Mr. Chairman:
For you and for me and for most of those in this room, poverty is not a condition of our lives. In fact, most of us have never had it so good. But just down the street, or around the corner or across the fields or in the heart of this and every City, poverty is an overwhelming fact of life. Daily life. Twenty-four hours a day without relief.
According to a recent report by Isabell Sawhill of the Urban Institute, poverty right now, today, is a fact in the lives of 14% of our society, or 33 million people. In fact, the United States has “one of the highest poverty rates in the industrialized world, especially among its children, but also among those who work part or all of the time”. This is not something most of us see outside our windows every day. But it is there. It is there for old people. For parents who want to work and are working. And, especially, it is there for children. A child born in the United States today is two or three times as likely to be poor as one in Germany, Sweden, Norway or Canada. Eight percent of all our children spend 7 or more of their first ten years in poverty. For black children, the proportion is 34%. And these children of poverty will probably continue to experience poverty in adulthood.
I am sure, Mr. Chairman, that you are as appalled by these statistics as I was when I read Dr. Sawhill’s report. I am sure that most Americans would be shocked and dismayed if they knew these facts. But poverty is not something people like to dwell on for very long. It’s not a part of their lives, even if it is a part of the life of their country, of their community. Ronald Reagan, in fact, made a kind of joke of it. He said that we once “declared War on Poverty and Poverty won.” That’s a neat wise-crack. The trouble is, it isn’t true. In 1964 we did declare war on poverty. And by the early 1970’s we were winning. Then came the Nixon years. And the Reagan years. And the cut-backs. And the planned sabotage and destruction of the instruments of that war. The disbanding of the armies of that war. And, of course, poverty won. And it’s still winning.
Let’s look at some more facts. Let’s look at the record, as Al Smith used to say. In 1965, when the opening salvos of our nationally declared war on poverty were fired, there were 33 million poor people in America, 17.3% of the population. By 1973, that proportion had dropped to 11.1 percent. Not by accident. But because the concentration of national resources and the focus of national will on the elimination of poverty was beginning to take effect. Then, as this great national effort was dismantled, the incidence of poverty inevitably rose until by the mid 1980’s it was back up to 15% -- almost where it was in 1965. And this happened in the midst of the most prolonged era of prosperity in our century. Mr. Chairman, I think we all will agree that this is intolerable. And I think it is tremendously significant that one of the first things Jack Kemp, our new Secretary of HUD said when he was nominated by President Bush was, “We are going to start a new War on Poverty.”
There are two ways of fighting a war. Through a universal draft. Or with a volunteer army. I think we can all agree that America does its fighting best on every front when it does it with volunteers. When Alexander de Toqueville came to America in the 1830’s, he was struck even then by what he called “habits of the heart,” the way Americans instinctively rallied together to solve problems, whether to help a neighbor raise a barn or to man a soup kitchen to feed the poor. We are a nation of volunteers. We started out that way. We’re still that way. And if we think its descriptive to refer to volunteers as points of light, there are not a thousand of them. There are millions of them. Millions who are waiting to join up. And millions who would volunteer if they only knew where to go and what to do. In today’s Washington Post, Bill Raspberry quotes a young woman who says, “The problem is young people are not informed about the opportunities for helping. It doesn’t happen in the schools, and there’s not enough effort coming from their homes, their churches, or their temples.”
Twenty-five years ago, when we pledged as a nation to “eliminate the paradox of poverty in the midst of plenty, by opening to everyone the opportunity to work and the opportunity to live in decency and dignity”, we recognized the power of these “habits of the heart” and the need to harness the energies of volunteerism for the great battles ahead.
In proposing VISTA, Volunteers In Service To America, Congress wrote these words into the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964, our declaration of War Against Poverty: "...a nationally sponsored program for full-time volunteer service will afford an effective means of stimulating greater volunteer activities at all levels...will encourage more men and women to pursue the helping professions as a career and will make material contributions...toward the elimination of the causes and effects of poverty”.
For twenty-five years, this is precisely what VISTA and its volunteers have sought to accomplish. It’s true -- they haven’t been very visible. They haven’t made headlines. I will wager that most Americans don’t even know they exist. And do you know why? For two reasons. First, because these volunteers work and live where poverty is the greatest. On the mean streets of our cities; in rural pockets of poverty where the people and the media rarely go. Second, because after years of struggling to close down and dismantle VISTA, there is no longer a national recruiting effort; no longer any national advertising of the program. Today, if you want to enlist in VISTA, you have to make all the moves. And even when you do, chances are that you won’t be sent anywhere but into the poverty of your own neighborhood.
