KATHLEEN COURRIER: (In progress)—I think will be a very lively discussion on reconnecting disadvantaged young men. I'm Kathy Courrier. I'm standing in today for Bob Reischauer, who I know for a fact wishes he was here. I'm vice president for communications, but I also head up the Urban Institute Press, so I'm especially delighted to kick off a panel that features two of our authors: Harry Holzer and Peter Edelman. And I'm not at all shy about telling you where to buy the book that they wrote with the late Paul Offner. You go out that door and 10 paces to your left, if you're interested.
Lunch is being catered today by Fresh Start Catering. Fresh Start is part of D.C. Central Kitchens food rescue and job training program. You can pick up their card if you want to know more about them. And then one more thing: in your folders you'll find an invitation to another panel that we're having here two days from now. On Thursday morning our monthly Thursday's Child will explore the benefits and challenges facing children who leave distressed public housing. I think there is an e-mail address that you can use today or tomorrow if you want to join us on Thursday.
And now on with the show. Today's panelists are experts on so-called disconnected youth. And this is a group of 2 to 3 million young people age 16 to 24 who have no postsecondary education and haven't worked in at least a year. The situation and outlook are especially grave for young black men. On any given day, roughly one-third of them are either awaiting trial or are in jail or prison or on probation or parole, and only half have jobs.
Harry Holzer will lead off the panel today, and at that time he will say a few words about our brilliant and sorely missed colleague, Paul Offner. Harry is a visiting fellow at the Urban Institute. In his spare time he is associate dean at Georgetown Public Policy Institute, and he's also a former chief economist for the U.S. Department of Labor.
Peter Edelman will speak after Harry. Peter teaches at Georgetown University Law Center, and he has worked in all three branches of government, serving in HHS, working for Senators Robert and Edward Kennedy, and clerking for Supreme Court Justice Robert (sic) J. Goldberg.
David Reingold of Indiana University School of Public and Environmental Affairs comes next. David was a member of the White House Task Force for Disadvantaged Youth, and he also directed research and policy development for the Corporation for National and Community Service.
Karen Pittman will take us to the finish line. She is executive director of the Forum for Youth Investment, which she cofounded in 1998, and she also had a hand in creating a number of other organizations. Three of note are the Center for Youth Development and Policy Research, the president's Crime Prevention Council, and America's Promise. And I had to read those—that's a lot.
And Clarence Page will try to keep everybody in line today. Clarence is a syndicated columnist for the Chicago Tribune. In 1989 he won the Pulitzer Prize for commentary, and he is a regular, as you all know, on radio and television. He's been on NPR's "News & Notes with Ed
Gordon," "The McLaughlin Group," "The Chris Matthews Show," "The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer"—and those are just the ones I know about.
So, Harry, will you help us remember Paul and then Clarence can take over? Thanks.
HARRY HOLZER: Thank you, Kathy. As Kathy said, Paul Offner was the third author of this volume that Peter and I will be speaking about today. Many of you knew Paul. Paul spent much of his professional life working on the issues of poverty, both inside and outside government. In the 1990s and 1980s, Paul spent a lot of his time on welfare reform as Senator Moynihan's key legislative aid on that topic, but in the last five years of his life, Paul really became convinced that the issue that we're going to talk about today of disadvantaged young men was very, very critical to this problem and that he really believed strongly that it hadn't gotten the attention that it deserved in the research community and certainly in the policy community. And he certainly convinced me of that and helped rekindle my own interests in the topic and really brought me back to this issue. He was really a driving force behind the book that the three of us wrote together.
Paul died two years ago in April of 2004 while the manuscript was still in process, but he contributed enormously to it. We certainly missed him a lot after he was gone and wished he had been there to help see it to the finish line, but the book very much does reflect his contributions. And I also want to acknowledge that Paul's wife, Molly, is here today, sitting in the front row, and we're really glad to have you here as well with us today.
CLARENCE PAGE: Thank you very much. I'm indeed honored and humbled to be here today, and very excited. I actually expect to learn something, which you won't hear Washington journalists admit very often. But this is a terrific panel. I love the Institute. These are the folks I usually turn to for information, and so I'm really looking forward to today. So if you see me taking copious notes, it may be partly because I'm really massaging questions and partly because I'm working on future columns.
