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I think there when I talked to you on the phone interview, you said your move from Washington to Stanford. You said, oh, you said this in your previous oral history interview, and I'm going to quote, we said, we really need to do something to reach out to the younger generation, the way I've been called The Service by John Kennedy. John Kennedy, yeah. Yeah. And I'll also note that when you served as the Executive Director of the Commission on National Community Service, that organization's 1993 report is titled, What can you Do for your Country? In the first line in the preference says that famous Kennedy line. That's not what what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. With all that said, talk about how John Kennedy inspired you to think about service. Well, when I was at college, it never had really thought about national service, or survey your country because I wasn't going into the military. Then when the first concept of Peace Corps came out, it was like, well, maybe I should do this. So I thought very seriously about joining Peace Corps instead. Did what I did and on the whole issue of the history of American Negro and all the rest. But I think it was basically, it was inspirational. That's all I can say. It was like, it was this call like, well, you've got to do something. Yeah. So I'm going to pull into question now that I was going to ask you at the end. So John Kennedy, even though he never knew it, inspired you to to think seriously about incorporating service into your life. Yes, you were a young person at that point. Did you ever pay it forward? Do you work to inspire young people to Oh, absolutely, service? Well, I think that that has been certainly work I did at the Ha Center at Stanford. That was totally what I was about, even back for the last couple of years, especially after this last election. I went back and I said, I'm too old to really make a difference now, and you guys have got to let me help you, let me give you all the connections. That was certainly the whole idea of what I did with working at Stanford. And I think that that was certainly a call in terms of why I did the work I did here with the National Service. You go to Stanford, basically, your special assistant with the President, which must have given you a pretty capacious portfolio. Yeah, Yeah. Well, actually it was only focused on public service. He already had a special assistant to take care of all the other stuff. So what were you doing in the area of album service? Well, what my job was to write a report to the faculty senate on the status of public service at Stanford and what recommendations of what should be done in order to change it. Once that announcement was given, two things happened. First of all, suddenly people from the community and foundation started calling me and saying, this is great, can I talk to you and give you some ideas? And second, students start to line up literally out the door and say, I want to get involved. I was there literally, I believe it was like a week or two. And it's like we now have something that is alive and we don't even know what we have. I did spend the time trying to find out because history, Stanford did have some things, and my current husband is embarrassing to have three husbands, but it's like the reasons that happened. My current husband actually used to run programs years ago at Stanford that were the early programs during this. Did you know? I didn't know I met him once. It's like a small world. But anyway, there were programs that had done some things away back. Stafford at one point had the largest number of young people going to Peace Corps. I knew that there was a tradition there, but it really wasn't very much alive and the students were upset about that and wanted something more done. You had a program called Stanford in Washington. Yes. That was the other talk, a little bit about that. That was the first e mail or letter. I can't remember whether it was back then to Don Kennedy with recommendations for Stanford should do. I said they needed to of a presence in Washington, DC. And they needed to understand Washington DC. Better here. I said, I've been here like about a couple of weeks and talked to people in the Political Science Department, all that. I think you need an overseas program in Washington DC, because people here really don't have a good feel for how things actually operate at that point. I've gotten a bill through which was almost, I literally got that Bill of Victims rights through, and I've done other things. I knew a bit of how to get things done and I just Like people that I had run into. What Stanford did. Don thought that was an interesting idea. He said, let's do other things here first. We did focus on other things, but it was in the back of my mind. And then I had a couple of students only at Stanford with happen, who happened to be daughters of senators, come to me and say, we think that we need this program in DC. And would you help? Basically, the three of us worked on seeing what was available. And then I probably spent the next four years trying to get faculty to support it. Now it's very popular program, but it was very hard to get a faculty committee, even though, quite frankly, I had already decided what the program should be. But they didn't want internships to be part of it. And it was like, oh, I mean, why not? Because it's not academic. And so they were interested in their research, they were interested in research. And if students wanted to go there and write papers but not do an internship, and maybe, all right, the will give you 10 hours a week, I said, no, it's going to be a full time, substantive internship. In the end, we got exactly what absolutely what I wanted and we were lucky to. John Kennedy did a great job, raise the money, and we got a great building. And everybody would say it's one of Stafford's best programs. The great building in Washington DC. On Connecticut Avenue, right across from Metro, not too far in Woodley Park, is that is, yeah. It's just like it used to be at a Chinese restaurant, and they took over two restaurants at a hotel. It's really nice at Stanford. You were the founder of the house? Yeah, yeah. And we sort of alluded to that a few times, but 1985 is that right? Yeah, I think so. I started working there, we always have trouble figuring out dates because I started working there I think in 802-80-1802 I can't get even get that date straight. I have to do it if you want. But anyway, and it took a couple of years to get the endowment, so that's why we say it was founded in 85. But in fact, we started a public service center. And the purpose of the S center was public service. Yeah. Yeah. And to train students to, we probably have a purpose written now, but it was actually to instill upon students the concept that service was important. And to give them the opportunities academically to have experiences woven into their classes as well. So you were encouraging faculty to incorporate. Now I have over 250 classes that do it. And we know barriers by having fellowships. We don't answer a phone anymore. Every Miss Frank, we created fellowships so that students who could have money to do work in the summer and post graduation. Did you design the center, the work of the center and the bit? Yeah. Totally, 100% When I say that, of course, students, I was always a partner with the students, the endowment that yeah, that was Kennedy, the end. I did a lot of work on getting that. But it came from the has family. I got one of the key members to be on my I set up an advisory board. I got John Gardner to agree to be chair. We had several other great people on it and Mimi has agreed to serve. And that was for a year or so. We ask just for the benefit of Ebo, using John John Gardner was the founder of Common Cause Independent Secretary, Former HEW secretary under Johnson, The War of Poverty. And then he came and basically you could say retirement came to Stanford. And I got him an endowed professorship. So he worked here for five years teaching. So you're going to start the center? Yeah. You had an idea. Yeah. And you obviously, we sell the idea to the administration and to the president. Whose idea was it to reach out to the Has family? Because it's one thing to have an idea, it's another thing to pay for it. I totally understand that. Sly understand that we I think it may have been someone in development office, but it was a combination. I had lunch early on with one of these foundation people who said, you want to get the Hostas involved. So that he had a lunch, he told me. And so I had that in mind. But I think the development office they were doing, big fund raising the has usually gave to Berkeley. I think they thought this was something they might get to, they worked with. Don on that and then I did me. Meanwhile, I got her on the Board and then I helped I wrote the proposal, but I would say Don Kennedy. It could have never happened without him. Yeah. In terms of getting getting the money, I did get our first grant, which was a half $1, million, which was from someone who was volunteering for me, from the community who I had no idea she had any money. And she said, I love this and I'm going to give you a half $1, million I raised the first year, I probably raised a couple of million dollars. That was one reason I hate to say it, but that was one reason. They said, oh, we'll do this. You know what I mean? Like, you know what you mean? But the thing that made it go and created a permanent was the endowment Endowment. Absolutely. And then getting a building. So here's another tiny little story for you, is that I had a former student, MBA student, who worked for a group called Strategic Decisions Group, which is a big international organization. And he came back and said, how can I help you? Basically, we went through an exercise of what are all, I guess the Swat thing, like what are the things that could possibly really hurt the center? And he said, well Don Kenny will leave. You'll leave it I said that's like what? Oh my God. I then really focused on we need real estate because I understood how universities work and I can remember that this was right after we got the endowment. I remember going to the Provost. He says, I can't believe you. You just got the other. Just leave me alone But I was managed. And this was John Gardner telling me. He said, you should have lunch with this person, Tom Ford, who I didn't know. And I told Tom Ford I had a goal of having service as important as athletics. And he said, wow. And then he gave me a bunch of money right there at lunch. And it turned out that he was on the Board of Trustees. I didn't know this head of the building committee, so I asked him to be my chair. And the next thing I know he said, all right, here's how we have to get this building because it would have never happened without him. And it's there now. It's there. And the name of the building? It's the host. Okay. Yeah. They didn't call anything else. Yeah, yeah. I mentioned to introduce you a citation from the World Children Humanitarian Award. And I read that citation and one line kind of jumped out at me, it said you increased student involvement in community service 40-80% within five years. Yeah. And I assume that meant Stanford. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm going to assume that it's true or it wouldn't be in there, so how did you do that? I mean, that's a huge Inca. Yeah. Some of the service I hired students including some who recently graduated to be in charge of volunteer recruitment. And we did that. We set up new programs on tutoring. We set up some real institutions, which is what I learned to help me with the Commission is you've got to have the institutions with trainings and stuff like that in order to make it possible for people to volunteer. So we set up programs like that, but we also worked hard with fraternity sororities and other groups to try to really help them do a better job with what they're doing. And I guess that's Don Kennedy made a raging role because he as president was always saying, you got to do service, you got to do. He was he never gave up an opportunity. Okay. So you were involved in the creation of the California Youth Service Corps? Yeah. Yeah. What's that about? Well, that was let's see, There were two programs I helped to create. One was a youth corps which was actually around around this area of like six communities around here focused on kids in middle school to try to get them to do the Palo Alto area. Yeah, Palo Alto. To do community service. I did this in part because I had kids in middle school and there were no service programs. We wanted them to also work with kids from East Palo Alto. We created jointly that program has now had its 30 anniversary with kids in middle school. You felt there wasn't appropriate opportunity when you created it? That's right. Exactly. Exactly. It's a great program to the day, the other one, which was service California, I believe. I think that it anyway, I have to get the exact dates if I have a wrong. But that was a program to bring together all of the key elements of service in California and have them work together. And we had a conference, an annual conference, that basically helped lead to setting up a real service network in the state of California, which is now run by the state that helped to provide support for getting America or throat. Was your work in California, would you service that helped to jump start America? Absolutely. In your last couple of years at Stanford, you were on leave? The last two years I was on leave at the Commission were doing this work. Okay. Yeah. And part of what you were doing with the Commission was trying to get meric or That's right. Exactly. And I was given sort of a ultimatum by the new President because my if it had been John Kennedy, it wouldn't have happened. But with the new President, he basically said as. Yeah, he said, you either come back or, you know, you have a two year leave and we won't extend it. And I felt like, as much as I didn't want to leave Stanford, that if I had left Americorp at that point in time, it wouldn't have been launched. So you left Stanford State with American to get logs? Right. Okay. So as I've been doing background reading, there were some names that popped up over and over again. I don't know if I'm putting these in the right place or not, but Susan Stroud. Susan Stroud, yeah. You should definitely talk a little bit about her contribution. Okay, Susan Stroud worked at Brown University, and she was originally a coordinator of internship programs from five East Coast universities. I met her, One of the things I did when I first came here to Stanford was to go back east to see how could we steal every good idea from Harvard and Yale and Brown. I met Susan then and she was close friends of Frank Newman. I don't know if you've heard that name, but Frank was head, but he's the next guy. He was head of the Commission on Education, Commission of the States. He'd been President of University of Rhode Island. He had the idea, and I should tell you, same time I did too, but of getting college presidents together to promote service. And that's the genesis of campus Comp. That's the genesis of Campus Compact. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Susan is somebody that is overseeing, is working with less Koski and Tom Erlich on the archive project because she was head of Campus Compact for a while. We were doing it jointly, but then she did it full time. Then when I took over the commission work, she was still a campus compact. But then when I did the corporation work, she got a job at the White House. She worked at the White House getting community support things and long story short. I ran several programs including Learn and Serve. And when I left, she took over Learn and Serve. She's now helping with the archives. So yeah. Yeah, she's on our list. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you played a role in the founding of Campus Compact. Absolutely. As well as California? Absolutely. Yeah. As you mentioned, a national coalition of university presidents committed to engaging students service. I think it was found in 1985. So how did that organization come into existence? Well, it's one thing to have an idea and there's another thing to persuade these presidents to do it exactly. Well, the time is right, Don Kennedy. I actually took several graduate students from the School of education who had come to me independently saying, if we want to change this nation, and if we want to do all of this on a bigger school scale, we need to have college presidents because there's no one else. It was a vacuum of leadership, and the college presidents are the perfect ones. To be the ones to do this call, you have to convince Don Kennedy, he wants to do that. I said sure. I said, we take him over and we had a meeting with Don. And I think Don was like, okay. He didn't say yes at that point. But he was like, well this is an interesting idea. Then simultaneously Frank Newman approached him at some national meeting of college presidents and said, I think you and Howard and Father Healey should get together. Howard swear President Brown and Father Healey, President of Georgetown. And I think at that point don's like okay. And came back to me and said, all right, will you help me with this? We basically then started to think about it and Susan and I worked really closely and I think it's fair to say that Frank Newman had the idea, well, let's get 100 of them together to issue a proclamation that we think this is important and that's all we wanted to do at that point. Organization, I can't remember the exact numbers, but we had more wanting to sign up than we thought. And we had a meeting at Georgetown University and John Gardner was there. And there were some other distinguished media columnists who, I don't remember who they were, but we could find that out from the Washington Post. At that meeting, what happened was like we got a stay together, we got to do this. Then we started to fund raise and got money from Ford. Carnegie Kellogg. Yeah, that's what It's still in existence. It's still in existence and it still has that mission of incur. That's right, absolutely. In California, the person who runs it, I'm in touch with a fair amount. She's doing a great job. They've got several, a number of whole states who have independent. I helped with Legit Oregon for a while. I helped with that one too. So I'm going to ask you one more question and we're going to actually talk about the service in some focused way. But Tom Elish was nominated by President George HW Bush to be on the points of lion to figure out what to do about national service. And I'm going to actually talk to Tom Elish tomorrow, a former president of Indiana University, pro University of Pennsylvania, Dean of Stanford Law School. A very distinguished career for the benefit of anybody who's going to use this interview. Can you explain what the points of foundation is? When Bush, I think, gave his inauguration speech, he talked about how he wanted there to be 1,000 points of light out there of people doing good service. It was an idea that captured the imagination of a lot of people. They decided to try to establish it as an ongoing thing by recognizing during his presidency every day a different person who would be a point of light and that he would meet with when he was traveling around the country. It was like a simple concept. They had to hire, put together a staff and I guess they got private money and a board. Ray Chambers was the first chair of it. I forgot the name of the man who I could see what he looks like, but he was a very big corporate guy. Was the first director of It. A friend of mine who is head of California Compact, Chuck Supple went to work for Thom, was one of the first staff people. I think that it was basically an idea to try to select and recognize people who had done service. Then the idea got a little bigger terms of how do we support the nonprofit sector and how do we create more of infrastructure of support for that field? And there was a whole association of volunteer organization programs that promoted volunteers, and that got incorporated. That was what it was my understanding, and this is what Greg Petersier certainly long more than I was, but it was one of George Bush's. He really wanted this to happen. He wanted more ongoing funding from the federal government. And that's when the whole idea of setting up the Commission came about as a compromise. That's my understanding of what happened. Yeah, so there is a connection then between totally he wanted the money, and Kennedy and other Democrats were like, okay, you give us money for that, you give us money for what we want and we'll make a deal. That's basically what now surely you're going to talk to we'll know much more than I do about that deal. But that's exactly how I understood it. The deal was the Democrats who were pushing what became the Commission That's right. Wanted support from the Point of Light Foundation and they agreed that they would support appropriations for Points of Light if we got the commission. Yeah, So what happened is that the bill got through and signed. But part of the ways of the bill, the way it was designed, was that there was going to be this bipartisan board and had to be appointed by the President. And he didn't appoint anybody. He got his money for the points of light, but didn't appoint the board of the Commission. And the Commission had a timeline on it, which is what led to all the pressure because a whole year went away. And I think my understanding is that then he reached out to Tom Erlich and others and said, because I think it became clear, Congress says you're not going to get any more money. I mean, it's like you had that and it's like, that's all you're going to get unless you do this other. The Commission on National and Community Service goes into law. But the President doesn't appoint a board. That's exactly, But he was pressured to do that. Tom Erlich was on that board and became chair of the board. Exactly. All right. Exactly. Tom Erlich was also on the Points of light. That's right. All right. So probably Tom is a key person to explain that and surely would be the other person. So I'll be interested to read that.

Description of the video:

I think there when I talked to you on the phone interview, you said your move from Washington to Stanford. You said, oh, you said this in your previous oral history interview, and I'm going to quote, we said, we really need to do something to reach out to the younger generation, the way I've been called The Service by John Kennedy. John Kennedy, yeah. Yeah. And I'll also note that when you served as the Executive Director of the Commission on National Community Service, that organization's 1993 report is titled, What can you Do for your Country? In the first line in the preference says that famous Kennedy line. That's not what what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. With all that said, talk about how John Kennedy inspired you to think about service. Well, when I was at college, it never had really thought about national service, or survey your country because I wasn't going into the military. Then when the first concept of Peace Corps came out, it was like, well, maybe I should do this. So I thought very seriously about joining Peace Corps instead. Did what I did and on the whole issue of the history of American Negro and all the rest. But I think it was basically, it was inspirational. That's all I can say. It was like, it was this call like, well, you've got to do something. Yeah. So I'm going to pull into question now that I was going to ask you at the end. So John Kennedy, even though he never knew it, inspired you to to think seriously about incorporating service into your life. Yes, you were a young person at that point. Did you ever pay it forward? Do you work to inspire young people to Oh, absolutely, service? Well, I think that that has been certainly work I did at the Ha Center at Stanford. That was totally what I was about, even back for the last couple of years, especially after this last election. I went back and I said, I'm too old to really make a difference now, and you guys have got to let me help you, let me give you all the connections. That was certainly the whole idea of what I did with working at Stanford. And I think that that was certainly a call in terms of why I did the work I did here with the National Service. You go to Stanford, basically, your special assistant with the President, which must have given you a pretty capacious portfolio. Yeah, Yeah. Well, actually it was only focused on public service. He already had a special assistant to take care of all the other stuff. So what were you doing in the area of album service? Well, what my job was to write a report to the faculty senate on the status of public service at Stanford and what recommendations of what should be done in order to change it. Once that announcement was given, two things happened. First of all, suddenly people from the community and foundation started calling me and saying, this is great, can I talk to you and give you some ideas? And second, students start to line up literally out the door and say, I want to get involved. I was there literally, I believe it was like a week or two. And it's like we now have something that is alive and we don't even know what we have. I did spend the time trying to find out because history, Stanford did have some things, and my current husband is embarrassing to have three husbands, but it's like the reasons that happened. My current husband actually used to run programs years ago at Stanford that were the early programs during this. Did you know? I didn't know I met him once. It's like a small world. But anyway, there were programs that had done some things away back. Stafford at one point had the largest number of young people going to Peace Corps. I knew that there was a tradition there, but it really wasn't very much alive and the students were upset about that and wanted something more done. You had a program called Stanford in Washington. Yes. That was the other talk, a little bit about that. That was the first e mail or letter. I can't remember whether it was back then to Don Kennedy with recommendations for Stanford should do. I said they needed to of a presence in Washington, DC. And they needed to understand Washington DC. Better here. I said, I've been here like about a couple of weeks and talked to people in the Political Science Department, all that. I think you need an overseas program in Washington DC, because people here really don't have a good feel for how things actually operate at that point. I've gotten a bill through which was almost, I literally got that Bill of Victims rights through, and I've done other things. I knew a bit of how to get things done and I just Like people that I had run into. What Stanford did. Don thought that was an interesting idea. He said, let's do other things here first. We did focus on other things, but it was in the back of my mind. And then I had a couple of students only at Stanford with happen, who happened to be daughters of senators, come to me and say, we think that we need this program in DC. And would you help? Basically, the three of us worked on seeing what was available. And then I probably spent the next four years trying to get faculty to support it. Now it's very popular program, but it was very hard to get a faculty committee, even though, quite frankly, I had already decided what the program should be. But they didn't want internships to be part of it. And it was like, oh, I mean, why not? Because it's not academic. And so they were interested in their research, they were interested in research. And if students wanted to go there and write papers but not do an internship, and maybe, all right, the will give you 10 hours a week, I said, no, it's going to be a full time, substantive internship. In the end, we got exactly what absolutely what I wanted and we were lucky to. John Kennedy did a great job, raise the money, and we got a great building. And everybody would say it's one of Stafford's best programs. The great building in Washington DC. On Connecticut Avenue, right across from Metro, not too far in Woodley Park, is that is, yeah. It's just like it used to be at a Chinese restaurant, and they took over two restaurants at a hotel. It's really nice at Stanford. You were the founder of the house? Yeah, yeah. And we sort of alluded to that a few times, but 1985 is that right? Yeah, I think so. I started working there, we always have trouble figuring out dates because I started working there I think in 802-80-1802 I can't get even get that date straight. I have to do it if you want. But anyway, and it took a couple of years to get the endowment, so that's why we say it was founded in 85. But in fact, we started a public service center. And the purpose of the S center was public service. Yeah. Yeah. And to train students to, we probably have a purpose written now, but it was actually to instill upon students the concept that service was important. And to give them the opportunities academically to have experiences woven into their classes as well. So you were encouraging faculty to incorporate. Now I have over 250 classes that do it. And we know barriers by having fellowships. We don't answer a phone anymore. Every Miss Frank, we created fellowships so that students who could have money to do work in the summer and post graduation. Did you design the center, the work of the center and the bit? Yeah. Totally, 100% When I say that, of course, students, I was always a partner with the students, the endowment that yeah, that was Kennedy, the end. I did a lot of work on getting that. But it came from the has family. I got one of the key members to be on my I set up an advisory board. I got John Gardner to agree to be chair. We had several other great people on it and Mimi has agreed to serve. And that was for a year or so. We ask just for the benefit of Ebo, using John John Gardner was the founder of Common Cause Independent Secretary, Former HEW secretary under Johnson, The War of Poverty. And then he came and basically you could say retirement came to Stanford. And I got him an endowed professorship. So he worked here for five years teaching. So you're going to start the center? Yeah. You had an idea. Yeah. And you obviously, we sell the idea to the administration and to the president. Whose idea was it to reach out to the Has family? Because it's one thing to have an idea, it's another thing to pay for it. I totally understand that. Sly understand that we I think it may have been someone in development office, but it was a combination. I had lunch early on with one of these foundation people who said, you want to get the Hostas involved. So that he had a lunch, he told me. And so I had that in mind. But I think the development office they were doing, big fund raising the has usually gave to Berkeley. I think they thought this was something they might get to, they worked with. Don on that and then I did me. Meanwhile, I got her on the Board and then I helped I wrote the proposal, but I would say Don Kennedy. It could have never happened without him. Yeah. In terms of getting getting the money, I did get our first grant, which was a half $1, million, which was from someone who was volunteering for me, from the community who I had no idea she had any money. And she said, I love this and I'm going to give you a half $1, million I raised the first year, I probably raised a couple of million dollars. That was one reason I hate to say it, but that was one reason. They said, oh, we'll do this. You know what I mean? Like, you know what you mean? But the thing that made it go and created a permanent was the endowment Endowment. Absolutely. And then getting a building. So here's another tiny little story for you, is that I had a former student, MBA student, who worked for a group called Strategic Decisions Group, which is a big international organization. And he came back and said, how can I help you? Basically, we went through an exercise of what are all, I guess the Swat thing, like what are the things that could possibly really hurt the center? And he said, well Don Kenny will leave. You'll leave it I said that's like what? Oh my God. I then really focused on we need real estate because I understood how universities work and I can remember that this was right after we got the endowment. I remember going to the Provost. He says, I can't believe you. You just got the other. Just leave me alone But I was managed. And this was John Gardner telling me. He said, you should have lunch with this person, Tom Ford, who I didn't know. And I told Tom Ford I had a goal of having service as important as athletics. And he said, wow. And then he gave me a bunch of money right there at lunch. And it turned out that he was on the Board of Trustees. I didn't know this head of the building committee, so I asked him to be my chair. And the next thing I know he said, all right, here's how we have to get this building because it would have never happened without him. And it's there now. It's there. And the name of the building? It's the host. Okay. Yeah. They didn't call anything else. Yeah, yeah. I mentioned to introduce you a citation from the World Children Humanitarian Award. And I read that citation and one line kind of jumped out at me, it said you increased student involvement in community service 40-80% within five years. Yeah. And I assume that meant Stanford. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm going to assume that it's true or it wouldn't be in there, so how did you do that? I mean, that's a huge Inca. Yeah. Some of the service I hired students including some who recently graduated to be in charge of volunteer recruitment. And we did that. We set up new programs on tutoring. We set up some real institutions, which is what I learned to help me with the Commission is you've got to have the institutions with trainings and stuff like that in order to make it possible for people to volunteer. So we set up programs like that, but we also worked hard with fraternity sororities and other groups to try to really help them do a better job with what they're doing. And I guess that's Don Kennedy made a raging role because he as president was always saying, you got to do service, you got to do. He was he never gave up an opportunity. Okay. So you were involved in the creation of the California Youth Service Corps? Yeah. Yeah. What's that about? Well, that was let's see, There were two programs I helped to create. One was a youth corps which was actually around around this area of like six communities around here focused on kids in middle school to try to get them to do the Palo Alto area. Yeah, Palo Alto. To do community service. I did this in part because I had kids in middle school and there were no service programs. We wanted them to also work with kids from East Palo Alto. We created jointly that program has now had its 30 anniversary with kids in middle school. You felt there wasn't appropriate opportunity when you created it? That's right. Exactly. Exactly. It's a great program to the day, the other one, which was service California, I believe. I think that it anyway, I have to get the exact dates if I have a wrong. But that was a program to bring together all of the key elements of service in California and have them work together. And we had a conference, an annual conference, that basically helped lead to setting up a real service network in the state of California, which is now run by the state that helped to provide support for getting America or throat. Was your work in California, would you service that helped to jump start America? Absolutely. In your last couple of years at Stanford, you were on leave? The last two years I was on leave at the Commission were doing this work. Okay. Yeah. And part of what you were doing with the Commission was trying to get meric or That's right. Exactly. And I was given sort of a ultimatum by the new President because my if it had been John Kennedy, it wouldn't have happened. But with the new President, he basically said as. Yeah, he said, you either come back or, you know, you have a two year leave and we won't extend it. And I felt like, as much as I didn't want to leave Stanford, that if I had left Americorp at that point in time, it wouldn't have been launched. So you left Stanford State with American to get logs? Right. Okay. So as I've been doing background reading, there were some names that popped up over and over again. I don't know if I'm putting these in the right place or not, but Susan Stroud. Susan Stroud, yeah. You should definitely talk a little bit about her contribution. Okay, Susan Stroud worked at Brown University, and she was originally a coordinator of internship programs from five East Coast universities. I met her, One of the things I did when I first came here to Stanford was to go back east to see how could we steal every good idea from Harvard and Yale and Brown. I met Susan then and she was close friends of Frank Newman. I don't know if you've heard that name, but Frank was head, but he's the next guy. He was head of the Commission on Education, Commission of the States. He'd been President of University of Rhode Island. He had the idea, and I should tell you, same time I did too, but of getting college presidents together to promote service. And that's the genesis of campus Comp. That's the genesis of Campus Compact. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Susan is somebody that is overseeing, is working with less Koski and Tom Erlich on the archive project because she was head of Campus Compact for a while. We were doing it jointly, but then she did it full time. Then when I took over the commission work, she was still a campus compact. But then when I did the corporation work, she got a job at the White House. She worked at the White House getting community support things and long story short. I ran several programs including Learn and Serve. And when I left, she took over Learn and Serve. She's now helping with the archives. So yeah. Yeah, she's on our list. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you played a role in the founding of Campus Compact. Absolutely. As well as California? Absolutely. Yeah. As you mentioned, a national coalition of university presidents committed to engaging students service. I think it was found in 1985. So how did that organization come into existence? Well, it's one thing to have an idea and there's another thing to persuade these presidents to do it exactly. Well, the time is right, Don Kennedy. I actually took several graduate students from the School of education who had come to me independently saying, if we want to change this nation, and if we want to do all of this on a bigger school scale, we need to have college presidents because there's no one else. It was a vacuum of leadership, and the college presidents are the perfect ones. To be the ones to do this call, you have to convince Don Kennedy, he wants to do that. I said sure. I said, we take him over and we had a meeting with Don. And I think Don was like, okay. He didn't say yes at that point. But he was like, well this is an interesting idea. Then simultaneously Frank Newman approached him at some national meeting of college presidents and said, I think you and Howard and Father Healey should get together. Howard swear President Brown and Father Healey, President of Georgetown. And I think at that point don's like okay. And came back to me and said, all right, will you help me with this? We basically then started to think about it and Susan and I worked really closely and I think it's fair to say that Frank Newman had the idea, well, let's get 100 of them together to issue a proclamation that we think this is important and that's all we wanted to do at that point. Organization, I can't remember the exact numbers, but we had more wanting to sign up than we thought. And we had a meeting at Georgetown University and John Gardner was there. And there were some other distinguished media columnists who, I don't remember who they were, but we could find that out from the Washington Post. At that meeting, what happened was like we got a stay together, we got to do this. Then we started to fund raise and got money from Ford. Carnegie Kellogg. Yeah, that's what It's still in existence. It's still in existence and it still has that mission of incur. That's right, absolutely. In California, the person who runs it, I'm in touch with a fair amount. She's doing a great job. They've got several, a number of whole states who have independent. I helped with Legit Oregon for a while. I helped with that one too. So I'm going to ask you one more question and we're going to actually talk about the service in some focused way. But Tom Elish was nominated by President George HW Bush to be on the points of lion to figure out what to do about national service. And I'm going to actually talk to Tom Elish tomorrow, a former president of Indiana University, pro University of Pennsylvania, Dean of Stanford Law School. A very distinguished career for the benefit of anybody who's going to use this interview. Can you explain what the points of foundation is? When Bush, I think, gave his inauguration speech, he talked about how he wanted there to be 1,000 points of light out there of people doing good service. It was an idea that captured the imagination of a lot of people. They decided to try to establish it as an ongoing thing by recognizing during his presidency every day a different person who would be a point of light and that he would meet with when he was traveling around the country. It was like a simple concept. They had to hire, put together a staff and I guess they got private money and a board. Ray Chambers was the first chair of it. I forgot the name of the man who I could see what he looks like, but he was a very big corporate guy. Was the first director of It. A friend of mine who is head of California Compact, Chuck Supple went to work for Thom, was one of the first staff people. I think that it was basically an idea to try to select and recognize people who had done service. Then the idea got a little bigger terms of how do we support the nonprofit sector and how do we create more of infrastructure of support for that field? And there was a whole association of volunteer organization programs that promoted volunteers, and that got incorporated. That was what it was my understanding, and this is what Greg Petersier certainly long more than I was, but it was one of George Bush's. He really wanted this to happen. He wanted more ongoing funding from the federal government. And that's when the whole idea of setting up the Commission came about as a compromise. That's my understanding of what happened. Yeah, so there is a connection then between totally he wanted the money, and Kennedy and other Democrats were like, okay, you give us money for that, you give us money for what we want and we'll make a deal. That's basically what now surely you're going to talk to we'll know much more than I do about that deal. But that's exactly how I understood it. The deal was the Democrats who were pushing what became the Commission That's right. Wanted support from the Point of Light Foundation and they agreed that they would support appropriations for Points of Light if we got the commission. Yeah, So what happened is that the bill got through and signed. But part of the ways of the bill, the way it was designed, was that there was going to be this bipartisan board and had to be appointed by the President. And he didn't appoint anybody. He got his money for the points of light, but didn't appoint the board of the Commission. And the Commission had a timeline on it, which is what led to all the pressure because a whole year went away. And I think my understanding is that then he reached out to Tom Erlich and others and said, because I think it became clear, Congress says you're not going to get any more money. I mean, it's like you had that and it's like, that's all you're going to get unless you do this other. The Commission on National and Community Service goes into law. But the President doesn't appoint a board. That's exactly, But he was pressured to do that. Tom Erlich was on that board and became chair of the board. Exactly. All right. Exactly. Tom Erlich was also on the Points of light. That's right. All right. So probably Tom is a key person to explain that and surely would be the other person. So I'll be interested to read that.

Description of the video:

I think there when I talked to you on the phone interview, you said your move from Washington to Stanford. You said, oh, you said this in your previous oral history interview, and I'm going to quote, we said, we really need to do something to reach out to the younger generation, the way I've been called The Service by John Kennedy. John Kennedy, yeah. Yeah. And I'll also note that when you served as the Executive Director of the Commission on National Community Service, that organization's 1993 report is titled, What can you Do for your Country? In the first line in the preference says that famous Kennedy line. That's not what what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. With all that said, talk about how John Kennedy inspired you to think about service. Well, when I was at college, it never had really thought about national service, or survey your country because I wasn't going into the military. Then when the first concept of Peace Corps came out, it was like, well, maybe I should do this. So I thought very seriously about joining Peace Corps instead. Did what I did and on the whole issue of the history of American Negro and all the rest. But I think it was basically, it was inspirational. That's all I can say. It was like, it was this call like, well, you've got to do something. Yeah. So I'm going to pull into question now that I was going to ask you at the end. So John Kennedy, even though he never knew it, inspired you to to think seriously about incorporating service into your life. Yes, you were a young person at that point. Did you ever pay it forward? Do you work to inspire young people to Oh, absolutely, service? Well, I think that that has been certainly work I did at the Ha Center at Stanford. That was totally what I was about, even back for the last couple of years, especially after this last election. I went back and I said, I'm too old to really make a difference now, and you guys have got to let me help you, let me give you all the connections. That was certainly the whole idea of what I did with working at Stanford. And I think that that was certainly a call in terms of why I did the work I did here with the National Service. You go to Stanford, basically, your special assistant with the President, which must have given you a pretty capacious portfolio. Yeah, Yeah. Well, actually it was only focused on public service. He already had a special assistant to take care of all the other stuff. So what were you doing in the area of album service? Well, what my job was to write a report to the faculty senate on the status of public service at Stanford and what recommendations of what should be done in order to change it. Once that announcement was given, two things happened. First of all, suddenly people from the community and foundation started calling me and saying, this is great, can I talk to you and give you some ideas? And second, students start to line up literally out the door and say, I want to get involved. I was there literally, I believe it was like a week or two. And it's like we now have something that is alive and we don't even know what we have. I did spend the time trying to find out because history, Stanford did have some things, and my current husband is embarrassing to have three husbands, but it's like the reasons that happened. My current husband actually used to run programs years ago at Stanford that were the early programs during this. Did you know? I didn't know I met him once. It's like a small world. But anyway, there were programs that had done some things away back. Stafford at one point had the largest number of young people going to Peace Corps. I knew that there was a tradition there, but it really wasn't very much alive and the students were upset about that and wanted something more done. You had a program called Stanford in Washington. Yes. That was the other talk, a little bit about that. That was the first e mail or letter. I can't remember whether it was back then to Don Kennedy with recommendations for Stanford should do. I said they needed to of a presence in Washington, DC. And they needed to understand Washington DC. Better here. I said, I've been here like about a couple of weeks and talked to people in the Political Science Department, all that. I think you need an overseas program in Washington DC, because people here really don't have a good feel for how things actually operate at that point. I've gotten a bill through which was almost, I literally got that Bill of Victims rights through, and I've done other things. I knew a bit of how to get things done and I just Like people that I had run into. What Stanford did. Don thought that was an interesting idea. He said, let's do other things here first. We did focus on other things, but it was in the back of my mind. And then I had a couple of students only at Stanford with happen, who happened to be daughters of senators, come to me and say, we think that we need this program in DC. And would you help? Basically, the three of us worked on seeing what was available. And then I probably spent the next four years trying to get faculty to support it. Now it's very popular program, but it was very hard to get a faculty committee, even though, quite frankly, I had already decided what the program should be. But they didn't want internships to be part of it. And it was like, oh, I mean, why not? Because it's not academic. And so they were interested in their research, they were interested in research. And if students wanted to go there and write papers but not do an internship, and maybe, all