such as stuffing and sealing envelopes. Collecting funds, organizing, or promoting the institutional aspects of an agency should not be permitted. (V) The national service program should operate on a basic policy of nondiscrimination. Participation in the service program should be available to all those who are qualified without reference to race or creed. Corpsmen should be placed only in projects made available and open to all without discrimination or segregation. Service programs should be available: (1) to all people who need service irrespective of race or creed; and (2) to all agencies and institutions that have nondiscriminatory policies and practices. (VI) The entire year of voluntary service should be an educational experience for participants. Special training should be provided and should include: Short term national training planned with graduate schools of welfare, health, and education. This should include general orientation to the needs of people, services to meet the needs, goals, basic concepts, methods, and attitudes in work with people; also function of the program in relation to the community, the agency or institution, and the supervision to which participants are assigned. Short term introductory training provided by the agency or institution in which participants will do their work. This should include orientation to the philosophy, policies, and specific assignment. Inservice training under guidance of qualified professional workers. FOCUS OF PROJECTS We believe the National Service Corps will result in greater impact, satisfaction, and achievement if the work is concentrated in service to people through welfare, health, and education programs. If the scope of the program includes too many fields of work, the planning problems will be multiplied and the impact of the tentatively suggested 4,000 corpsmen may appear negligible. On the other hand, there should be sufficient diversity of projects to test adequately the potentialities of the National Service Corps. We recommend that, to the greatest extent possible, the National Service Corps give priority: 1. To new or extended services to meet pressing needs of people who are isolated socially or geographically, and who have few services available. 2. To new or extended service in organized communities where the human need far exceeds available services, such as low-income sections of urban centers. ADVISORY COUNCIL We recommend that a "National Service Program Advisory Council" (patterned on advisory councils of the National Institute of Mental Health) composed of persons, both volunteer and professional, qualified in public and voluntary services in the fields of welfare, health, and education should be established. The Council should advise and consult with the administrator and staff of the national service program in the development of all standards and policies. Projects selected should be subject to the Council's approval. SELECTION OF PROJECTS The National Service Program Advisory Council should review and recommend projects in accordance with established criteria or guidelines. Guidelines may include questions such as: 1. Is the service proposed to meet a serious need which cannot be met without the National Service Corps? 2. Is the service requested by the local community? Or is the need such that interest can, and should, be stimulated? 3. Is the proposed service an integrated part of the coordinated community plan for service to people? 4. Is the service designed to help the community increase its competence to help itself? 5. Is the proposed service accessible to all persons on a basis of nondiscrimination? 6. Is there a broadly representative committee of local persons available to cooperate with the National Service Corps? 7. What counterpart efforts is the sponsor prepared to make? 8. Is the project so designed that necessary services can be continued as the national service phases out? 9. Does the project give promise of demonstrating a service replicable in other communities? National service program personnel should be generally, but not limited to, two groups: Young adults in their twenties who have not yet entered a career or a graduate school. Retired workers with special skills. FINANCES Funds appropriated for the national service program should provide for all members: Per diem for moderate-cost maintenance adequate to the locale. Travel and maintenance for participation in the national training course. Terminal scholarship funds for participants who apply, and are admitted, to graduate schools of welfare, health, and education. Funds for allocation to agencies, or institutions, to ensure availability of qualified professional supervision and resulting administrative costs. Travel funds to make possible the transfer of participants to work assignments in other sections of the Nation. We know no hospital, social agency, school, or other institution that has qualified professional supervisors with idle time. Since the objective is to provide more service under able supervision, the solution would be to provide funds to employ assistance-part time at least-to release the supervisor from some responsibilities, and thus make time available for guidance to service-program participants. We recommend that, to the extent indicated by need, service corpsmen should be encouraged to take work assignments in other sections of the Nation, and communities should be encouraged to welcome participants from other sections. Such transfers will increase travel costs, but will have such obvious advantages as greater appeal to young people, broadened experience for corpsmen, and interchange of ideas and viewpoints between corpsmen and the host