I'm very much concerned about this topic today. Last time Peter Edelman and I chatted—in fact, you and your wife and I were talking about "Crash," which your wife immediately asked had we seen, and the movie sparks everybody's conversations now. And I think my last words to you were,
"but it will never come close to getting an Oscar nomination." (Laughter.) So don't listen to my predictions anymore, all right? I'll tell you. And I was a little late coming over here today because I was working on a column looking at what does it mean that this movie—both that it grows to get a Best Picture, and also just the fact that it stimulated so much conversation, this little low-budget flick, and I can't help but be reminded of how Paul Haggis, the creator
of the movie, went home and scribbled the outline of it on a legal pad after he and his wife were carjacked there on a street near UCLA in Los Angeles. The story has that kind of passion and it's got that kind of edge in its uncompromising view of race and ethnic relations in our 21st century Mulligan stew, as I like to call it, of diversity in the country. It's also called a salad bowl, and one of my colleagues in Los Angeles, a Japanese American, likes to call it a stir-fry. It's like a Mulligan stew, just crispier.
But whatever metaphor you want to use, that's a part of our life today, and that movie opens with a scene that's right out of Haggis's life, and this strikes me so much as the father of a 16-year-old young black male because it's a scene that reminds me of how the most feared creature
on our urban streets today is still young black males and that it doesn't matter particularly what class they come from—and the movie has a very artful way of dealing with the class issues there too in this scene, that race becomes a marker of class and opportunity in our society. And class is also something that liberals and conservatives are, alike, uncomfortable with dealing with, just like race. And so we just don't like to go near it. It's a lot like—race
is like sex in our society. You know, everybody feels expert at it but we're afraid to discuss it in mixed company.
So we have here today some very brave people on this panel here, so rather than let me babble on, let's give them an opportunity. They have all been instructed to keep their opening remarks in the neighborhood of six minutes. And I don't do much up here—I'm not one of the experts—but as my editor used to say about columnists, we're kind of like the one-eyed javelin thrower: we don't score very much but we keep the crowd alert. (Laughter.) So that's my job here, so take that as caution and warning, et cetera.
With that in mind, one of my favorite people—Harry, please take it away and get us started here.
MR. HOLZER: Thank you, Clarence.
Well, the book focuses on the issue of disconnected youth but it's really about disconnected young men. And the first think you might be wondering about is, well, why just focus on young men? Obviously disadvantaged young women have problems too and why aren't we talking about those? And we made a conscious decision to focus on the young men partly because, quite frankly, the trends for young women look so much better in the 1990s and beyond. The enrollment rates of young women—women graduate from high school and attend college in much greater rates now than young men do. That's true within all racial groups, by the way, but especially in the minority community. Their employment rates were improving dramatically. So lots of issues and lots of problems there, but the contrast with the situation of the young men was very profound and striking to us, and the fact that in the 1990s with the strongest labor market in over 30 years, the employment rates of young black men continued to deteriorate while those of young black women were improving quite rapidly. This struck us and we decided to focus on this issue.
So Peter and Paul and I really spent some time looking at the research literature and trying to figure out what's this all about, and if we're going to ultimately focus on policy issues, what's really going on here and what deserves the most focus? And we started with the labor market because clearly that's where the problems and the trends look worse to us. Now, obviously the labor market for less-educated young men has changed dramatically in the last 30 years. The disappearance of good jobs for young men without higher education—and that's a story that's been told many times and I don't need to repeat it—it's had enormous impacts on this group of young men.
But it has two implications for policy. First, skills matter a great deal, much more in the labor market than they ever did before. We define skills broadly to include not only levels of education and postsecondary education and cognitive skills, but also occupational skills, occupational training, and early work experience, which a lot of these young men have great difficulty accumulating.
It also raises the issue of incentives to work because for those men who don't have these skills and face very low wages and very poor prospects in the labor market, their incentive to remain connected to the world of work and even the world of school seems to have diminished, and that to us seems to be a big part of the story about why they have fallen away. So work incentives are important.
Finally, we looked at the 1990s and said, what is continuing to cause this deterioration? With such a strong labor market and crime rates falling, how come the employment rates keep getting worse? Our answer was, based on the research that we saw, a lot of it had to do with these incarceration rates. Kathy described one-third of all young black men are involved in the criminal justice system. That means that most of them eventually end up back on the street with criminal records. Employers are much, much less inclined to hire them. The young men themselves are much less inclined to stay with the mainstream labor market.
And also the issue of child support. And I know there are some folks in the room who know a great deal more about that issue than I do and have helped to educate us on this topic, but up to one-half of young black men, by the time they reach age 34, are noncustodial fathers, and the way we now enforce the child support system, especially once these young men fall behind and go into arrears, we believe this creates additional disincentives for them to work because the tax rates on their earnings are so enormous.
