Voices for National Service recognized Senator Coons Tuesday for his exemplary leadership and advocacy of national service as a state and federal priority, awarding him their Outstanding National Service Advocacy Award.
At the organization’s 11th Annual Friends of National Service Reception, Chris spoke to a packed room of service champions about the role of national service in helping the nation meet its toughest challenges. The reception, which also celebrated the 20th anniversary of AmeriCorps, allowed Senator Coons to reflect on his personal involvement with the organization.
“AmeriCorps has given Americans immense opportunities over the past 20 years to use our talents to build stronger communities,” Chris said. “It’s because of your work and dedication that the service movement has come so far – closer to a day when it will be commonplace for any American to ask his or her neighbor ‘Where do you serve?’”
During AmeriCorps’ first years, Chris worked with a small group of individuals with the national “I Have a Dream Foundation” to build the organization’s AmeriCorps program. Chris currently serves as a member of the National Service Congressional Caucus, where he joins with Democrats and Republicans to fight for expanded national service opportunities. This year’s award was Chris’ second from Voices for National Service – in 2012, he received the Outstanding New Member Award for elevating national service as a legislative priority.
Voices for National Service is a coalition of national, state, and individual service programs that aims to give Americans of all ages the opportunity to volunteer and serve. Founded in 2003, Voices for National Service works with well-known service organizations to engage bipartisan efforts to meet policy needs through volunteerism and service.
Volunteering in service to our communities has been an American value for all of our history. Whenever people are in need, we always come together as communities and as a country to lend a hand. That is why Congress created a number of national service programs in 1993, through bipartisan legislation, under the aegis of the Corporation for National and Community Service (CNCS). These programs include AmeriCorps, VISTA, Learn and Serve America, Senior Corps, and others that enable Americans to engage in service to their communities.
Unfortunately, earlier this year House Republicans threatened to defund the CNCS and, with it, remove opportunities for Americans to engage in volunteerism in communities throughout the country.
On Monday, Senator Coons joined Maryland Senator Barbara Mikulski and twenty other Democratic senators in sending a letter to the Labor-Health and Human Service – Education Appropriations Subcommittee urging its leadership to support funding for the CNCS in next year’s budget. In the letter, Chris and his colleagues noted that these programs have a “multiplier effect, yielding much more in benefits than we put into it in dollars.”
“We strongly believe that whatever cuts are made to the budget will need to be paired with strategic, long-term investments in economic growth and middle class job creation. AmeriCorps’s contribution to public safety, education, and housing do much to advance this agenda,” the Senators wrote.
Since their creation, these programs have engaged millions of Americans in service. Senior Corps, with half a million volunteers each year, enables older Americans to serve as foster grandparents, to visit other seniors who are homebound, to participate in neighborhood safety patrols, and to work on local environmental preservation projects. Learn and Serve America provides grants to state education agencies, schools, and non-profit organizations to engage students in service activities that connect to academics. AmeriCorps provides opportunities to over 85,000 Americans each year to work full-time in service to their communities in a range of ways. VISTA, one well-known AmeriCorps program, helps over 7,000 Americans each year work full time at non-profits or local government agencies to help fight poverty, teach reading skills, combat homelessness, expand employment opportunities, and improve public health.
Chris co-founded one of the first AmeriCorps-supported programs in Delaware in the early 1990s, which helped mentor students participating in the “I Have a Dream” Foundation’s college-attainment program. As New Castle County Executive in 2005, Chris helped create the New Castle County Emergency Services Corps (ESC), a partnership between AmeriCorps, county government, the Volunteer Firefighters’ Association, and the YMCA Resource Center of Delaware. The ESC was created to recruit more people into the county’s volunteer fire companies, but its members also provide a host of important benefits to the community, including CPR and First Aid training and other outreach activities to promote safety. Over the past six years, ESC members have provided over 108,000 hours of service to their communities and saved County taxpayers money that would otherwise have been spent on providing these services directly.
The Emergency Services Corps is just one of so many examples of community service programs supported by AmeriCorps. All over Delaware and across America, communities are being strengthened by the hands of volunteers from AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, and other CNCS programs.