community. OTHER SAFEGUARDS Public interpretation should make very clear the fact that the national service program is neither a panacea nor a substitute for basic legislation, appropriations, and programs needed to ensure adequate welfare, health, and education services for people of the United States. The national service program should be clearly dissociated from the proposed legislation to increase employment opportunities for youth. The service program will not be a solution to youth unemployment. Public interpretation of the National Service Corps should make it clear that the corps is not designed as an instrument for the rehabilitation of its participants. Corpsmen cannot be recruited from the ranks of troubled or delinquent youth, nor will the corps generally be able to utilize the services of young people who are unemployed because they lack education. The national service program should provide: 1. For the termination of a project and transfer of corpsmen, in any situation in which the agency or institution fails to meet its obligations (good quality work opportunities, professional supervision, etc.). 2. For the termination of a corpsman's services, the worker proves to be unwilling or incapable of doing work in accordance with best known standards. Adopted by the Executive Committee of the National Social Welfare Assembly, January 15, 1963. The National Social Welfare Assembly is the central national planning and coordinating agency for the social welfare field. Adoption of a position statement by the assembly shall not be construed as speaking for the affiliate organizations. Prices-1 to 9, 15 cents each; 10 or more, 5 cents each plus postage. " Senator TOWER. The next witness is Miss Margaret Berry, National Federation of Settlement and Neighborhood Centers. Senator JAVITS. Mr. Chairman, before Miss Berry testifies, may I welcome Miss Berry to the subcommittee and commend her to the Chair. And also to state that I am, myself, a product of a settlement, University Settlement on Eldridge and Irvington Streets in lower Manhattan, and can testify to the excellence of their work and considering the dedicated output of the settlement workers which Miss Berry will speak of before the subcommittee the attention and the respect to which their recommendations are entitled. STATEMENT OF MISS MARGARET BERRY, NATIONAL FEDERATION OF SETTLEMENT AND NEIGHBORHOOD CENTERS Miss BERRY. Thank you. Senator TOWER. Thank you for coming this morning, and we will now hear your testimony. Miss BERRY. Thank you very much, Senator. Before we begin, I should say University Settlement is the oldest settlement in the United States. We are very proud of this as our very first and proud of our Senator. Senator JAVITs. Thank you. Miss BERRY. My name is Margaret Berry, and I am the executive director of the National Federation of Settlements and Neighborhood Centers, 226 West 47th Street, New York 36, N.Y. Our federation is composed of 264 affiliates, which operate 356 neighborhood centers in 88 cities in 31 States and the District of Columbia. I wish to speak in favor of the bill, as authorized by the annual meeting of the federation of May 18, 1963. We have a particular interest in S. 1321 both because our work is concentrated in deprived urban areas, and because as voluntary agencies we applaud this attempt to develop an additional concept of full-time voluntary service. The plight of the millions of Americans who do not share in the general prosperity needs no further elaboration. In the slum areas of large and small cities we see compounded the problems of poverty, unemployment, discrimination, ill health, poor education and lack of job skills needed in an increasingly automated economy. Rural Americans continue to come into the cities, poorly prepared for the job market there, and bewildered by city life. Even those who have found some measure of adjustment to city life are torn from tenuous moorings as our inner cities are rebuilt, and thousands of families face relocation. A city neighborhood is the living situation in which all the special problems appear, not neatly isolated, but compounded and aggravating each other. In one neighborhood we can find simultaneously a concentration of poor elderly people, minority group families—even including Indians from the reservation-struggling for acceptance and a livelihood, school dropouts, and physical and mental health problems. One neighborhood provides the whole cross section. Can National Service Corpsmen perform useful tasks, and will their services be welcomed? I can give an unqualified "yes" to this question on behalf of settlement and neighborhood centers. When we asked our members, we received immediate responses from 56 agencies located in 30 cities. They outlined specific projects that would require the services of 308 corpsmen. Agencies in New York City were polled separately by our city federation, the United Neighborhood Houses. Together these 38 agencies developed 13 projects, which could utilize 551 corpsmen. Let me illustrate with one response from San Antonio. Here, an agency which serves a low-income Spanish-speaking area requested four corpsmen. One would be used to supervise the literacy program, manned by volunteers. The San Antonio Literacy Council is working on the total county program for the estimated 60,000 illiterate, but concentrated service is needed in this area. Another worker would develop the program for school dropouts. Two would carry out a comprehensive neighborhood health survey which the director of public health and the director of the new teaching hospital consider to be essential. For 10 years this neighborhood center has been the place where