So at the end of this review, Peter and Paul and I decided to focus on three broad issues: Number one, the whole area of education and training, which I'm going to pass to Peter in a few minutes to talk about. Second, the issue of how do we improve their incentives to work in the low-wage labor market. And third, what do we do about the barriers and disincentives facing youth offenders and noncustodial fathers. So just a couple minutes on those second and third topics and then I will pass it to Peter.
On work incentives, you know, we focused on a couple of policy areas in the book, one of which was raising the minimum wage, which we think would make these jobs more attractive to young people. Now, as an economist—you know, economists worry about the other set of incentives of
raising the minimum wage, whether it would reduce the incentive of employers to hire young people, and we take that problem very seriously, but we believe that given that the federal minimum wage was falling to such a low level relative to the rest of the labor market, we think modest or moderate increases would not run a great risk of reducing employer hiring and might do some real good in improving the incentives to work. So we support those kinds of increases.
The earned income tax credit (EITC) is the other area we focus on. The earned income tax credit did enormous good in helping to bring welfare moms into the labor market in the 1990s and improve their incentives, but young men, and especially noncustodial fathers, derive very little benefit from that system. So we thought, at a minimum, we should be thinking about how to extend the earned income tax credit to young men who are doing the right thing and actually paying child support. And we were quite pleased that Governor Pataki in New York took this issue on and had a nice proposal on this topic, which did not pass the legislature but we hear that he will bring it back again and we're pleased about that.
And maybe we should think about extending the earned income tax credit even more broadly than that to young adults without children, who may someday have children but right now face issues about the labor market. This raises all kinds of issues about marriage penalties; you know, if separate parents each are getting their own EITC, what happens if they want to marry, and would they lose it? And those issues we feel would need to be addressed but are certainly addressable within a set of policy proposals.
Finally we talk in the book about what to do about youth offenders and young noncustodial fathers. There's a variety of specific policies we talk about for youth offenders: prerelease programs, postrelease. The real issue is how to keep these young men from falling through the cracks once they leave the criminal justice system. There are very few good institutional linkages among the criminal justice system, the school system, and employers. And, again, Peter is going to talk more, I'm quite sure, about building systems at the local level that will prevent this kind of falling through the cracks.
For noncustodial fathers, we think a set of reforms needs to be done on this process, but especially when it comes to the issue of arrears and how, when these young men fall into arrears, we might change their incentives by allowing some kind of arrearage forgiveness when they're trying
to do the right thing. Also issues of passing through the benefits to low-income families and establishing good fatherhood programs that combine a focus on work with a focus on parenting. So there's a lot of things that we talk about in the book. There's a lot of issues here. There's a lot of dimensions to this problem. We don't think that there is a single magic bullet that's going to dramatically change this thing. We have to be looking for a more comprehensive approach.
We also think that it's going to really require some new resources. The resources that are spent now do need to be spent better. I think some other panelists are going to talk about that, and we certainly agree with that. But in the end, if you look at the young women and the progress made by young women, as a society, we were willing to invest more in the young women, the young, single moms, in the 1990s through the earned income tax credit, through all kinds of child care expenditures, and we think that was at least part of the story about why their employment improved. And we have to be ready, we think, to invest some resources for the men—for the young men as
well. We think it's an important investment and a very worthwhile investment and it can make a difference.
And with that let me turn it over to my coauthor for some words on education and training.
MR. PAGE: Thank you very much for your brevity and your speed and a wealth of information, Harry.
Peter, please take it away.
PETER EDELMAN: Thank you, Clarence. First of all, let me add my words of memory and memorial about Paul, who not only was really the stimulus for this book—he said—Harry and me, one day we ran into each other (maybe it was even here, I don't remember)—he said, what about the men? We've had this public policy initiative, for better or worse—some of us think worse;
there are some who think better—for women in the 1990s, and it seems like our public policy for young men of color in particular is prison, and so why don't we see if we could make some contribution to that? I knew Paul since the 1970s, and so it was particularly wonderful for me to have the chance to work with him closely on this, and of course we all miss him.
Secondly, I'd like to thank Hugh Price for having written the forward for the book, which I think adds, in a very, very important way, to what we're saying. Hugh knows these issues very well from his work over the years, not only at the Urban League but at the Rockefeller Foundation and
other venues. And so we're very glad about that. And of course, we had the benefit of help from a lot of people in this room, and it was kind of a nice free education for me beyond what I already knew, which was a little, but I think all of us, Harry and I, would say that we know a lot more as a consequence of having had a chance to sit at the feet of others to learn more.
