JEAN CASE: Tell us a little bit about Hands On, where it got started, what your vision is, and where the organization is today.

MICHELLE NUNN: Close to 20 years ago, a group of people started in New York with the idea of making it easier and more effective for people to get involved in service. They felt like there was a lot of untapped interest from their peers in terms of making a difference and being connected to community, and people didn't know where to turn. In a sense, we needed to reinvent a mechanism for people to be engaged.

So that group of folks started with some basic principles. One is getting people involved in meaningful service -- giving them a project that is high quality and that gives a real sense of impact, and also the social reinforcement of peers and building social capital, and finally giving individuals a pathway from direct service to civic participation.

Out of that effort -- actually New York Cares -- grew an organic movement. People from New York moved to Washington and heard about it in Atlanta, and so on and so on. These community-based Hands On or Cares organizations emerged. And from those groups, we formed the national organization.

So, long story short, we have come from those original handful of folks to a network of over a half million volunteers last year. We are now in 58 cities across the country and across the world.

JEAN: So when you started, you realized there was this latent interest, as you mentioned, and you needed to reinvent mechanisms. What exactly did you do to find the people who wanted to serve and to get them engaged? If there was a New York Cares, how did they know New York Cares existed, and how did you find the volunteers?

MICHELLE: My experience grew through Hands On Atlanta, one of our earliest affliliates, and I think there was a lot of word of mouth. Really there was this sense that we were tapping into something that was needed and real, because it really did proliferate very organically and very easily.

When we started Hands On Atlanta we had a group of 12, sending out a postcard with the projects to friends, and had a picnic and invited 100 people. Small groups started to go through the orientations, and then we started to get a little publicity.

We were featured on one of the front pages of the newspaper on the same day that the Olympics was announced in Atlanta, which was a huge deal, and literally had thousands of people call. From there it was sort of a tipping point in terms of our scale. Then we went from just brokering individuals to brokering groups -- and most particularly, corporations who wanted to bridge the difference between the needs in the community and their employees, or organization members wanting to make a difference.

JEAN: Can you talk a little bit about what you found to be effective on the corporate front, what you are doing there specifically, and what some of the goals are for Hands On and the corporate effort that you have to bring lots of companies into this mix?

MICHELLE: We naturally found that corporations became an important part of our stakeholders over the last 15-plus years. At the same time, there was developing a widely accepted sense of corporate responsibility, and more specifically, corporate volunteerism and employee volunteerism.

The Corporate Service Council brought in the idea of CEO-level involvement in a peer network, committing to a big and bold goal -- in this case, increasing volunteerism by 10 percent. None of us individually or organizationally are going to achieve that, but if we thought in a big way and worked together, it would push the envelope.

JEAN: That is an aggressive goal, and I salute you for leading that effort. What have you heard from your corporate leaders in terms of the benefits back to the companies and the actual business model as they have had experiences around service?

MICHELLE: Team building among employees, leadership development, actually giving employees the opportunity to lead in a way that they might not have within their own employee position. I think that these corporate leaders are embracing that and feel that it is intuitively true that these benefits are real. One of the big challenges that we partnered with the Case Foundation to help think about is how do we turn that intuition into real, proof-positive business metrics -- to show there really is a business incentive for doing this work and to better integrate the objectives of employee volunteerism into how companies operate and do business, with the hope that this will be something that will get incorporated into the DNA.

So that is part of what we are seeing that corporations are interested in doing, but I haven't felt like collectively corporations have made that leap, which is an important one that needs to happen to get to the next level.

JEAN: You are more familiar than most with the various polling around service and around the concept of giving by individuals, and I think it is a great model to ask corporations and companies to engage their employees. It makes a very efficient path to finding people who are willing to serve with all of the benefits that we have just talked about. But to the individuals out there who are disconnected from opportunities to serve, many of them say it is easier to give money than to give time. What do you see as the big barriers, both to finding those people and to giving them a sense of both comfort and interest to draw them into service?

MICHELLE: That is the phenomenon that Robert Putnam and others have pointed to; we have effective organizations, but many of them have become less focused on engagement versus membership via dues. There is a real price to pay if people step back from their engagement practices of real participation.

The obstacle that we hear time and time again is time. People understandably feel a tremendous sense of pressure around their time.

At the same time, if people refocused their time to more meaningful activities having to do with giving back and being a part of a community, there is some time that we can recapture. But part of it is giving people flexibility in terms of how they engage, and to participate with peers, friends, and family. I think we all recognize that if we have two working parents, it is hard for them to take time away from their family to give back to the community. But how can we have a more holistic approach in which we are really engaging people? Young people are leading their family in service in ways that enrich the family at the same time they enrich the community and feeling an ethic of service. There is a great kind of inverse model, in which young people are leading adults in service.

JEAN: Often the dialogue around service is not outcome-focused, and for many, they want to feel like they are able to change their world through their efforts and not just say, "Oh, I served for six hours on Saturday." How do you see that? What is the role of outcomes, and how do you look at outcomes as you try to bring people to service?

MICHELLE: People are led to serve out of a sense of the efficacy of their efforts to impact the world, and there is a very powerful effect of "if you build it, they will come." A big part of what we do is create meaningful opportunities for people to serve and then basically let them fill that vacuum -- so set up a project that didn't exist and then watch and see how 100 people will come out on a Saturday to make it happen.