right, the will give you 10 hours a week, I said, no, it's going to be a full time, substantive internship. In the end, we got exactly what absolutely what I wanted and we were lucky to. John Kennedy did a great job, raise the money, and we got a great building. And everybody would say it's one of Stafford's best programs. The great building in Washington DC. On Connecticut Avenue, right across from Metro, not too far in Woodley Park, is that is, yeah. It's just like it used to be at a Chinese restaurant, and they took over two restaurants at a hotel. It's really nice at Stanford. You were the founder of the house? Yeah, yeah. And we sort of alluded to that a few times, but 1985 is that right? Yeah, I think so. I started working there, we always have trouble figuring out dates because I started working there I think in 802-80-1802 I can't get even get that date straight. I have to do it if you want. But anyway, and it took a couple of years to get the endowment, so that's why we say it was founded in 85. But in fact, we started a public service center. And the purpose of the S center was public service. Yeah. Yeah. And to train students to, we probably have a purpose written now, but it was actually to instill upon students the concept that service was important. And to give them the opportunities academically to have experiences woven into their classes as well. So you were encouraging faculty to incorporate. Now I have over 250 classes that do it. And we know barriers by having fellowships. We don't answer a phone anymore. Every Miss Frank, we created fellowships so that students who could have money to do work in the summer and post graduation. Did you design the center, the work of the center and the bit? Yeah. Totally, 100% When I say that, of course, students, I was always a partner with the students, the endowment that yeah, that was Kennedy, the end. I did a lot of work on getting that. But it came from the has family. I got one of the key members to be on my I set up an advisory board. I got John Gardner to agree to be chair. We had several other great people on it and Mimi has agreed to serve. And that was for a year or so. We ask just for the benefit of Ebo, using John John Gardner was the founder of Common Cause Independent Secretary, Former HEW secretary under Johnson, The War of Poverty. And then he came and basically you could say retirement came to Stanford. And I got him an endowed professorship. So he worked here for five years teaching. So you're going to start the center? Yeah. You had an idea. Yeah. And you obviously, we sell the idea to the administration and to the president. Whose idea was it to reach out to the Has family? Because it's one thing to have an idea, it's another thing to pay for it. I totally understand that. Sly understand that we I think it may have been someone in development office, but it was a combination. I had lunch early on with one of these foundation people who said, you want to get the Hostas involved. So that he had a lunch, he told me. And so I had that in mind. But I think the development office they were doing, big fund raising the has usually gave to Berkeley. I think they thought this was something they might get to, they worked with. Don on that and then I did me. Meanwhile, I got her on the Board and then I helped I wrote the proposal, but I would say Don Kennedy. It could have never happened without him. Yeah. In terms of getting getting the money, I did get our first grant, which was a half $1, million, which was from someone who was volunteering for me, from the community who I had no idea she had any money. And she said, I love this and I'm going to give you a half $1, million I raised the first year, I probably raised a couple of million dollars. That was one reason I hate to say it, but that was one reason. They said, oh, we'll do this. You know what I mean? Like, you know what you mean? But the thing that made it go and created a permanent was the endowment Endowment. Absolutely. And then getting a building. So here's another tiny little story for you, is that I had a former student, MBA student, who worked for a group called Strategic Decisions Group, which is a big international organization. And he came back and said, how can I help you? Basically, we went through an exercise of what are all, I guess the Swat thing, like what are the things that could possibly really hurt the center? And he said, well Don Kenny will leave. You'll leave it I said that's like what? Oh my God. I then really focused on we need real estate because I understood how universities work and I can remember that this was right after we got the endowment. I remember going to the Provost. He says, I can't believe you. You just got the other. Just leave me alone But I was managed. And this was John Gardner telling me. He said, you should have lunch with this person, Tom Ford, who I didn't know. And I told Tom Ford I had a goal of having service as important as athletics. And he said, wow. And then he gave me a bunch of money right there at lunch. And it turned out that he was on the Board of Trustees. I didn't know this head of the building committee, so I asked him to be my chair. And the next thing I know he said, all right, here's how we have to get this building because it would have never happened without him. And it's there now. It's there. And the name of the building? It's the host. Okay. Yeah. They didn't call anything else. Yeah, yeah. I mentioned to introduce you a citation from the World Children Humanitarian Award. And I read that citation and one line kind of jumped out at me, it said you increased student involvement in community service 40-80% within five years. Yeah. And I assume that meant Stanford. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm going to assume that it's true or it wouldn't be in there, so how did you do that? I mean, that's a huge Inca. Yeah. Some of the service I hired students including some who recently graduated to be in charge of volunteer recruitment. And we did that. We set up new programs on tutoring. We set up some real institutions, which is what I learned to help me with the Commission is you've got to have the institutions with trainings and stuff like that in order to make it possible for people to volunteer. So we set up programs like that, but we also worked hard with fraternity sororities and other groups to try to really help them do a better job with what they're doing. And I guess that's Don Kennedy made a raging role because he as president was always saying, you got to do service, you got to do. He was he never gave up an opportunity. Okay. So you were involved in the creation of the California Youth Service Corps? Yeah. Yeah. What's that about? Well, that was let's see, There were two programs I helped to create. One was a youth corps which was actually around around this area of like six communities around here focused on kids in middle school to try to get them to do the Palo Alto area. Yeah, Palo Alto. To do community service. I did this in part because I had kids in middle school and there were no service programs. We wanted them to also work with kids from East Palo Alto. We created jointly that program has now had its 30 anniversary with kids in middle school. You felt there wasn't appropriate opportunity when you created it? That's right. Exactly. Exactly. It's a great program to the day, the other one, which was service California, I believe. I think that it anyway, I have to get the exact dates if I have a wrong. But that was a program to bring together all of the key elements of service in California and have them work together. And we had a conference, an annual conference, that basically helped lead to setting up a real service network in the state of California, which is now run by the state that helped to provide support for getting America or throat. Was your work in California, would you service that helped to jump start America? Absolutely. In your last couple of years at Stanford, you were on leave? The last two years I was on leave at the Commission were doing this work. Okay. Yeah. And part of what you were doing with the Commission was trying to get meric or That's right. Exactly. And I was given sort of a ultimatum by the new President because my if it had been John Kennedy, it wouldn't have happened. But with the new President, he basically said as. Yeah, he said, you either come back or, you know, you have a two year leave and we won't extend it. And I felt like, as much as I didn't want to leave Stanford, that if I had left Americorp at that point in time, it wouldn't have been launched. So you left Stanford State with American to get logs? Right. Okay. So as I've been doing background reading, there were some names that popped up over and over again. I don't know if I'm putting these in the right place or not, but Susan Stroud. Susan Stroud, yeah. You should definitely talk a little bit about her contribution. Okay, Susan Stroud worked at Brown University, and she was originally a coordinator of internship programs from five East Coast universities. I met her, One of the things I did when I first came here to Stanford was to go back east to see how could we steal every good idea from Harvard and Yale and Brown. I met Susan then and she was close friends of Frank Newman. I don't know if you've heard that name, but Frank was head, but he's the next guy. He was head of the Commission on Education, Commission of the States. He'd been President of University of Rhode Island. He had the idea, and I should tell you, same time I did too, but of getting college presidents together to promote service. And that's the genesis of campus Comp. That's the genesis of Campus Compact. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Susan is somebody that is overseeing, is working with less Koski and Tom Erlich on the archive project because she was head of Campus Compact for a while. We were doing it jointly, but then she did it full time. Then when I took over the commission work, she was still a campus compact. But then when I did the corporation work, she got a job at the White House. She worked at the White House getting community support things and long story short. I ran several programs including Learn and Serve. And when I left, she took over Learn and Serve. She's now helping with the archives. So yeah. Yeah, she's on our list. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you played a role in the founding of Campus Compact. Absolutely. As well as California? Absolutely. Yeah. As you mentioned, a national coalition of university presidents committed to engaging students service. I think it was found in 1985. So how did that organization come into existence? Well, it's one thing to have an idea and there's another thing to persuade these presidents to do it exactly. Well, the time is right, Don Kennedy. I actually took several graduate students from the School of education who had come to me independently saying, if we want to change this nation, and if we want to do all of this on a bigger school scale, we need to have college presidents because there's no one else. It was a vacuum of leadership, and the college presidents are the perfect ones. To be the ones to do this call, you have to convince Don Kennedy, he wants to do that. I said sure. I said, we take him over and we had a meeting with Don. And I think Don was like, okay. He didn't say yes at that point. But he was like, well this is an interesting idea. Then simultaneously Frank Newman approached him at some national meeting of college presidents and said, I think you and Howard and Father Healey should get together. Howard swear President Brown and Father Healey, President of Georgetown. And I think at that point don's like okay. And came back to me and said, all right, will you help me with this? We basically then started to think about it and Susan and I worked really closely and I think it's fair to say that Frank Newman had the idea, well, let's get 100 of them together to issue a proclamation that we think this is important and that's all we wanted to do at that point. Organization, I can't remember the exact numbers, but we had more wanting to sign up than we thought. And we had a meeting at Georgetown University and John Gardner was there. And there were some other distinguished media columnists who, I don't remember who they were, but we could find that out from the Washington Post. At that meeting, what happened was like we got a stay together, we got to do this. Then we started to fund raise and got money from Ford. Carnegie Kellogg. Yeah, that's what It's still in existence. It's still in existence and it still has that mission of incur. That's right, absolutely. In California, the person who runs it, I'm in touch with a fair amount. She's doing a great job. They've got several, a number of whole states who have independent. I helped with Legit Oregon for a while. I helped with that one too. So I'm going to ask you one more question and we're going to actually talk about the service in some focused way. But Tom Elish was nominated by President George HW Bush to be on the points of lion to figure out what to do about national service. And I'm going to actually talk to Tom Elish tomorrow, a former president of Indiana University, pro University of Pennsylvania, Dean of Stanford Law School. A very distinguished career for the benefit of anybody who's going to use this interview. Can you explain what the points of foundation is? When Bush, I think, gave his inauguration speech, he talked about how he wanted there to be 1,000 points of light out there of people doing good service. It was an idea that captured the imagination of a lot of people. They decided to try to establish it as an ongoing thing by recognizing during his presidency every day a different person who would be a point of light and that he would meet with when he was traveling around the country. It was like a simple concept. They had to hire, put together a staff and I guess they got private money and a board. Ray Chambers was the first chair of it. I forgot the name of the man who I could see what he looks like, but he was a very big corporate guy. Was the first director of It. A friend of mine who is head of California Compact, Chuck Supple went to work for Thom, was one of the first staff people. I think that it was basically an idea to try to select and recognize people who had done service. Then the idea got a little bigger terms of how do we support the nonprofit sector and how do we create more of infrastructure of support for that field? And there was a whole association of volunteer organization programs that promoted volunteers, and that got incorporated. That was what it was my understanding, and this is what Greg Petersier certainly long more than I was, but it was one of George Bush's. He really wanted this to happen. He wanted more ongoing funding from the federal government. And that's when the whole idea of setting up the Commission came about as a compromise. That's my understanding of what happened. Yeah, so there is a connection then between totally he wanted the money, and Kennedy and other Democrats were like, okay, you give us money for that, you give us money for what we want and we'll make a deal. That's basically what now surely you're going to talk to we'll know much more than I do about that deal. But that's exactly how I understood it. The deal was the Democrats who were pushing what became the Commission That's right. Wanted support from the Point of Light Foundation and they agreed that they would support appropriations for Points of Light if we got the commission. Yeah, So what happened is that the bill got through and signed. But part of the ways of the bill, the way it was designed, was that there was going to be this bipartisan board and had to be appointed by the President. And he didn't appoint anybody. He got his money for the points of light, but didn't appoint the board of the Commission. And the Commission had a timeline on it, which is what led to all the pressure because a whole year went away. And I think my understanding is that then he reached out to Tom Erlich and others and said, because I think it became clear, Congress says you're not going to get any more money. I mean, it's like you had that and it's like, that's all you're going to get unless you do this other. The Commission on National and Community Service goes into law. But the President doesn't appoint a board. That's exactly, But he was pressured to do that. Tom Erlich was on that board and became chair of the board. Exactly. All right. Exactly. Tom Erlich was also on the Points of light. That's right. All right. So probably Tom is a key person to explain that and surely would be the other person. So I'll be interested to read that.