We really don't talk about one of the most dangerous intersections in America. Clarence, you talked about it terms of race, but the intersection of race and poverty is the kind of place where you don't want to be. And we all know the numbers. They're better than they used to be, you can
certainly say that: 23, 24 percent poverty among African Americans, the same among Latinos, and basically the same among Native Americans—and particularly the deteriorating situation for young African-American men with less than a high school education through the '90s, when basically everybody else in society was doing better.
And so that's what we've tried to address here. We're very clear in the book—and you don't have to get past page three to see all the things that we don't try to answer, and we just thought it was important just so no false promise was made that we would have an answer to racism in our society, and a whole long list of other things, whether it's peer relationships on the street or mass culture or education reform from top to bottom and so on, although we address some issues of education and training that I'm going to talk about briefly here.
So this is not a book that purports to answer comprehensively this whole problem. We think that what we offer here would make a difference. That's why we offer it. And chapters 3 and 4 relate to issues of education and training and how those might be pulled together at the community level, which we think is extremely important. So when you get into it, you'll see that we start our focus during the teens at the adolescent level. Of course, we could have started with prenatal care—it goes back to what we don't cover—and every child being ready to learn at age five, which we don't deal with.
But certainly in terms of young people, particularly in communities of concentrated poverty, particularly in neighborhoods where schools are bad, we need to have a policy about what happens outside of school hours. And so we start there, talking about youth development—obviously a book or books (Karen knows this very well and has indeed written) can be written about the question of youth development. But we talk about the Harlem Children's Zone; we talk about Beacon Schools. There are many others that we could have mentioned, but the main point is that the process of preparation for a successful entry into the labor market has to start there.
And then we walk through a combination of age by age, year by year, or groups of years, and also an overlay of young people who have particular needs. And so I won't go into all the particulars. We think career academies are particularly promising. We try to stick to areas where there is research that supports making a representation that something is a good initiative. Harry and I have a continuing conversation. He asked us how we could put "particularly promising" in the book, even if not "rigorously evaluated." We made a deal on that. So if you see one that's "rigorously
evaluated," it's his. "Particularly promising" is mine. (Laughter.)
And we think that community colleges are a place where there is a lot going on, where there is a lot of ferment and activity right now, and lots of possibilities for blurring the lines between high school and college—high school and community college, kind of in both directions, and
so we make a particular point of that. Second-chance programs that we're all quite familiar with in terms of Job Corps and Youth Service Corps, the conservation corps, and YouthBuild, which of course is a great favorite of many of us. And then the idea of applying sectoral training, which has been more successful with somewhat older trainees, we think, and there are a few examples that applying that to younger workers is important.
A key recommendation that we make in terms of national policy at that point in the book is for a new national apprenticeship program. We think that there is learning from the school-to-work efforts of the '90s and that if we could get to a point in time where there was any interest in terms of our national government in new steps forward, that that's an area that we ought to put back on the table, as well as expanding proven programs and insisting on a much more rigorous and extensive evaluation of things than we've had before.
Now, the thing I want to particularly emphasize is something that I believe in very strongly and Harry and I and Paul talked about it a lot, and—but so much of the action, if we're going to make a difference in all this, has to be at the community level. We need national policy but, you know, we've got a lot of national money going on out there, have had for decades, in the area of employment and training, and some of it we just frankly don't even know what happens to it. And in any case, there is very little accountability.
And so we think it's absolutely key for there to be initiatives at the community level, and we talk about three models—again, the Harlem Children's Zone, After School Matters in Chicago, and the Youth Opportunity grants that were unfortunately eliminated and had their national
funding stopped—they exist still locally—just within the last two or three or four years during the current administration.
So that is something that I hope will be of particular interest, and I will stop there and thank you for the chance to be here.
MR. PAGE: Thank you, Peter. We look forward to hearing more.
I'm sure it was just coincidental, David, that Peter happened to mention funding cutoffs in the current administration before shifting it over to you—(chuckles)—but could you—
DAVID A. REINGOLD: Thanks.
MR. PAGE: Could you take on the mammoth task of giving us an overview of the White House task force, and also your feelings about the findings that Peter and Harry have brought to us?