JEAN: Can you talk a bit about how it transforms an individual to serve, and typically what we see from that individual who is engaged in service? How are they different than the average citizen and what are some different qualities we see?

MICHELLE: There is so much evidence that service is transformational for people, and it is clear that people who volunteer are more likely to vote and to be civically engaged and to participate.

We all know all the studies around social capital, and connectedness to your community means health. It literally translates that people who are connected and volunteering and participating have greater longevity and satisfaction rates. So you have that at the statistical level, from the public health perspective, from the community health perspective, and then we also know just from a spiritual perspective. Service grounds every single one of our faith traditions. It is a common denominator. It is the fundamental commandment of each of our major faith traditions. So I think it meets people at a spiritual level. It meets people at a health level.

I think people who serve are more likely in terms of building their resume and their own future and opportunity to be effective in the workplace, and we need to figure out how to send that message. At the same time, people are serving ultimately because they do want to make a difference.

JEAN: If service is one way to build a stronger citizenry, what should the role of government be as it relates to service?

MICHELLE: I firmly believe that government does have a role, and I think it is a mistake to believe that there should be a divide between government and the idea of service.

Throughout our history, we have seen that government has a role to play in catalyzing service. Whether it is through the Civilian Conservation Corps or even during World War II, the call to action from the presidents around participation, or Citizens Corps. There is a strong relationship and a strong role for government, both in terms of the bully pulpit of the presidency and for political leadership, and also I believe in the idea of federal investment into the infrastructure of our civic workings. Everything from our school systems, which were always intended to cultivate educated citizens who could participate and support our democracy, to the investment in national service as a citizen vanguard. When we invest in Peace Corps, we are investing in our foreign policy and national security.

 

There has been this sort of political cleavage between what people would say as pure volunteers and stipended volunteers, but nobody draws that line when they think of our military or really even the Peace Corps.

There is a hybrid model in which we integrate those who can serve a few hours a week versus those who can serve for several years at a time, and I think there is a role for both. For instance, President Bush has called for every American to serve over the course of their lifetime, 2,000 hours. It is a resonant call, but it needs to come with the kind of civic infrastructure that can support it. It doesn't do as much good to call for it without the capacity for it to really be meaningfully delivered.

JEAN: Do you see there any specific barriers that you think government can address in terms of following up on the call?

MICHELLE: We need a stronger volunteer civic infrastructure. Hands On Network has called for an investment fund, a matching fund for local community-based volunteer intermediary organizations to help build the capacity of those organizations, volunteer centers, and Hands On organizations that would be competitively allocated and matched by local communities based upon taking threshold leaps of building the capacity.

JEAN: In that sense, it is like a private-public partnership, where the government dollars are highly leveraged by private dollars?

MICHELLE: Exactly. The role of government should be in partnership with the private sector and with local communities, but I firmly believe that there is a role, and that we have seen the benefit of that, through the movement of national service in AmeriCorps. But it is yet to be taken fully to scale.

JEAN: What role did your parents play in some of the things you are involved in now, specifically your passion around service?

MICHELLE: Well, I think I definitely grew up with an understanding of public service being the pinnacle of what you could do. While we sometimes look with cynicism at Washington, I grew up with a strong sense of the power and dignity of public service and leadership. Specifically, my parents and I did volunteer together. I had opportunities to volunteer in school, and that played an important foundational role in my understanding of where I found meaning, which was in service. My parents are role models, and then, a host of community public servants have inspired me and led me to the idea of leadership and service.

JEAN: Where is the Hands On Network internationally?

MICHELLE: We have, again, organically seen the seeds of Hands On organization get planted across the globe now. We have an affiliate in South Africa and Zimbabwe and Brazil and Amsterdam and Manila and Shanghai.

One of my real passions is travel, but also issues around international development. It is something that I don't get to touch upon, but I think is so important, which is eradicating extreme poverty and some of the global inequities around public health that we all see so poignantly. One thing that has been terribly exciting is to see this organic development of organizations that are building civil society through service, and we are seeing just incredible work. Manila has this great group that is really doing creative things -- things outside of the box, and addressing issues in a different way. In Zimbabwe too. They are saving people's lives through peer education around HIV, and we are just now trying to get our arms around what does the global movement look like, and how could it be self-reinforcing. There is so much we have to learn here that could be inspired through our peers in other countries.

JEAN: One thing I wanted to ask you, maybe because of my AOL roots: My view is that the Internet has really been under recognized as a great tool to play a role in service. Even today, if somebody wants to get involved, there really aren't terrific avenues to take them there, to hold their hand from the very start when they know nothing and to give them a comfortable path into service. What do you see as the role the Internet might play in helping to drive both service and outcomes in our communities?

MICHELLE: Despite a good deal of progress, I still think that we haven't fully mined the Internet for its civic power. Hands On has actually invested a lot in our technology efforts, and we have found tremendous results in creating a web interface that captures the business model and then enables it to go to scale. One of the things that we are tremendously interested in is what it will look like in 20 years. I still believe the power of organizations will be central, but I also believe the power of individuals for self-organizing could be exploded in a real meaningful way.

 

JEAN: Michelle, thank you for taking the time to share your insights with me and our readers. We're glad to have the opportunity to feature you this month as part of our look at service.