. Like the CCC, AmeriCorps has an explicit, formative civic goal: to strengthen participants’ sense of citizenship and civic responsibility. However, AmeriCorps, following VISTA’s example, recruits many participants who join precisely because they already have strong civic commitments and skills. These multiple strands present AmeriCorps with a unique civic challenge. Politically, AmeriCorps’s policy design shows both the difficulties and possibilities of institutionalizing civilian national service, to build a deep and durable policy into the future. The CCC’s influence and VISTA’s presence are clear but programmatically small. Further, AmeriCorps itself has been difficult to institutionalize. For much of its first decade, its very survival was in question, complicating efforts to make it a well-recognized, strongly supported policy option for addressing the nation’s needs and a practical life option for large numbers of young adults. On the other hand, by 2009 its enrollment had grown to 75,000 members a year and was authorized to grow to 250,000 a year by 2017, which would move it slowly toward the CCC’s scope. Like the CCC, AmeriCorps both benefited and suffered from its close association with its founding president and party, yet survived a hostile Congress and lived to be supported and expanded by future presidents, including one of the opposing party. These facts testify to the ideological malleability of civilian national service and the deepening of post–New Deal political structures. These same factors saved VISTA, but did not allow it to flourish. AmeriCorps has done far better, but its future, and the future of national service more broadly, remains equal parts accomplishment and possibility. 09-2380-6 ch9.indd 148 12/24/12 10:44 AM ...

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