MR. REINGOLD: Certainly. You know, most folks may not be aware that in fact there was a White House Task Force for Disadvantaged Youth, and it was created by this president in 2003, and I guess just to give a little bit of context of what exactly this task force was up to, why it was created, and then perhaps reflect on where it's going and how the work that we're here to discuss fits in—the White House Task Force on Disadvantaged Youth actually was created in a bit of a roundabout way. When the president, in 2002, in his State of the Union address, called on all Americans to contribute 4,000 hours of service during their lifetime and created a White House office for trying to coordinate that effort, there was a lot of head scratching and questioning over, well, what exactly are people going to serve for? And in that context—and it wasn't very well articulated, I think it's pretty fair to say, in terms of people are going to serve their communities, their country, and so on and so forth—but there really wasn't much of a policy kind of architecture or any kind of effort to hang that service initiative on.
And so one of the impetuses for the White House Task Force for Disadvantaged Youth was in fact to begin an effort at building that kind of architecture, that kind of framework around which this call to service could be directed. And I think, as is true with a lot of things in D.C., when you want to try and foster some change and you're not really quite sure that you want that change, you put a bunch of folks to go off and study it and deliver a report. And so that's in fact what happened. There was a group that was put together across all the domestic federal agencies, as well as parts of the White House, to kind of assess where we were with the investment that the federal government was making around disadvantaged youth programs, and the efforts were housed at the Corporation for National Community Service in the unit that I was directing at the time, and it was put there in large part so that all the various agencies that were involved that had a big stake in the outcome of this report wouldn't be able to slant it in any particular way.
And so we produced this report, and I have to say that what came next I think was a bit of a surprise to most of us who were involved in it, and I think a lot of the report really focuses on how and whether the federal government should be involved in trying to get more coordination, reduced redundancy, and in general more for the money than is currently being spent on disadvantaged youth programs. And much to our surprise—at least my surprise—the reception that the report received from the youth-serving community was, I would say, very, very positive in the sense that the general response, that at least I heard and I think continues to this day—was that, you know, thank goodness somebody is paying attention to this topic, and that it's a topic that is being worked on by the executive branch, and in fact I think the report helped perhaps to bring a little bit of renewed energy to the youth-serving community, and a consequence was that the efforts and the reception of this report culminated in some fairly robust lobbying efforts by nonprofits and other organizations that are running youth programs, trying to
help disadvantaged youth begin lobbying for a bill based on building off of this report. And a couple of months ago, the House passed the Youth Coordination Act, which I believe is one of the few pieces of bipartisan legislation that has been passed by the House in a number of years, although there may be a few other examples, and it's now sitting waiting for the Senate to do something with it.
And so I guess what really kind of surprised at least me, and I think a few others, was the degree to which there was a real desire out there among providers and those at the local and state level to have a federal role and for that in fact to get some traction in Congress. I think, as I kind of look at this and I was—and so right now we're sitting waiting for—I think a number of us are sitting around waiting to see whether or not the Senate is actually going to do anything with this particular bill, and the one thing that really I think is quite illuminating in terms of how some of the various perspectives on this particular problem—people don't see eye to eye—in Hugh Price's prologue to the book he talks about the Challenge program. And for those of you who have had a chance to look at it, the Challenge program is a unique disadvantaged youth effort that's run by the National Guard and the Defense Department.
And one of the things that—at least based on some of the work that we did on this task force—became pretty clear is that there is so much fragmentation around youth programs, at least at the federal level, and I think that the Challenge example is one that is used, at least in the report, to say, you know, how is it that we can have these programs scattered about pretty much every federal agency, including the Defense Department? And if we've got that kind of fragmentation, how can we actually expect to see some coherent results at the end of the day?
And I think that one of the things that is fairly apparent is that, you know, at least in my reading, perhaps what we need is not so much a growth of new programs or the further application of existing programs—and I think we have seen lots of programs scaled up to the national level without having really any good evidence that in fact those programs are what we hope that they are—but rather, as this, I think, taskforce report tries to set out, and the bill in the House sets out, is to try and get some coherence to the existing investments that are currently being made where we don't have, for example, pretty much every federal agency and many, many bureaus running programs that nobody really is coordinating across agencies—very little coordinated evaluation work so that you can actually compare programs to programs in terms of the results.
And so hopefully, you know, I think that while everybody has, I think, their favorite program and can point to an effort that they think is really quite worthwhile, you know, I think that a lot of different eyes can look at those same programs and see—instead of a wonderful program, they see fragmentation, they see lack of coordination, they see just a discontinuity. And I think one of the critical things that we have to get over and try and sort out is, you know, how does one person's view about a program being strong jibe with another person's view of it being completely fragmented and disconnected? And I think that hopefully if this bill that's going to be up in the Senate actually gets through, maybe that would be the venue where we can actually start grappling with some of those particular issues.
MR. PAGE: Thank you very much, David.
