The mayor unveiled his NYC Service Initiative at a rally hosted by MTV personality Sway Calloway on April 20. The next day, President Obama signed the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act into law, and Bloomberg attended the signing. NYC Service obviously intends to take advantage of an Obama effect, generating momentum for public service, as well as synergies between the two programs.
The mayor's office is promoting the Initiative as heeding Obama's "call to service" and as a national model. The initiative has three goals: tending to the city's "greatest needs," including helping low-income New Yorkers and residents battered by the recession; imparting the "value of service" to young people and students; and making New York "the easiest city in America in which to serve." While boasting multiple plans to meet the latter two goals, it focuses on expanding, restructuring and streamlining existing volunteer infrastructure for the first. In fact, a mayoral office for the promotion of volunteering has existed for four decades.
Bloomberg plans to appoint a Chief Service Officer to oversee much of the Initiative and track its progress, including publishing updates on the website. But the criteria for success are vague. A 60-page report released with the announcement of the Initiative lists no specific numbers to be hit, only "metrics." The metric for determining the success of the legal services program, for instance, is the "number of New Yorkers who receive legal counseling."
Veteran advocate Joel Berg, director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, helped advise President Clinton in the 90s on founding the AmeriCorps program and says the anticipated expansion of the corps from 75,000 to 250,000 members meshes with the local plan – and could take a real bite out of hunger locally. "AmeriCorps national service participants, who serve full- or part-time for a year or work full-time for a summer, can ... help charities fill in the food gaps for hungry Americans," Berg said in a statement. "Such efforts achieve concrete, measurable results in neighborhoods nationwide, while building a sense of community."
In an interview, he said a reorganization of local service opportunities could be helpful. "Why start something brand-new instead of expanding and fine-tuning something that's worked?" he asked. But he questioned some of the Initiative's overtones. "The idea that anyone can do service, anyone can make a difference, I challenge that. Service is not necessarily supposed to be easy. Nothing meaningful is easy. It should be easy to make a volunteer commitment, but that's not the same as 'easy to volunteer.'"
