A Walk Toward Philadelphia Service

My walk home from Center City Philadelphia is a time where I find myself thinking about where we are as a region and where would we like to be: how do we stop the crime, how do we improve our neighborhoods, how do we improve retention rates in schools, how do we become better citizens? Raised in an Army family where giving back to the community was required, rather than optional, I find that my own experiences paint the picture for what we need to do.

 

At an early age, I helped my father, Col. (Ret) Robert Lee Gordon III, with Rotary Club orange sales and Thanksgiving turkey drives. During college, I spent national service days sprucing up city high schools. Eventually, I founded a couple of organizations that went beyond a single day but rather focused on ongoing mentorship of students. Now a few years out of college, I’m frustrated by the lack of progress that I see.

 

Passing by a school that looks like it needs all the help that a TV “Home Makeover” can muster, I’m reminded of what former President Clinton said recently: “private citizens have more power to do public good than at any time in the history of the world.” An example of such national and local civic engagement is City Year, an organization founded in 1988 by Harvard classmates Michael Brown and Alan Khazei that inspired Clinton to create the national service AmeriCorps program in 1993. City Year provides a space to allow young leaders to engage and mentor their peers for the ultimate experience in making a difference.

City Year corps members serve full-time for a year or more, receive a weekly stipend to facilitate their volunteer service, and, upon completion of 1,700 hours of service, receive an AmeriCorps Education Award of $4,725 to pay for college or graduate school, or to pay back qualified student loans.

 

Corps members are role models who tutor and mentor youths, provide in-class and after-school support, beautify neighborhoods, engage volunteers, and break down social barriers. Nationwide, City Year’s nearly 1,000 young leaders will complete more than 1.7 million hours of service this year through the following activities:

While there is great concern around our educational system, such civic service and mentorship programs as City Year and other organizations under the umbrella of AmeriCorps have figured out ways of creating peer-to-peer mentorship through which both the mentor and the student grow. One of City Year’s largest corporate sponsors has been Comcast. Other major corporate sponsors include Bank of America, Cisco Systems, CSX, Pepperidge Farm (which advertises City Year starfish in select goldfish packages), Pepsi, Timberland Clothing (provides City Year’s uniforms), and T-Mobile (provider of volunteers’ cell phones).

 

We’re fortunate that City Year of Greater Philadelphia is the one of the organization’s standouts, having completed more than two million hours of community service, generated more than $5 million in education awards, engaged more than 25,000 volunteers in service events across the city, and assisted over 100,000 children. Currently, City Year Philadelphia has volunteers in 23 schools and places more than 1,500 in the service field upon completion of their corps program where they can continue to form the landscape of civic change.

As I approach my apartment door, I end with this: as Greater Philadelphians, we must remember that we have a greater ability than ever before to effect positive change in our communities and around the world. As programs such as City Year prepare for another season of service, I, for one, am ready to volunteer my time in the upcoming year not just because I am my father’s son, but because I strive every day to make the city and the region a better place, one person at a time. If you don’t already, this is a call for you to do the same.

-- Robert Lee Gordon IV, Research Associate