Karen, please give us a little more on that politics theme, if you will, and also your response to what's been said here.
KAREN J. PITTMAN: Sure. A couple things, and I think I'm just going to start by saying I think there is a story behind this that we need to pull up. There is always a story behind the numbers.
David just said several times the word "fragmentation," and that issue has plagued us at all levels of government—federal, state, local—for as long as I've been alive, and probably
as long as we've had government, at least in its modern form. And this idea of creating some kind of coordinating council is not a new idea. They exist inside the department in which they all come together to try to do it. And I actually ran the '95 version of this; it was called the President's Crime Prevention Council, but it came out of legislation that was called Ounce of Prevention, which Peter had a hand in, and it was the same basic idea that we need to have a table at which the departments come together, look at the array of programs, and try to figure out how you get a better return on the investment, if you want to use economist language, and all the politics that ensue from trying to do that work, whether you're doing it through legislation or you're doing it
through administrative cooperation. The good news that time was that we really did find ways to do it, and we made a lot of administrative progress. The bad news was it was the wrong time to bring anything to the forefront from a legislative perspective, and so that particular effort died.
I guess I probably sit here representing those youth policy program advocates that you were surprised responded well when the White House Task Force report came out. And we certainly all held our breaths behind the scenes because what we didn't want was a report that came out and said, here are the 10 programs that you need to slash. But what happened and what we advocated for and said we wouldn't respond to behind the scenes was a report that said, we need to call for coordination, we need to call for accountability, we need to figure out how we know good programs from bad, and most important, we need to figure out how these programs get to the state and local level in integrated ways.
For those of you who haven't seen it—and if I could put one slide up right now I would put up one of the slides that Margaret Dunkle, who is associated with the Institute for Educational Leadership at George Washington, we call them the scary slides because whenever we put them up people go—(gasps). And it's a slide that really traces programs coming into a family, and you have probably 100 arrows—different-colored arrows on a page—coming from different departments and finding their way into a family. So the fragmentation issue is a pain from a policy perspective, but it really is actually frightening from youth people and families' perspective.
And one of the things that I'll do at this end of the table before we open it up is to say, for most young people and families, but certainly for the population that we're talking about, the conversation really can't be about programs; it has to be about pathways, and pathways require multiple programs that are hooked together and somebody has to be paying attention. And if we expect young people, who are the most vulnerable, to do the heavy lifting of figuring out how to apply for 17 different things, what to do when their eligibility in one program stops and they have to get to another one, it won't happen because what they are trying to do is not just get prepared—now I'll go to Dorothy Stoneman, who is one of everybody's favorite people—the young people in YouthBuild talk openly about the need for transformation—not just preparation but transformation, and it's very hard to figure out how you transform your overall identity about who you are, what you can do, how your community sees you, what skills you have, and where you see
opportunities for yourself if you're changing programs every six months and not quite sure what to go on.
So that's a story that I want to sort of put out there, and that's the challenge that we have to put in front of policymakers, starting with things like the coordinating council—this Youth Development Council that's being put in place, we hope, or at least this version of it. And we know also that—I mean, the thing that I want to say quickly is that while folks, primarily sort of spearheaded by the National Collaboration for Youth and the Campaign for Youth and other organizations that are based here in D.C. that can walk up to the Hill and encourage congressmen and senators to do the right thing, we're also doing something else because there was a moment at
which the White House said, we wrote a report and we didn't think anybody cared. And in fact, the number of reports that were printed on the first run was 200, and so they really didn't think anybody cared. And so we've also decided that we have to do something about that, and we've created something called a Youth Policy Action Center where 60 organizations that do advocacy at the federal, state, and local level are joining forces to make sure that their constituents have the sophisticated software needed to get their voices heard in Congress.
A couple of things to let you know how this connects down to real life on the ground. This coordinating body that's trying to be created now at the federal level—and once it's created we will make sure this time that voices are heard and that it has clout and it's held accountable for doing its work—exists right now at the state level. There are things called Children's Cabinets in about 18 or 19 states, and there is some version of a coordinated body in about 30 states that has taken on the same charge. So this is not going to be a top-down; it really needs to be a bottom up, and we work with those groups to make sure that when this legislation is passed, the wisdom that they have from doing this anywhere from 10 to 12 years can bubble up, as well—and they also happened at the local level. Many mayors offices have coordinating councils.
So those kinds of things are there; coordinating bodies are there, and the main argument behind them is, again, we have fragmented programs; we need to figure out how to put them together. The trick is really creating a table and creating a framework and creating a sense of urgency that you need to put those together.
