three things with national service. We were told to: make it cost effective, make it innovative, and make it inclusive.

Clearly, we need to make it effective. This is a new initiative, launched in tight budgetary times. So we have gone to work quickly.

Our largest new program is AmeriCorps, the President's program to change our communities through the direct action of ordinary Americans. In return for a substantial commitment to getting things done in public safety, education, human needs and the environment, AmeriCorps members will receive a modest living allowance and after a full year of service an educational award worth nearly $5,000.

By this time next year, 20,000 AmeriCorps members of all backgrounds will be serving in our communities. By and large, they won't be working for the Federal Government, but rather for local nonprofit organizations which will receive grants from us earmarked for the program costs and the living wage and education award of the AmeriCorps members.

The nonprofits will be selected in a series of competitions, primarily through new State bipartisan commissions; to get the AmeriCorps product ready for market, we needed to devise and publish our regulations and work with the States to establish their commissions.

I am happy to report that our final regulations will be published this very week and that more than one half of the States have already created their commissions, California's this week.

It was essential for us to get our rules and structure established, but those are merely prerequisites to results. Our principal aim for national service is to get things done in communities, and though we are still some months away from our full launch, it is already clear what national service can accomplish. Some modest demonstration projects provide good examples for us.

The varieties of national service are as vast and unique as are the faces of service participants. Let me describe to you two faces of national service already in action: One belongs to a young woman named Susan, a student at the University of Southern California. She decided to spend last summer in our Summer of Service Program in Texas. Susan, and 86 other AmeriCorps, were the outreach team for the Texas Department of Health in the first ever effort to find parents whose children hadn't been immunized and bring them in.

The result was extraordinary. Over 104,000 children were immunized in eight and a half weeks. For every $1.00 spent on that program in Texas that summer, taxpayers saved $5.50, just on the prevention provided by the immunizations. The State of Texas was so impressed that it is spending its own funds to keep an even larger AmeriCorps Health Service Corps in the field all year long. With the funding we have requested for fiscal year 1995, this kind of model can be used by other States.

Another face of service belongs to Guillermo. He is a crew leader for the Los Angeles Conservation Corps. He and his crew have done everything from rehabilitating housing to replanting hillsides. But when the earthquake hit in Los Angeles, Guillermo did something different; he helped to distribute food and bottled water, co

ordinated activities for children in emergency shelters, and connected quake victims to services.

And Guillermo showed that service can provide far more than muscle power when disaster strikes. Hearing that FEMA couldn't convince a group of Spanish-speaking families to leave their outdoor encampment and return to their apartments, Guillermo went by with his crew to help.

They found out that language barriers, distrust of outsiders and just plain fear were keeping the families outdoors. So they calmed them, let them know their apartment buildings were safe, and helped them move back, and many more families followed their lead, ending a major headache for FEMA.

With our fiscal year 1995 funding, we spend to support Service Corps' work wherever major disaster strikes, frequently getting things done in ways and at a level of cost effectiveness impossible for others. Service Corps were there and stayed there long after the cameras left; when hurricanes hit Florida, when floods ravaged the Midwest, and when the quake shook Los Angeles.

Mr. Chairman, Congress and the President also told us to make national service innovative. It is reflected in our very structure. Not some new Federal bureaucracy, but a decentralized approach that puts much of the decision-making at the local level, close to the customer. That is, closest to the community being served. And we back this up in the budget before you.

Despite substantially increasing the number of programs we hope to fund in 1995, we are asking for no real dollar increase in funding for our administration and overhead. That is keeping our eye on the bottom line, one of many lessons from the marketplace we have incorporated into our operations.

Another such lesson is that fair and equitable competition is the best guarantor of quality. That is why we have structured the grants process as we have, and the results so far have been terrific. Last summer, for 16 Summer of Service Projects, we received over 450 applications.

Our budget request will allow us to fund more excellent efforts, and to ensure that promising endeavors receive the technical assistance needed to develop and run high-quality service programs. The first step is to get the word out. We have already responded to more than 10,000 requests for information. With the funding we are requesting, we intend to expand these efforts.

Mr. Chairman, each of us knows in our hometown some extraordinary individual or group, putting in long hours with little recognition. The President and I heard from nine of these modern heroes just this past Thursday at a forum we held in Brooklyn, New York, to make national service an effective player in the fight against crime, violence and fear.

One of the presenters spoke from a wheelchair. His name is Sherman Spears, and he was shot by other teens who were mad at Sherman's friend, not even mad at Sherman. None of them even remember how the fight began. But Sherman is not going to forget the result the paralysis the bullets caused. They won't let him. He could have lost all hope and energy, he could have struck out, giving into the friends who wanted to help him take revenge. But Sherman Spears did something different. He set up Caught in the

Crossfire, a program where he and other youth counselors, all very young-in their teens and early 20s-go to hospitals in Oakland, California, and persuade teenage crime victims not to retaliate.

Now, Caught in the Crossfire is not going to end violence in America. It probably won't even end revenge shooting in the East Bay area. But it is working.

And then we can listen to Sherman Spears and be moved and we can respond in many ways. We can give him recognition and move on; or we could take his idea and set up a huge Federal program with thousands of licensed psychologists; or we could give Sherman a few million dollars, not even a blip in the Federal budget, but more than enough to swamp a young man in a wheelchair with a good idea and the personal power to persuade; or we could give Sherman what he told us he could use the most, five to ten peers, young people like himself, who could devote full time to counselling and conflict resolution.

That, Mr. Chairman, is what AmeriCorps can do, and what we will do with your subcommittee's help. AmeriCorps isn't some giant machine created by Rube Goldberg with a million steps and oddities required to get from the beginning to the goal. No, it is a small but nearly magical device that converts money into people. That is what makes our work so unique.

We make our money work four different ways. Because we insist on direct and demonstrable community change from our programs our funds buy safer streets, smarter students, cleaner parks, and healthier babies. Because we involve tens of thousands of AmeriCorps members in substantial efforts to help our Nation and our neighborhood, our funds work a second time, helping to instill the habits of citizenship that Mr. Lewis addressed a few moments ago that we know can last a lifetime.

Because we engage communities directly in the collective effort to reclaim their future, our funds work a third time, proving that our problems can be solved if we act together and reknitting the fragile bonds that turn a mass of strangers into a community.

And because we make college or training easier for those who have served, our funds work still a fourth time, creating tens of thousands of better-educated and more productive Americans for the benefit of us all.

The last goal that the Congress and the President asked us to address is to make it inclusive. It reflects the truth in Dr. King's immortal phrase: that "everyone can be great because everyone can serve."

We have seen throughout our recent history, from the Depression-era CCC to the melting pot of the military, that the differences that divide in our daily lives can bring a team together, if the farm boy and the street-wise, the law school graduate and the high school dropout, strive to solve common problems. For all that appears to atomize the next generation who will lead our country in the 21st Century, for all that makes each young adult different from the other, they are going to be united by something. It can be the values of Beavis and Butthead, the siren song of drugs and alcohol, the frustration of a workplace that demands skills they don't possess, or it can be a common belief that they can make a difference in the lives of others.

Members of this subcommittee, that is our ambitious goal: for national service to act as the delivery system of change; change in the conditions of our neighborhoods, change in the responsibilities individuals feel toward one another; and change in the accessibility of an increasingly expensive college education.

We ask for your help and your support, but as I said at the beginning of my remarks, as more than merely our bankers, as common shareholders in national service, the American way to change America.

Mr. Chairman, Members of the subcommittee, I thank you for your support, your efforts to make a difference and for your attention this morning. I would welcome your questions.

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