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Carnegie Corporation And Time Magazine To Convene Summit On Citizenship And Service

Presidential Candidate John McCain and California Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger to Participate. Presidential Candidate Barack Obama Expected to Participate.

New York, New York, July 21, 2008—Carnegie Corporation of New York and TIME are convening a national bipartisan summit in New York City that will bring together hundreds of leading Americans to plan and lay out a bold blueprint on citizen service. The announcement was made by TIME Managing Editor Richard Stengel in the “To Our Readers” section of the magazine’s current issue (July 28, 2008).

Presidential candidate John McCain will join ServiceNation – a new coalition of more than 100 groups dedicated to strengthening American democracy and solving problems through civic engagement and citizen service – for an historic presidential candidates forum the evening of September 11 in New York City. Presidential candidate Barack Obama has also been invited to participate.

“Volunteerism is the cornerstone of American democracy,” said Vartan Gregorian, President of Carnegie Corporation. “As Alexis de Tocqueville noted in his classic 1835 book, Democracy in America, the efforts of both individual Americans and citizens' associations have played a critical role in preserving and strengthening our nation. We continue to see the proof of that dedication to service in the fact that there are more than 1.4 million nonprofit organizations in the U.S. addressing the challenges facing Americans across all social, cultural and economic levels."

“I hope the Summit will re-kindle the spirit of the 1960s, when President John F. Kennedy reminded us that, as citizens, we should not just think of ourselves but of our nation; not just of our rights but also of our responsibilities and obligations. Andrew Carnegie would certainly have agreed. He believed that with private wealth comes public obligations and that with citizenship comes service. The time has come to reaffirm those principles and, once again, to reinvigorate the spirit of service among Americans of all ages."

The Summit will launch an ambitious, one-year national campaign by ServiceNation (http//www.servicenation.org). The goal of ServiceNation, which includes more than 100 organizations representing some 100 million Americans, is to inspire America’s leaders to expand volunteer and national service opportunities for all Americans; use proven service strategies to create targeted service corps that will tackle some of America’s most chronic social challenges; and call on all Americans to make service a core ideal of citizenship.