The other thing that's happening at the state level, with or without these coordinating bodies, is increasing efforts to look at the need to coordinate in order to address the needs of special populations and vulnerable youth, disadvantaged youth, out-of-school youth, disconnected youth, whatever term that we want to use—young people who are exiting public systems. Whether it's juvenile justice or foster care, there is an increased recognition that these young people, if they are going to make that transformation, need services and supports from multiple agencies, and then there are folks who are bringing those people together and then looking for both legislation and administrative policy changes to make that happen.
At the program level, we've got folks that are playing coordinated functions—again, sort of taking this theme that you have to figure out how to do some of the heavy lifting on our end and not ask young people to do it. Peter mentioned community colleges, which really are becoming increasingly a base for this population to come back, get key educational and vocational training services, but also get additional supports that are needed. There is a wonderful book—we could do plugs for other people's books as well. The American Youth Policy Forum just put out a book called Whatever It Takes, looking at what 12 communities are doing to reconnect out-of-school youth. You've got actually a shorter version, I think, in your packets of—one of the cities in here is Portland and you've got an example of Portland in there.
There are also coordinating functions that are being created at the city level. And Peter is absolutely right; this has to come together at the community level. So I think the forum—the focus that you have in your report, we also talk about an organization that's called CS2—Communities and Schools for Career Success—that's created what they call social entrepreneurs. These are folks who were staffed inside the school system, but their job is to go around in the community, identify all those supports, and figure out how you put those together into a package for young people.
The last thing that I want to say is for any of this to work we have to have urgency, and what a lot of communities are finding is that the most effective way to have urgency is to have the young people themselves begin to advocate for change. And so you've got tremendous movements that are happening across the country in places like California where you have the Books Not Bars movement where young people are advocating. You've got foster care youth and former juvenile justice youth who are coming together to advocate for legislation and policy. You've got young people doing increasing amounts of organizing in policy advocacy and getting pulled together.
So those are the kinds of things that are going on. The work that we do at the Forum for Youth Investment is really focused on looking at how we can bring more meat into these opportunities, because the main thing that we need to do to connect the dots between the fragmentation of
programs and policies and the real need for pathways for young people—there are a couple of things we have to do. One, we have to make sure that as communities and states are talking about what do we do about youth, they're disaggregating the population enough to recognize the special needs in this case of young men and young African-American men, but they're not just talking youth in a sort of 0-21 kind of space and not pulling it apart.
The second thing that they need to do—which actually if you've ever looked at the White House Task Force report you'll see an example of it in the back—is actually dissect the programs, pull things apart from their name and figure out what services and supports they actually
provide, and then come at them that way so that you pull together all the programs across departments that are offering counseling and you ask, how can we consolidate these functions? So we're beginning to look at programs not by what they're called or which department is funding them, but actually by what they do.
Once you've done that you then have a new opportunity, which is what a lot of these Children's Cabinets and coordinating bodies are doing, which is to look at the array of resources that you have and put them back together in a way that has more power, especially for the populations that we're talking about, and it's much more likely that that happens if they're at the table with you. So I'll stop there.
MR. PAGE: Thank you very much. I just have a couple of quick questions. I'm hearing a lot about 30 or 40 years of history of a repeated problem with fragmentation and coordination. Is this because we haven't been learning anything over the last few decades or is there something systemic that causes refragmention even after we have gotten coordination for various programs because of many of these ideas and programs bubbling up from the grass roots? And I would like to ask Harry and Peter about that first.
MR. HOLZER: It's hard for me to speak—coordination is not really the focus of my work, so I will defer to the other people that have thought about that issue more.
My basic attitude about this is I think the coordination issue is very important. It shouldn't be thought of as a substitute for a broader range of policy initiatives and change and resources
that I think also need to be on the table. Yeah, I think the arguments for coordination are very compelling and I'm glad that Karen and David and other folks have thought a lot about that. One could have made the same argument in the 1990s—you know, we need to coordinate and we'd get a lot more bang for the buck. We never would have done the earned income tax credit if that had been the case. We never would have dramatically expanded the Child Development Block Grant and other things, which did some real good for that population.
So I hope that as we talk about improving coordination, reducing fragmentation—which I think is a very important issue—that we also don't lose sight of some of the broader policy initiatives and policy changes that we also hope will take place simultaneously.
MR. PAGE: Good point. Peter?