When he got out of College, my son, Mark, tried to join VISTA. He couldn’t get in. He spent weeks trying to find out where to go. And when he did locate an office, no one was there. Today, you need the skills of a Houdini to find out that there is such a program as VISTA, and then, when you get out of that straitjacket, there’s no one around to applaud.
And so, from a volunteer effort against poverty that was designed to harness the energy and idealism of youth, VISTA now is a program in which the average age of its volunteers is 40, and of those volunteers, 70% are women, most of whom are clients of other anti-poverty efforts. Don’t get me wrong. I think it’s a marvelous thing to give poor people themselves a chance to join the fight against poverty -- in fact that has been one of the great strengths of Head Start. But to snuff-out-thousands of points of light -even before they have a chance to shine -- is, to my mind, a national disgrace.
It is doubly a disgrace because today, right now, we are seeing a resurgence of a call for volunteer service among our youth. There are at least eight bills in the hopper calling for some sort of voluntary national service, ranging from the president’s YOUTH ENGAGED IN SERVICE (YES) to proposals for a CITIZENS CORPS, which would reward civilian or military service with vouchers to be used by volunteers for their education or for buying a home. In fact, the sounds of these new calls for volunteer service have become so loud that even U.S. NEWS AND WORLD REPORT, certainly not one of our more radical news magazines, featured “The Push For Voluntary National Service” as its February 13 Cover Story.
And so, Mr. Chairman, in the midst of a resurgence of poverty in the United States and in the midst of a new call for increased volunteer service on the part of the President and both political parties, VISTA, our greatest, most cost-effective domestic volunteer program; our only national volunteer effort focused on our most grievous national problem, languishes. It makes no sense. It must not be permitted to happen. And this year, the Twenty-fifth Anniversary of its founding, is the right time and this is the right Congress to bring VISTA to full, active life once again.
This is not a partisan effort, Mr. Chairman. There are strong Republicans like former HUD Secretary, George Romney, and former head of VISTA, Carol Khosrovi Marshall who are proud to call themselves “Friends of VISTA”. There are over 100,000 former VISTA volunteers of every age, every political persuasion, whose service in VISTA has enhanced their contributions to our society. There is already in place a VISTA Literacy Corps, dedicated to helping solve one of the problems this Administration has already declared to be a priority concern. Yet this same Administration has requested zero funding for the coming fiscal year.
This, too, makes no sense. With troops already in the field; with 2000 points of light already blazing, are we going to turn them out, and build a whole new generator plant, a whole new bureaucracy, to do exactly the same thing?
Ten years ago, VISTA had almost 5000 volunteers in the field and a budget of $34 million. This fiscal year, there are only 2000 volunteers and a budget of just $24 million including the VISTA Literacy Corps. Fewer people. Fewer dollars. A weakened effort. A loss of national commitment at a time when poverty is more intractable than ever. When the need for volunteers in our poverty areas is greatest. Not volunteers who come in for a day and then go back to the green lawns of suburbia. But volunteers who, for at least a year, will live and work among those who need them most: the homeless sleeping in our streets; the babies of AIDS victims who lie in hospital wards; the teen-age mothers struggling to create a decent life for their children; the drug addicts trying to stay clean. This is where volunteers are needed. This is where VISTA has always been. Why reinvent the wheel when we have a road-tested, proven vehicle already on the scene. I think all these new efforts are commendable. One of them, in fact, has been introduced by my brother-in-law, Senator Kennedy. I think very highly of his program. And I think highly of the volunteer proposal of Senator Dodd, a former Peace Corps Volunteer. But I believe it would be impractical, wasteful, even immoral if we failed to give VISTA a chance to live and grow and accomplish the mission against poverty that it was organized twenty-five years ago to carry out.
In closing, Mr. Chairman, I think back to a day five years ago, when we celebrated the twentieth anniversary of VISTA. It was a very hot day and hundreds of Friends of VISTA were crowded into a stuffy tent. They were straining to hear the hoarse and weakened voice of a man who sat before them, -- in a wheel chair -- struggling for breath. This man was one of our greatest statesman. A distinguished republican Senator Jacob Javits. He had asked to speak to this group - one of his last appearances before his death -- because he wanted to tell them how much service in VISTA had meant to his daughter. And how much, through thousands of people like his daughter, young and old, it had meant to America.
Today, on this twenty-fifth Anniversary of VISTA, I can only repeat to you the deep emotional, intellectual conviction of this great man. VISTA must live. VISTA must grow. VISTA has become one of our most precious “habits of the heart.” Happy Birthday VISTA, and many, many
happy returns of the day. Thank you.