health resources and needs meet comfortably-through its medical, dental, well body, immunization, and cancer detection clinics. It provides the link between rural people, accustomed to folk medicine, and the public health and hospital resources, visiting nurses, and specialized health agencies. Now, to make most effective use of the new city hospital, the center needs skilled and sensitive manpower to carry out the comprehensive survey. This pilot survey would then be used to plan improved services for the whole city. I think this illustration answers the question of whether the small number of corpsmen would be effective in the face of the enormous problems outlined. It seems to us that if the projects are carefully selected to provide a concentration of extra help in a strategic place and time, they can have great influence in spite of their small size. You may be interested in the kind of help which our 56 responding agencies thought could be utilized immediately and effectively. These projects are really ready to go, under the guidance of people who are already known and accepted as good neighbors. The proposals fell into four main categories. The first includes the variety of programs which help youth in trouble-specific work with delinquent or delinquency-prone youth. Settlements have many workers employed in this kind of "reaching out" to gangs or unaffiliated youth. Their efforts could be augmented by mature and dedicated corpsmen. Also, as youth unemployment has become increasingly critical, we have developed all kinds of beginning efforts cooperation with schools to augment instruction by remedial reading and tutoring, organizing parent groups, vocational clubs, part-time work projects, work with the employment service and public schools to stimulate apprenticeship and training projects. A second set of projects were related to helping people improve their environment. In urban renewal areas it involved relocation of families, code enforcement, and other conservation and rehabilitation efforts. In others it included block organization for neighborhood improvement, neighborhood council formation, cooperative projects ranging from credit unions to the "Good Companions and Friendly Visitors" of Henry Street, 350 older people who act as interpreters, visitors to the sick and blind and lonely, and help in the neighborhood hospital. Helping others is often the most effective form of "self-help." This leads to the third kind of project in which corpsmen could help service to the aged who are concentrated in low-rent areas, often living in single rooms, in deprivation and utter isolation. Proposals include hot lunch programs, augmented by other neighborly services, helping the old to maintain contact with health and welfare resources. Lastly come programs designed to help the dependent or multiproblem family to break out of the cycle of dependency and take steps to independent living. We are having success with the use of case aids, with homemaking and housekeeping demonstrations, and need to augment this service. We can put corpsmen to work in our own cities in opportunities as real and dramatic as the Peace Corps finds overseas. We do not believe that this new concept of full-time service will discourage the approximately 20 million volunteers who are the backbone of our voluntary agencies. The idea of citizens investing a year of their time in community service ought to dramatize and reinforce the concept of community service. In fact, it seems to us that this is already part of the thinking of the American public. Just for example, I have the magazine here of the Chicago Chamber of Commerce in which an article is listed called "Chicago's Peace Corps, a Private Enterprise." It goes on to describe what volunteers are already doing in the settlement houses of Chicago. So it seems to us that the general public has already made this tie between the concept of the Service Corps and the whole idea of voluntary enterprise. Our observation is that there is ready response to such an idea. The national federation has experimented in the past 2 years with four weekend conferences, designed to tell college students about neighborhood service; two have been held in Chicago, one in Nashville, and one in Cincinnati. Students from a radius of 200 miles have been notified; they have had to pay their own way, and two events were held in holiday time. Yet we have been able to accommodate only a small percentage of those who wanted to come. Two hundred applied for the first one held during Christmas vacation. We are convinced that many youths are idealistic, and are seeking opportunities. The Service Corps offers them a splendid way. For many, this year of service might crystallize their vocational choices and lead them into service professions. In view of the shortage of full-time workers, to which the bill calls attention, we would like to see some provision for terminal scholarship funds for participants who wants to go on professionally to graduate schools of welfare, health, or education. There is another point which we think should be considered. The success of the program will be determined-both for the community and the corpsmen-in the day-by-day work which is done. The corpsmen ought to have a satisfactory and educational opportunity in return for their gift of time and energy. Yet many of the agencies which might provide the most exciting tasks are so understaffed they cannot realistically release staff for supervision without dropping another part of their program. Therefore, we believe that the bill should allow for allocations to agencies where this is necessary to insure adequate on-the-job supervision. 99-865 0-63—16 |