Description of the video:

I think there when I talked to you on the phone interview, you said your move from Washington to Stanford. You said, oh, you said this in your previous oral history interview, and I'm going to quote, we said, we really need to do something to reach out to the younger generation, the way I've been called The Service by John Kennedy. John Kennedy, yeah. Yeah. And I'll also note that when you served as the Executive Director of the Commission on National Community Service, that organization's 1993 report is titled, What can you Do for your Country? In the first line in the preference says that famous Kennedy line. That's not what what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. With all that said, talk about how John Kennedy inspired you to think about service. Well, when I was at college, it never had really thought about national service, or survey your country because I wasn't going into the military. Then when the first concept of Peace Corps came out, it was like, well, maybe I should do this. So I thought very seriously about joining Peace Corps instead. Did what I did and on the whole issue of the history of American Negro and all the rest. But I think it was basically, it was inspirational. That's all I can say. It was like, it was this call like, well, you've got to do something. Yeah. So I'm going to pull into question now that I was going to ask you at the end. So John Kennedy, even though he never knew it, inspired you to to think seriously about incorporating service into your life. Yes, you were a young person at that point. Did you ever pay it forward? Do you work to inspire young people to Oh, absolutely, service? Well, I think that that has been certainly work I did at the Ha Center at Stanford. That was totally what I was about, even back for the last couple of years, especially after this last election. I went back and I said, I'm too old to really make a difference now, and you guys have got to let me help you, let me give you all the connections. That was certainly the whole idea of what I did with working at Stanford. And I think that that was certainly a call in terms of why I did the work I did here with the National Service. You go to Stanford, basically, your special assistant with the President, which must have given you a pretty capacious portfolio. Yeah, Yeah. Well, actually it was only focused on public service. He already had a special assistant to take care of all the other stuff. So what were you doing in the area of album service? Well, what my job was to write a report to the faculty senate on the status of public service at Stanford and what recommendations of what should be done in order to change it. Once that announcement was given, two things happened. First of all, suddenly people from the community and foundation started calling me and saying, this is great, can I talk to you and give you some ideas? And second, students start to line up literally out the door and say, I want to get involved. I was there literally, I believe it was like a week or two. And it's like we now have something that is alive and we don't even know what we have. I did spend the time trying to find out because history, Stanford did have some things, and my current husband is embarrassing to have three husbands, but it's like the reasons that happened. My current husband actually used to run programs years ago at Stanford that were the early programs during this. Did you know? I didn't know I met him once. It's like a small world. But anyway, there were programs that had done some things away back. Stafford at one point had the largest number of young people going to Peace Corps. I knew that there was a tradition there, but it really wasn't very much alive and the students were upset about that and wanted something more done. You had a program called Stanford in Washington. Yes. That was the other talk, a little bit about that. That was the first e mail or letter. I can't remember whether it was back then to Don Kennedy with recommendations for Stanford should do. I said they needed to of a presence in Washington, DC. And they needed to understand Washington DC. Better here. I said, I've been here like about a couple of weeks and talked to people in the Political Science Department, all that. I think you need an overseas program in Washington DC, because people here really don't have a good feel for how things actually operate at that point. I've gotten a bill through which was almost, I literally got that Bill of Victims rights through, and I've done other things. I knew a bit of how to get things done and I just Like people that I had run into. What Stanford did. Don thought that was an interesting idea. He said, let's do other things here first. We did focus on other things, but it was in the back of my mind. And then I had a couple of students only at Stanford with happen, who happened to be daughters of senators, come to me and say, we think that we need this program in DC. And would you help? Basically, the three of us worked on seeing what was available. And then I probably spent the next four years trying to get faculty to support it. Now it's very popular program, but it was very hard to get a faculty committee, even though, quite frankly, I had already decided what the program should be. But they didn't want internships to be part of it. And it was like, oh, I mean, why not? Because it's not academic. And so they were interested in their research, they were interested in research. And if students wanted to go there and write papers but not do an internship, and maybe, all right, the will give you 10 hours a week, I said, no, it's going to be a full time, substantive internship. In the end, we got exactly what absolutely what I wanted and we were lucky to. John Kennedy did a great job, raise the money, and we got a great building. And everybody would say it's one of Stafford's best programs. The great building in Washington DC. On Connecticut Avenue, right across from Metro, not too far in Woodley Park, is that is, yeah. It's just like it used to be at a Chinese restaurant, and they took over two restaurants at a hotel. It's really nice at Stanford. You were the founder of the house? Yeah, yeah. And we sort of alluded to that a few times, but 1985 is that right? Yeah, I think so. I started working there, we always have trouble figuring out dates because I started working there I think in 802-80-1802 I can't get even get that date straight. I have to do it if you want. But anyway, and it took a couple of years to get the endowment, so that's why we say it was founded in 85. But in fact, we started a public service center. And the purpose of the S center was public service. Yeah. Yeah. And to train students to, we probably have a purpose written now, but it was actually to instill upon students the concept that service was important. And to give them the opportunities academically to have experiences woven into their classes as well. So you were encouraging faculty to incorporate. Now I have over 250 classes that do it. And we know barriers by having fellowships. We don't answer a phone anymore. Every Miss Frank, we created fellowships so that students who could have money to do work in the summer and post graduation. Did you design the center, the work of the center and the bit? Yeah. Totally, 100% When I say that, of course, students, I was always a partner with the students, the endowment that yeah, that was Kennedy, the end. I did a lot of work on getting that. But it came from the has family. I got one of the key members to be on my I set up an advisory board. I got John Gardner to agree to be chair. We had several other great people on it and Mimi has agreed to serve. And that was for a year or so. We ask just for the benefit of Ebo, using John John Gardner was the founder of Common Cause Independent Secretary, Former HEW secretary under Johnson, The War of Poverty. And then he came and basically you could say retirement came to Stanford. And I got him an endowed professorship. So he worked here for five years teaching. So you're going to start the center? Yeah. You had an idea. Yeah. And you obviously, we sell the idea to the administration and to the president. Whose idea was it to reach out to the Has family? Because it's one thing to have an idea, it's another thing to pay for it. I totally understand that. Sly understand that we I think it may have been someone in development office, but it was a combination. I had lunch early on with one of these foundation people who said, you want to get the Hostas involved. So that he had a lunch, he told me. And so I had that in mind. But I think the development office they were doing, big fund raising the has usually gave to Berkeley. I think they thought this was something they might get to, they worked with. Don on that and then I did me. Meanwhile, I got her on the Board and then I helped I wrote the proposal, but I would say Don Kennedy. It could have never happened without him. Yeah. In terms of getting getting the money, I did get our first grant, which was a half $1, million, which was from someone who was volunteering for me, from the community who I had no idea she had any money. And she said, I love this and I'm going to give you a half $1, million I raised the first year, I probably raised a couple of million dollars. That was one reason I hate to say it, but that was one reason. They said, oh, we'll do this. You know what I mean? Like, you know what you mean? But the thing that made it go and created a permanent was the endowment Endowment. Absolutely. And then getting a building. So here's another tiny little story for you, is that I had a former student, MBA student, who worked for a group called Strategic Decisions Group, which is a big international organization. And he came back and said, how can I help you? Basically, we went through an exercise of what are all, I guess the Swat thing, like what are the things that could possibly really hurt the center? And he said, well Don Kenny will leave. You'll leave it I said that's like what? Oh my God. I then really focused on we need real estate because I understood how universities work and I can remember that this was right after we got the endowment. I remember going to the Provost. He says, I can't believe you. You just got the other. Just leave me alone But I was managed. And this was John Gardner telling me. He said, you should have lunch with this person, Tom Ford, who I didn't know. And I told Tom Ford I had a goal of having service as important as athletics. And he said, wow. And then he gave me a bunch of money right there at lunch. And it turned out that he was on the Board of Trustees. I didn't know this head of the building committee, so I asked him to be my chair. And the next thing I know he said, all right, here's how we have to get this building because it would have never happened without him. And it's there now. It's there. And the name of the building? It's the host. Okay. Yeah. They didn't call anything else. Yeah, yeah. I mentioned to introduce you a citation from the World Children Humanitarian Award. And I read that citation and one line kind of jumped out at me, it said you increased student involvement in community service 40-80% within five years. Yeah. And I assume that meant Stanford. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm going to assume that it's true or it wouldn't be in there, so how did you do that? I mean, that's a huge Inca. Yeah. Some of the service I hired students including some who recently graduated to be in charge of volunteer recruitment. And we did that. We set up new programs on tutoring. We set up some real institutions, which is what I learned to help me with the Commission is you've got to have the institutions with trainings and stuff like that in order to make it possible for people to volunteer. So we set up programs like that, but we also worked hard with fraternity sororities and other groups to try to really help them do a better job with what they're doing. And I guess that's Don Kennedy made a raging role because he as president was always saying, you got to do service, you got to do. He was he never gave up an opportunity. Okay. So you were involved in the creation of the California Youth Service Corps? Yeah. Yeah. What's that about? Well, that was let's see, There were two programs I helped to create. One was a youth corps which was actually around around this area of like six communities around here focused on kids in middle school to try to get them to do the Palo Alto area. Yeah, Palo Alto. To do community service. I did this in part because I had kids in middle school and there were no service programs. We wanted them to also work with kids from East Palo Alto. We created jointly that program has now had its 30 anniversary with kids in middle school. You felt there wasn't appropriate opportunity when you created it? That's right. Exactly. Exactly. It's a great program to the day, the other one, which was service California, I believe. I think that it anyway, I have to get the exact dates if I have a wrong. But that was a program to bring together all of the key elements of service in California and have them work together. And we had a conference, an annual conference, that basically helped lead to setting up a real service network in the state of California, which is now run by the state that helped to provide support for getting America or throat. Was your work in California, would you service that helped to jump start America? Absolutely. In your last couple of years at Stanford, you were on leave? The last two years I was on leave at the Commission were doing this work. Okay. Yeah. And part of what you were doing with the Commission was trying to get meric or That's right. Exactly. And I was given sort of a ultimatum by the new President because my if it had been John Kennedy, it wouldn't have happened. But with the new President, he basically said as. Yeah, he said, you either come back or, you know, you have a two year leave and we won't extend it. And I felt like, as much as I didn't want to leave Stanford, that if I had left Americorp at that point in time, it wouldn't have been launched. So you left Stanford State with American to get logs? Right. Okay. So as I've been doing background reading, there were some names that popped up over and over again. I don't know if I'm putting these in the right place or not, but Susan Stroud. Susan Stroud, yeah. You should definitely talk a little bit about her contribution. Okay, Susan Stroud worked at Brown University, and she was originally a coordinator of internship programs from five East Coast universities. I met her, One of the things I did when I first came here to Stanford was to go back east to see how could we steal every good idea from Harvard and Yale and Brown. I met Susan then and she was close friends of Frank Newman. I don't know if you've heard that name, but Frank was head, but he's the next guy. He was head of the Commission on Education, Commission of the States. He'd been President of University of Rhode Island. He had the idea, and I should tell you, same time I did too, but of getting college presidents together to promote service. And that's the genesis of campus Comp. That's the genesis of Campus Compact. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Susan is somebody that is overseeing, is working with less Koski and Tom Erlich on the archive project because she was head of Campus Compact for a while. We were doing it jointly, but then she did it full time. Then when I took over the commission work, she was still a campus compact. But then when I did the corporation work, she got a job at the White House. She worked at the White House getting community support things and long story short. I ran several programs including Learn and Serve. And when I left, she took over Learn and Serve. She's now helping with the archives. So yeah. Yeah, she's on our list. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you played a role in the founding of Campus Compact. Absolutely. As well as California? Absolutely. Yeah. As you mentioned, a national coalition of university presidents committed to engaging students service. I think it was found in 1985. So how did that organization come into existence? Well, it's one thing to have an idea and there's another thing to persuade these presidents to do it exactly. Well, the time is right, Don Kennedy. I actually took several graduate students from the School of education who had come to me independently saying, if we want to change this nation, and if we want to do all of this on a bigger school scale, we need to have college presidents because there's no one else. It was a vacuum of leadership, and the college presidents are the perfect ones. To be the ones to do this call, you have to convince Don Kennedy, he wants to do that. I said sure. I said, we take him over and we had a meeting with Don. And I think Don was like, okay. He didn't say yes at that point. But he was like, well this is an interesting idea. Then simultaneously Frank Newman approached him at some national meeting of college presidents and said, I think you and Howard and Father Healey should get together. Howard swear President Brown and Father Healey, President of Georgetown. And I think at that point don's like okay. And came back to me and said, all right, will you help me with this? We basically then started to think about it and Susan and I worked really closely and I think it's fair to say that Frank Newman had the idea, well, let's get 100 of them together to issue a proclamation that we think this is important and that's all we wanted to do at that point. Organization, I can't remember the exact numbers, but we had more wanting to sign up than we thought. And we had a meeting at Georgetown University and John Gardner was there. And there were some other distinguished media columnists who, I don't remember who they were, but we could find that out from the Washington Post. At that meeting, what happened was like we got a stay together, we got to do this. Then we started to fund raise and got money from Ford. Carnegie Kellogg. Yeah, that's what It's still in existence. It's still in existence and it still has that mission of incur. That's right, absolutely. In California, the person who runs it, I'm in touch with a fair amount. She's doing a great job. They've got several, a number of whole states who have independent. I helped with Legit Oregon for a while. I helped with that one too. So I'm going to ask you one more question and we're going to actually talk about the service in some focused way. But Tom Elish was nominated by President George HW Bush to be on the points of lion to figure out what to do about national service. And I'm going to actually talk to Tom Elish tomorrow, a former president of Indiana University, pro University of Pennsylvania, Dean of Stanford Law School. A very distinguished career for the benefit of anybody who's going to use this interview. Can you explain what the points of foundation is? When Bush, I think, gave his inauguration speech, he talked about how he wanted there to be 1,000 points of light out there of people doing good service. It was an idea that captured the imagination of a lot of people. They decided to try to establish it as an ongoing thing by recognizing during his presidency every day a different person who would be a point of light and that he would meet with when he was traveling around the country. It was like a simple concept. They had to hire, put together a staff and I guess they got private money and a board. Ray Chambers was the first chair of it. I forgot the name of the man who I could see what he looks like, but he was a very big corporate guy. Was the first director of It. A friend of mine who is head of California Compact, Chuck Supple went to work for Thom, was one of the first staff people. I think that it was basically an idea to try to select and recognize people who had done service. Then the idea got a little bigger terms of how do we support the nonprofit sector and how do we create more of infrastructure of support for that field? And there was a whole association of volunteer organization programs that promoted volunteers, and that got incorporated. That was what it was my understanding, and this is what Greg Petersier certainly long more than I was, but it was one of George Bush's. He really wanted this to happen. He wanted more ongoing funding from the federal government. And that's when the whole idea of setting up the Commission came about as a compromise. That's my understanding of what happened. Yeah, so there is a connection then between totally he wanted the money, and Kennedy and other Democrats were like, okay, you give us money for that, you give us money for what we want and we'll make a deal. That's basically what now surely you're going to talk to we'll know much more than I do about that deal. But that's exactly how I understood it. The deal was the Democrats who were pushing what became the Commission That's right. Wanted support from the Point of Light Foundation and they agreed that they would support appropriations for Points of Light if we got the commission. Yeah, So what happened is that the bill got through and signed. But part of the ways of the bill, the way it was designed, was that there was going to be this bipartisan board and had to be appointed by the President. And he didn't appoint anybody. He got his money for the points of light, but didn't appoint the board of the Commission. And the Commission had a timeline on it, which is what led to all the pressure because a whole year went away. And I think my understanding is that then he reached out to Tom Erlich and others and said, because I think it became clear, Congress says you're not going to get any more money. I mean, it's like you had that and it's like, that's all you're going to get unless you do this other. The Commission on National and Community Service goes into law. But the President doesn't appoint a board. That's exactly, But he was pressured to do that. Tom Erlich was on that board and became chair of the board. Exactly. All right. Exactly. Tom Erlich was also on the Points of light. That's right. All right. So probably Tom is a key person to explain that and surely would be the other person. So I'll be interested to read that.

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I think there when I talked to you on the phone interview, you said your move from Washington to Stanford. You said, oh, you said this in your previous oral history interview, and I'm going to quote, we said, we really need to do something to reach out to the younger generation, the way I've been called The Service by John Kennedy. John Kennedy, yeah. Yeah. And I'll also note that when you served as the Executive Director of the Commission on National Community Service, that organization's 1993 report is titled, What can you Do for your Country? In the first line in the preference says that famous Kennedy line. That's not what what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. With all that said, talk about how John Kennedy inspired you to think about service. Well, when I was at college, it never had really thought about national service, or survey your country because I wasn't going into the military. Then when the first concept of Peace Corps came out, it was like, well, maybe I should do this. So I thought very seriously about joining Peace Corps instead. Did what I did and on the whole issue of the history of American Negro and all the rest. But I think it was basically, it was inspirational. That's all I can say. It was like, it was this call like, well, you've got to do something. Yeah. So I'm going to pull into question now that I was going to ask you at the end. So John Kennedy, even though he never knew it, inspired you to to think seriously about incorporating service into your life. Yes, you were a young person at that point. Did you ever pay it forward? Do you work to inspire young people to Oh, absolutely, service? Well, I think that that has been certainly work I did at the Ha Center at Stanford. That was totally what I was about, even back for the last couple of years, especially after this last election. I went back and I said, I'm too old to really make a difference now, and you guys have got to let me help you, let me give you all the connections. That was certainly the whole idea of what I did with working at Stanford. And I think that that was certainly a call in terms of why I did the work I did here with the National Service. You go to Stanford, basically, your special assistant with the President, which must have given you a pretty capacious portfolio. Yeah, Yeah. Well, actually it was only focused on public service. He already had a special assistant to take care of all the other stuff. So what were you doing in the area of album service? Well, what my job was to write a report to the faculty senate on the status of public service at Stanford and what recommendations of what should be done in order to change it. Once that announcement was given, two things happened. First of all, suddenly people from the community and foundation started calling me and saying, this is great, can I talk to you and give you some ideas? And second, students start to line up literally out the door and say, I want to get involved. I was there literally, I believe it was like a week or two. And it's like we now have something that is alive and we don't even know what we have. I did spend the time trying to find out because history, Stanford did have some things, and my current husband is embarrassing to have three husbands, but it's like the reasons that happened. My current husband actually used to run programs years ago at Stanford that were the early programs during this. Did you know? I didn't know I met him once. It's like a small world. But anyway, there were programs that had done some things away back. Stafford at one point had the largest number of young people going to Peace Corps. I knew that there was a tradition there, but it really wasn't very much alive and the students were upset about that and wanted something more done. You had a program called Stanford in Washington. Yes. That was the other talk, a little bit about that. That was the first e mail or letter. I can't remember whether it was back then to Don Kennedy with recommendations for Stanford should do. I said they needed to of a presence in Washington, DC. And they needed to understand Washington DC. Better here. I said, I've been here like about a couple of weeks and talked to people in the Political Science Department, all that. I think you need an overseas program in Washington DC, because people here really don't have a good feel for how things actually operate at that point. I've gotten a bill through which was almost, I literally got that Bill of Victims rights through, and I've done other things. I knew a bit of how to get things done and I just Like people that I had run into. What Stanford did. Don thought that was an interesting idea. He said, let's do other things here first. We did focus on other things, but it was in the back of my mind. And then I had a couple of students only at Stanford with happen, who happened to be daughters of senators, come to me and say, we think that we need this program in DC. And would you help? Basically, the three of us worked on seeing what was available. And then I probably spent the next four years trying to get faculty to support it. Now it's very popular program, but it was very hard to get a faculty committee, even though, quite frankly, I had already decided what the program should be. But they didn't want internships to be part of it. And it was like, oh, I mean, why not? Because it's not academic. And so they were interested in their research, they were interested in research. And if students wanted to go there and write papers but not do an internship, and maybe, all right, the will give you 10 hours a week, I said, no, it's going to be a full time, substantive internship. In the end, we got exactly what absolutely what I wanted and we were lucky to. John Kennedy did a great job, raise the money, and we got a great building. And everybody would say it's one of Stafford's best programs. The great building in Washington DC. On Connecticut Avenue, right across from Metro, not too far in Woodley Park, is that is, yeah. It's just like it used to be at a Chinese restaurant, and they took over two restaurants at a hotel. It's really nice at Stanford. You were the founder of the house? Yeah, yeah. And we sort of alluded to that a few times, but 1985 is that right? Yeah, I think so. I started working there, we always have trouble figuring out dates because I started working there I think in 802-80-1802 I can't get even get that date straight. I have to do it if you want. But anyway, and it took a couple of years to get the endowment, so that's why we say it was founded in 85. But in fact, we started a public service center. And the purpose of the S center was public service. Yeah. Yeah. And to train students to, we probably have a purpose written now, but it was actually to instill upon students the concept that service was important. And to give them the opportunities academically to have experiences woven into their classes as well. So you were encouraging faculty to incorporate. Now I have over 250 classes that do it. And we know barriers by having fellowships. We don't answer a phone anymore. Every Miss Frank, we created fellowships so that students who could have money to do work in the summer and post graduation. Did you design the center, the work of the center and the bit? Yeah. Totally, 100% When I say that, of course, students, I was always a partner with the students, the endowment that yeah, that was Kennedy, the end. I did a lot of work on getting that. But it came from the has family. I got one of the key members to be on my I set up an advisory board. I got John Gardner to agree to be chair. We had several other great people on it and Mimi has agreed to serve. And that was for a year or so. We ask just for the benefit of Ebo, using John John Gardner was the founder of Common Cause Independent Secretary, Former HEW secretary under Johnson, The War of Poverty. And then he came and basically you could say retirement came to Stanford. And I got him an endowed professorship. So he worked here for five years teaching. So you're going to start the center? Yeah. You had an idea. Yeah. And you obviously, we sell the idea to the administration and to the president. Whose idea was it to reach out to the Has family? Because it's one thing to have an idea, it's another thing to pay for it. I totally understand that. Sly understand that we I think it may have been someone in development office, but it was a combination. I had lunch early on with one of these foundation people who said, you want to get the Hostas involved. So that he had a lunch, he told me. And so I had that in mind. But I think the development office they were doing, big fund raising the has usually gave to Berkeley. I think they thought this was something they might get to, they worked with. Don on that and then I did me. Meanwhile, I got her on the Board and then I helped I wrote the proposal, but I would say Don Kennedy. It could have never happened without him. Yeah. In terms of getting getting the money, I did get our first grant, which was a half $1, million, which was from someone who was volunteering for me, from the community who I had no idea she had any money. And she said, I love this and I'm going to give you a half $1, million I raised the first year, I probably raised a couple of million dollars. That was one reason I hate to say it, but that was one reason. They said, oh, we'll do this. You know what I mean? Like, you know what you mean? But the thing that made it go and created a permanent was the endowment Endowment. Absolutely. And then getting a building. So here's another tiny little story for you, is that I had a former student, MBA student, who worked for a group called Strategic Decisions Group, which is a big international organization. And he came back and said, how can I help you? Basically, we went through an exercise of what are all, I guess the Swat thing, like what are the things that could possibly really hurt the center? And he said, well Don Kenny will leave. You'll leave it I said that's like what? Oh my God. I then really focused on we need real estate because I understood how universities work and I can remember that this was right after we got the endowment. I remember going to the Provost. He says, I can't believe you. You just got the other. Just leave me alone But I was managed. And this was John Gardner telling me. He said, you should have lunch with this person, Tom Ford, who I didn't know. And I told Tom Ford I had a goal of having service as important as athletics. And he said, wow. And then he gave me a bunch of money right there at lunch. And it turned out that he was on the Board of Trustees. I didn't know this head of the building committee, so I asked him to be my chair. And the next thing I know he said, all right, here's how we have to get this building because it would have never happened without him. And it's there now. It's there. And the name of the building? It's the host. Okay. Yeah. They didn't call anything else. Yeah, yeah. I mentioned to introduce you a citation from the World Children Humanitarian Award. And I read that citation and one line kind of jumped out at me, it said you increased student involvement in community service 40-80% within five years. Yeah. And I assume that meant Stanford. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm going to assume that it's true or it wouldn't be in there, so how did you do that? I mean, that's a huge Inca. Yeah. Some of the service I hired students including some who recently graduated to be in charge of volunteer recruitment. And we did that. We set up new programs on tutoring. We set up some real institutions, which is what I learned to help me with the Commission is you've got to have the institutions with trainings and stuff like that in order to make it possible for people to volunteer. So we set up programs like that, but we also worked hard with fraternity sororities and other groups to try to really help them do a better job with what they're doing. And I guess that's Don Kennedy made a raging role because he as president was always saying, you got to do service, you got to do. He was he never gave up an opportunity. Okay. So you were involved in the creation of the California Youth Service Corps? Yeah. Yeah. What's that about? Well, that was let's see, There were two programs I helped to create. One was a youth corps which was actually around around this area of like six communities around here focused on kids in middle school to try to get them to do the Palo Alto area. Yeah, Palo Alto. To do community service. I did this in part because I had kids in middle school and there were no service programs. We wanted them to also work with kids from East Palo Alto. We created jointly that program has now had its 30 anniversary with kids in middle school. You felt there wasn't appropriate opportunity when you created it? That's right. Exactly. Exactly. It's a great program to the day, the other one, which was service California, I believe. I think that it anyway, I have to get the exact dates if I have a wrong. But that was a program to bring together all of the key elements of service in California and have them work together. And we had a conference, an annual conference, that basically helped lead to setting up a real service network in the state of California, which is now run by the state that helped to provide support for getting America or throat. Was your work in California, would you service that helped to jump start America? Absolutely. In your last couple of years at Stanford, you were on leave? The last two years I was on leave at the Commission were doing this work. Okay. Yeah. And part of what you were doing with the Commission was trying to get meric or That's right. Exactly. And I was given sort of a ultimatum by the new President because my if it had been John Kennedy, it wouldn't have happened. But with the new President, he basically said as. Yeah, he said, you either come back or, you know, you have a two year leave and we won't extend it. And I felt like, as much as I didn't want to leave Stanford, that if I had left Americorp at that point in time, it wouldn't have been launched. So you left Stanford State with American to get logs? Right. Okay. So as I've been doing background reading, there were some names that popped up over and over again. I don't know if I'm putting these in the right place or not, but Susan Stroud. Susan Stroud, yeah. You should definitely talk a little bit about her contribution. Okay, Susan Stroud worked at Brown University, and she was originally a coordinator of internship programs from five East Coast universities. I met her, One of the things I did when I first came here to Stanford was to go back east to see how could we steal every good idea from Harvard and Yale and Brown. I met Susan then and she was close friends of Frank Newman. I don't know if you've heard that name, but Frank was head, but he's the next guy. He was head of the Commission on Education, Commission of the States. He'd been President of University of Rhode Island. He had the idea, and I should tell you, same time I did too, but of getting college presidents together to promote service. And that's the genesis of campus Comp. That's the genesis of Campus Compact. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Susan is somebody that is overseeing, is working with less Koski and Tom Erlich on the archive project because she was head of Campus Compact for a while. We were doing it jointly, but then she did it full time. Then when I took over the commission work, she was still a campus compact. But then when I did the corporation work, she got a job at the White House. She worked at the White House getting community support things and long story short. I ran several programs including Learn and Serve. And when I left, she took over Learn and Serve. She's now helping with the archives. So yeah. Yeah, she's on our list. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you played a role in the founding of Campus Compact. Absolutely. As well as California? Absolutely. Yeah. As you mentioned, a national coalition of university presidents committed to engaging students service. I think it was found in 1985. So how did that organization come into existence? Well, it's one thing to have an idea and there's another thing to persuade these presidents to do it exactly. Well, the time is right, Don Kennedy. I actually took several graduate students from the School of education who had come to me independently saying, if we want to change this nation, and if we want to do all of this on a bigger school scale, we need to have college presidents because there's no one else. It was a vacuum of leadership, and the college presidents are the perfect ones. To be the ones to do this call, you have to convince Don Kennedy, he wants to do that. I said sure. I said, we take him over and we had a meeting with Don. And I think Don was like, okay. He didn't say yes at that point. But he was like, well this is an interesting idea. Then simultaneously Frank Newman approached him at some national meeting of college presidents and said, I think you and Howard and Father Healey should get together. Howard swear President Brown and Father Healey, President of Georgetown. And I think at that point don's like okay. And came back to me and said, all right, will you help me with this? We basically then started to think about it and Susan and I worked really closely and I think it's fair to say that Frank Newman had the idea, well, let's get 100 of them together to issue a proclamation that we think this is important and that's all we wanted to do at that point. Organization, I can't remember the exact numbers, but we had more wanting to sign up than we thought. And we had a meeting at Georgetown University and John Gardner was there. And there were some other distinguished media columnists who, I don't remember who they were, but we could find that out from the Washington Post. At that meeting, what happened was like we got a stay together, we got to do this. Then we started to fund raise and got money from Ford. Carnegie Kellogg. Yeah, that's what It's still in existence. It's still in existence and it still has that mission of incur. That's right, absolutely. In California, the person who runs it, I'm in touch with a fair amount. She's doing a great job. They've got several, a number of whole states who have independent. I helped with Legit Oregon for a while. I helped with that one too. So I'm going to ask you one more question and we're going to actually talk about the service in some focused way. But Tom Elish was nominated by President George HW Bush to be on the points of lion to figure out what to do about national service. And I'm going to actually talk to Tom Elish tomorrow, a former president of Indiana University, pro University of Pennsylvania, Dean of Stanford Law School. A very distinguished career for the benefit of anybody who's going to use this interview. Can you explain what the points of foundation is? When Bush, I think, gave his inauguration speech, he talked about how he wanted there to be 1,000 points of light out there of people doing good service. It was an idea that captured the imagination of a lot of people. They decided to try to establish it as an ongoing thing by recognizing during his presidency every day a different person who would be a point of light and that he would meet with when he was traveling around the country. It was like a simple concept. They had to hire, put together a staff and I guess they got private money and a board. Ray Chambers was the first chair of it. I forgot the name of the man who I could see what he looks like, but he was a very big corporate guy. Was the first director of It. A friend of mine who is head of California Compact, Chuck Supple went to work for Thom, was one of the first staff people. I think that it was basically an idea to try to select and recognize people who had done service. Then the idea got a little bigger terms of how do we support the nonprofit sector and how do we create more of infrastructure of support for that field? And there was a whole association of volunteer organization programs that promoted volunteers, and that got incorporated. That was what it was my understanding, and this is what Greg Petersier certainly long more than I was, but it was one of George Bush's. He really wanted this to happen. He wanted more ongoing funding from the federal government. And that's when the whole idea of setting up the Commission came about as a compromise. That's my understanding of what happened. Yeah, so there is a connection then between totally he wanted the money, and Kennedy and other Democrats were like, okay, you give us money for that, you give us money for what we want and we'll make a deal. That's basically what now surely you're going to talk to we'll know much more than I do about that deal. But that's exactly how I understood it. The deal was the Democrats who were pushing what became the Commission That's right. Wanted support from the Point of Light Foundation and they agreed that they would support appropriations for Points of Light if we got the commission. Yeah, So what happened is that the bill got through and signed. But part of the ways of the bill, the way it was designed, was that there was going to be this bipartisan board and had to be appointed by the President. And he didn't appoint anybody. He got his money for the points of light, but didn't appoint the board of the Commission. And the Commission had a timeline on it, which is what led to all the pressure because a whole year went away. And I think my understanding is that then he reached out to Tom Erlich and others and said, because I think it became clear, Congress says you're not going to get any more money. I mean, it's like you had that and it's like, that's all you're going to get unless you do this other. The Commission on National and Community Service goes into law. But the President doesn't appoint a board. That's exactly, But he was pressured to do that. Tom Erlich was on that board and became chair of the board. Exactly. All right. Exactly. Tom Erlich was also on the Points of light. That's right. All right. So probably Tom is a key person to explain that and surely would be the other person. So I'll be interested to read that.

Description of the video:

I think there when I talked to you on the phone interview, you said your move from Washington to Stanford. You said, oh, you said this in your previous oral history interview, and I'm going to quote, we said, we really need to do something to reach out to the younger generation, the way I've been called The Service by John Kennedy. John Kennedy, yeah. Yeah. And I'll also note that when you served as the Executive Director of the Commission on National Community Service, that organization's 1993 report is titled, What can you Do for your Country? In the first line in the preference says that famous Kennedy line. That's not what what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country. With all that said, talk about how John Kennedy inspired you to think about service. Well, when I was at college, it never had really thought about national service, or survey your country because I wasn't going into the military. Then when the first concept of Peace Corps came out, it was like, well, maybe I should do this. So I thought very seriously about joining Peace Corps instead. Did what I did and on the whole issue of the history of American Negro and all the rest. But I think it was basically, it was inspirational. That's all I can say. It was like, it was this call like, well, you've got to do something. Yeah. So I'm going to pull into question now that I was going to ask you at the end. So John Kennedy, even though he never knew it, inspired you to to think seriously about incorporating service into your life. Yes, you were a young person at that point. Did you ever pay it forward? Do you work to inspire young people to Oh, absolutely, service? Well, I think that that has been certainly work I did at the Ha Center at Stanford. That was totally what I was about, even back for the last couple of years, especially after this last election. I went back and I said, I'm too old to really make a difference now, and you guys have got to let me help you, let me give you all the connections. That was certainly the whole idea of what I did with working at Stanford. And I think that that was certainly a call in terms of why I did the work I did here with the National Service. You go to Stanford, basically, your special assistant with the President, which must have given you a pretty capacious portfolio. Yeah, Yeah. Well, actually it was only focused on public service. He already had a special assistant to take care of all the other stuff. So what were you doing in the area of album service? Well, what my job was to write a report to the faculty senate on the status of public service at Stanford and what recommendations of what should be done in order to change it. Once that announcement was given, two things happened. First of all, suddenly people from the community and foundation started calling me and saying, this is great, can I talk to you and give you some ideas? And second, students start to line up literally out the door and say, I want to get involved. I was there literally, I believe it was like a week or two. And it's like we now have something that is alive and we don't even know what we have. I did spend the time trying to find out because history, Stanford did have some things, and my current husband is embarrassing to have three husbands, but it's like the reasons that happened. My current husband actually used to run programs years ago at Stanford that were the early programs during this. Did you know? I didn't know I met him once. It's like a small world. But anyway, there were programs that had done some things away back. Stafford at one point had the largest number of young people going to Peace Corps. I knew that there was a tradition there, but it really wasn't very much alive and the students were upset about that and wanted something more done. You had a program called Stanford in Washington. Yes. That was the other talk, a little bit about that. That was the first e mail or letter. I can't remember whether it was back then to Don Kennedy with recommendations for Stanford should do. I said they needed to of a presence in Washington, DC. And they needed to understand Washington DC. Better here. I said, I've been here like about a couple of weeks and talked to people in the Political Science Department, all that. I think you need an overseas program in Washington DC, because people here really don't have a good feel for how things actually operate at that point. I've gotten a bill through which was almost, I literally got that Bill of Victims rights through, and I've done other things. I knew a bit of how to get things done and I just Like people that I had run into. What Stanford did. Don thought that was an interesting idea. He said, let's do other things here first. We did focus on other things, but it was in the back of my mind. And then I had a couple of students only at Stanford with happen, who happened to be daughters of senators, come to me and say, we think that we need this program in DC. And would you help? Basically, the three of us worked on seeing what was available. And then I probably spent the next four years trying to get faculty to support it. Now it's very popular program, but it was very hard to get a faculty committee, even though, quite frankly, I had already decided what the program should be. But they didn't want internships to be part of it. And it was like, oh, I mean, why not? Because it's not academic. And so they were interested in their research, they were interested in research. And if students wanted to go there and write papers but not do an internship, and maybe, all right, the will give you 10 hours a week, I said, no, it's going to be a full time, substantive internship. In the end, we got exactly what absolutely what I wanted and we were lucky to. John Kennedy did a great job, raise the money, and we got a great building. And everybody would say it's one of Stafford's best programs. The great building in Washington DC. On Connecticut Avenue, right across from Metro, not too far in Woodley Park, is that is, yeah. It's just like it used to be at a Chinese restaurant, and they took over two restaurants at a hotel. It's really nice at Stanford. You were the founder of the house? Yeah, yeah. And we sort of alluded to that a few times, but 1985 is that right? Yeah, I think so. I started working there, we always have trouble figuring out dates because I started working there I think in 802-80-1802 I can't get even get that date straight. I have to do it if you want. But anyway, and it took a couple of years to get the endowment, so that's why we say it was founded in 85. But in fact, we started a public service center. And the purpose of the S center was public service. Yeah. Yeah. And to train students to, we probably have a purpose written now, but it was actually to instill upon students the concept that service was important. And to give them the opportunities academically to have experiences woven into their classes as well. So you were encouraging faculty to incorporate. Now I have over 250 classes that do it. And we know barriers by having fellowships. We don't answer a phone anymore. Every Miss Frank, we created fellowships so that students who could have money to do work in the summer and post graduation. Did you design the center, the work of the center and the bit? Yeah. Totally, 100% When I say that, of course, students, I was always a partner with the students, the endowment that yeah, that was Kennedy, the end. I did a lot of work on getting that. But it came from the has family. I got one of the key members to be on my I set up an advisory board. I got John Gardner to agree to be chair. We had several other great people on it and Mimi has agreed to serve. And that was for a year or so. We ask just for the benefit of Ebo, using John John Gardner was the founder of Common Cause Independent Secretary, Former HEW secretary under Johnson, The War of Poverty. And then he came and basically you could say retirement came to Stanford. And I got him an endowed professorship. So he worked here for five years teaching. So you're going to start the center? Yeah. You had an idea. Yeah. And you obviously, we sell the idea to the administration and to the president. Whose idea was it to reach out to the Has family? Because it's one thing to have an idea, it's another thing to pay for it. I totally understand that. Sly understand that we I think it may have been someone in development office, but it was a combination. I had lunch early on with one of these foundation people who said, you want to get the Hostas involved. So that he had a lunch, he told me. And so I had that in mind. But I think the development office they were doing, big fund raising the has usually gave to Berkeley. I think they thought this was something they might get to, they worked with. Don on that and then I did me. Meanwhile, I got her on the Board and then I helped I wrote the proposal, but I would say Don Kennedy. It could have never happened without him. Yeah. In terms of getting getting the money, I did get our first grant, which was a half $1, million, which was from someone who was volunteering for me, from the community who I had no idea she had any money. And she said, I love this and I'm going to give you a half $1, million I raised the first year, I probably raised a couple of million dollars. That was one reason I hate to say it, but that was one reason. They said, oh, we'll do this. You know what I mean? Like, you know what you mean? But the thing that made it go and created a permanent was the endowment Endowment. Absolutely. And then getting a building. So here's another tiny little story for you, is that I had a former student, MBA student, who worked for a group called Strategic Decisions Group, which is a big international organization. And he came back and said, how can I help you? Basically, we went through an exercise of what are all, I guess the Swat thing, like what are the things that could possibly really hurt the center? And he said, well Don Kenny will leave. You'll leave it I said that's like what? Oh my God. I then really focused on we need real estate because I understood how universities work and I can remember that this was right after we got the endowment. I remember going to the Provost. He says, I can't believe you. You just got the other. Just leave me alone But I was managed. And this was John Gardner telling me. He said, you should have lunch with this person, Tom Ford, who I didn't know. And I told Tom Ford I had a goal of having service as important as athletics. And he said, wow. And then he gave me a bunch of money right there at lunch. And it turned out that he was on the Board of Trustees. I didn't know this head of the building committee, so I asked him to be my chair. And the next thing I know he said, all right, here's how we have to get this building because it would have never happened without him. And it's there now. It's there. And the name of the building? It's the host. Okay. Yeah. They didn't call anything else. Yeah, yeah. I mentioned to introduce you a citation from the World Children Humanitarian Award. And I read that citation and one line kind of jumped out at me, it said you increased student involvement in community service 40-80% within five years. Yeah. And I assume that meant Stanford. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I'm going to assume that it's true or it wouldn't be in there, so how did you do that? I mean, that's a huge Inca. Yeah. Some of the service I hired students including some who recently graduated to be in charge of volunteer recruitment. And we did that. We set up new programs on tutoring. We set up some real institutions, which is what I learned to help me with the Commission is you've got to have the institutions with trainings and stuff like that in order to make it possible for people to volunteer. So we set up programs like that, but we also worked hard with fraternity sororities and other groups to try to really help them do a better job with what they're doing. And I guess that's Don Kennedy made a raging role because he as president was always saying, you got to do service, you got to do. He was he never gave up an opportunity. Okay. So you were involved in the creation of the California Youth Service Corps? Yeah. Yeah. What's that about? Well, that was let's see, There were two programs I helped to create. One was a youth corps which was actually around around this area of like six communities around here focused on kids in middle school to try to get them to do the Palo Alto area. Yeah, Palo Alto. To do community service. I did this in part because I had kids in middle school and there were no service programs. We wanted them to also work with kids from East Palo Alto. We created jointly that program has now had its 30 anniversary with kids in middle school. You felt there wasn't appropriate opportunity when you created it? That's right. Exactly. Exactly. It's a great program to the day, the other one, which was service California, I believe. I think that it anyway, I have to get the exact dates if I have a wrong. But that was a program to bring together all of the key elements of service in California and have them work together. And we had a conference, an annual conference, that basically helped lead to setting up a real service network in the state of California, which is now run by the state that helped to provide support for getting America or throat. Was your work in California, would you service that helped to jump start America? Absolutely. In your last couple of years at Stanford, you were on leave? The last two years I was on leave at the Commission were doing this work. Okay. Yeah. And part of what you were doing with the Commission was trying to get meric or That's right. Exactly. And I was given sort of a ultimatum by the new President because my if it had been John Kennedy, it wouldn't have happened. But with the new President, he basically said as. Yeah, he said, you either come back or, you know, you have a two year leave and we won't extend it. And I felt like, as much as I didn't want to leave Stanford, that if I had left Americorp at that point in time, it wouldn't have been launched. So you left Stanford State with American to get logs? Right. Okay. So as I've been doing background reading, there were some names that popped up over and over again. I don't know if I'm putting these in the right place or not, but Susan Stroud. Susan Stroud, yeah. You should definitely talk a little bit about her contribution. Okay, Susan Stroud worked at Brown University, and she was originally a coordinator of internship programs from five East Coast universities. I met her, One of the things I did when I first came here to Stanford was to go back east to see how could we steal every good idea from Harvard and Yale and Brown. I met Susan then and she was close friends of Frank Newman. I don't know if you've heard that name, but Frank was head, but he's the next guy. He was head of the Commission on Education, Commission of the States. He'd been President of University of Rhode Island. He had the idea, and I should tell you, same time I did too, but of getting college presidents together to promote service. And that's the genesis of campus Comp. That's the genesis of Campus Compact. Yeah, yeah, exactly. Susan is somebody that is overseeing, is working with less Koski and Tom Erlich on the archive project because she was head of Campus Compact for a while. We were doing it jointly, but then she did it full time. Then when I took over the commission work, she was still a campus compact. But then when I did the corporation work, she got a job at the White House. She worked at the White House getting community support things and long story short. I ran several programs including Learn and Serve. And when I left, she took over Learn and Serve. She's now helping with the archives. So yeah. Yeah, she's on our list. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So you played a role in the founding of Campus Compact. Absolutely. As well as California? Absolutely. Yeah. As you mentioned, a national coalition of university presidents committed to engaging students service. I think it was found in 1985. So how did that organization come into existence? Well, it's one thing to have an idea and there's another thing to persuade these presidents to do it exactly. Well, the time is right, Don Kennedy. I actually took several graduate students from the School of education who had come to me independently saying, if we want to change this nation, and if we want to do all of this on a bigger school scale, we need to have college presidents because there's no one else. It was a vacuum of leadership, and the college presidents are the perfect ones. To be the ones to do this call, you have to convince Don Kennedy, he wants to do that. I said sure. I said, we take him over and we had a meeting with Don. And I think Don was like, okay. He didn't say yes at that point. But he was like, well this is an interesting idea. Then simultaneously Frank Newman approached him at some national meeting of college presidents and said, I think you and Howard and Father Healey should get together. Howard swear President Brown and Father Healey, President of Georgetown. And I think at that point don's like okay. And came back to me and said, all right, will you help me with this? We basically then started to think about it and Susan and I worked really closely and I think it's fair to say that Frank Newman had the idea, well, let's get 100 of them together to issue a proclamation that we think this is important and that's all we wanted to do at that point. Organization, I can't remember the exact numbers, but we had more wanting to sign up than we thought. And we had a meeting at Georgetown University and John Gardner was there. And there were some other distinguished media columnists who, I don't remember who they were, but we could find that out from the Washington Post. At that meeting, what happened was like we got a stay together, we got to do this. Then we started to fund raise and got money from Ford. Carnegie Kellogg. Yeah, that's what It's still in existence. It's still in existence and it still has that mission of incur. That's right, absolutely. In California, the person who runs it, I'm in touch with a fair amount. She's doing a great job. They've got several, a number of whole states who have independent. I helped with Legit Oregon for a while. I helped with that one too. So I'm going to ask you one more question and we're going to actually talk about the service in some focused way. But Tom Elish was nominated by President George HW Bush to be on the points of lion to figure out what to do about national service. And I'm going to actually talk to Tom Elish tomorrow, a former president of Indiana University, pro University of Pennsylvania, Dean of Stanford Law School. A very distinguished career for the benefit of anybody who's going to use this interview. Can you explain what the points of foundation is? When Bush, I think, gave his inauguration speech, he talked about how he wanted there to be 1,000 points of light out there of people doing good service. It was an idea that captured the imagination of a lot of people. They decided to try to establish it as an ongoing thing by recognizing during his presidency every day a different person who would be a point of light and that he would meet with when he was traveling around the country. It was like a simple concept. They had to hire, put together a staff and I guess they got private money and a board. Ray Chambers was the first chair of it. I forgot the name of the man who I could see what he looks like, but he was a very big corporate guy. Was the first director of It. A friend of mine who is head of California Compact, Chuck Supple went to work for Thom, was one of the first staff people. I think that it was basically an idea to try to select and recognize people who had done service. Then the idea got a little bigger terms of how do we support the nonprofit sector and how do we create more of infrastructure of support for that field? And there was a whole association of volunteer organization programs that promoted volunteers, and that got incorporated. That was what it was my understanding, and this is what Greg Petersier certainly long more than I was, but it was one of George Bush's. He really wanted this to happen. He wanted more ongoing funding from the federal government. And that's when the whole idea of setting up the Commission came about as a compromise. That's my understanding of what happened. Yeah, so there is a connection then between totally he wanted the money, and Kennedy and other Democrats were like, okay, you give us money for that, you give us money for what we want and we'll make a deal. That's basically what now surely you're going to talk to we'll know much more than I do about that deal. But that's exactly how I understood it. The deal was the Democrats who were pushing what became the Commission That's right. Wanted support from the Point of Light Foundation and they agreed that they would support appropriations for Points of Light if we got the commission. Yeah, So what happened is that the bill got through and signed. But part of the ways of the bill, the way it was designed, was that there was going to be this bipartisan board and had to be appointed by the President. And he didn't appoint anybody. He got his money for the points of light, but didn't appoint the board of the Commission. And the Commission had a timeline on it, which is what led to all the pressure because a whole year went away. And I think my understanding is that then he reached out to Tom Erlich and others and said, because I think it became clear, Congress says you're not going to get any more money. I mean, it's like you had that and it's like, that's all you're going to get unless you do this other. The Commission on National and Community Service goes into law. But the President doesn't appoint a board. That's exactly, But he was pressured to do that. Tom Erlich was on that board and became chair of the board. Exactly. All right. Exactly. Tom Erlich was also on the Points of light. That's right. All right. So probably Tom is a key person to explain that and surely would be the other person. So I'll be interested to read that.