MR. EDELMAN: Harry said it so diplomatically. (Laughter.) He's been teaching me that now for two, three years. We have to do substance. And sure you don't want to piss away this and do this little thing over there, and so on and so forth. Karen said it with words like "pathways" and "transformation," and looking at it as how the family looks at it or how the—(audio break, tape change)—you know, you can do the Margaret Dunkle thing and it's a great contribution that she makes. It is a great contribution. But, you know, the old 478-federal-programs deal, that is not the heart of our problem; it's a problem. The heart of our problem is wanting to do something about race and poverty in this country. That is the heart of our problem.
And we need national policy, no question about it, but the heart of getting something done about it is in community after community in this country and you already said that, so I sure don't have to repeat what you said because you always say it better than I can.
MR. PAGE: Let me ask David. I'm reminded of the first President Bush in the statement that we have more will than wallet. Do we have more will than wallet these days to deal with these problems?
MR. REINGOLD: Well, you know, if I had an answer to this particular question, you know, I probably wouldn't be sitting here, right. (Laughter.) But, yeah, I guess—you know, based on my personal experience, I agree. Coordination can get you so far. I think that if you look, for example, at the—slightly different topic, but White House Interagency Council on Homelessness that has been around for quite some time and is still very active and vibrant and is the arena in which the federal government works across agencies to try and address that particular issue.
And I think in terms of the proof of that effort and the proof of other efforts at trying to drive coordination across siloed organizations and programs probably does achieve some benefits. I think at the end of the day, though, the strength and the efforts of coordination are going to be a product of the effectiveness and the vitality of the efforts you're trying to coordinate.
So I would agree wholeheartedly, if you have got a number of efforts that aren't terribly strong or are misdirected, or what have you, it doesn't really matter how much coordination you can bring to bear because you really don't have a whole lot of pieces to really have the kind of effect that you want. And I think that there are some real questions out there within the world of trying to help disadvantaged youth and disconnected youth in terms of some of the strength of some of these
programs.
And frankly I think, when you look at some of these efforts and the patchwork of funding that they have to go through to support themselves and the grantsmenship costs that are in involved,
and just the—you know, it's mind-numbing. And I guess I just can't help but think that if there was a bit more of a rational approach to this that those organizations could do a whole lot more and do it better. But that is an unproven hypothesis and one that we'd only know if we actually tried it.
MR. PAGE: Karen, what do you think of that?
MS. PITTMAN: First to answer your question of why, if this has been around forever, why we haven't done more—and I think whether we are talking coordination sort of at a roadway in terms of coordinating programs or really talking about coordinating efforts, which is what I say coordination—it's more than just coordinating programs; it's really getting the folks who have the dollars around the table and forcing them to coordinate efforts in a responsible way.
But I think it's a lot like campaign financing: it is a nice thing to talk about; it's a hard thing to do. We make a committee, we talk about it, and if somebody doesn't come along and say really do it this time, it doesn't get done.
The thing that we are seeing happening across the states, which, again, if you bring muscle to these bodies that are created—if you don't bring muscle to them, they will do lip service, and they will exist and put out nice reports. There is no doubt about it. But if you bring muscle to them and discipline to them, what happens is that what they begin to do is both identify redundancies but also identify gaps.
And so if we are going into this thinking there are some gaps, and there are gaps that are actually being clouded over by the fact that things are so fragmented, we think we're doing things when we're not, and somebody can always hold up 10 programs and say, look, we are doing all of this stuff; they just don't show up, then I think we have to—we have an opportunity for this to be a Trojan horse.
But it has to be well monitored and we have to know why we are doing it. Coordinating for the sake of coordinating does not get you very far.
MR. PAGE: I want to give our audience a chance to give their questions and ever-so-brief comments. But we have a microphone here and I want to be sure that you know this. I see a couple of hands up already, so let me just ask—perhaps if we want to pass the mike on to the lady right here in the back row. Oh, there we go.
Q: Hi, I'm Marti Burt from the Urban Institute. And I just want to say that part of the fragmentation is in Congress. And having gone through the process with I can't tell you how many different populations and issues, whether it's high-risk youth, homelessness, serious mental illness, pregnant teenagers, I don't care what it is, every single one of those programs is trying to put together packages of inadequate levels of funding whether they are well targeted or not.
And you try to get them coordinated—you think the Interagency Council on Homelessness is doing anything to make federal agencies actually change their behavior? They are not. They are talking. They are nice to each other, but they haven't changed a single one of their rules or regulations.
And there is a lot of territoriality in Congress that keeps those programs separate I think, and I would love to hear somebody, you know, share the blame here around—(chuckles)—where a lot of it also belongs. That is also true of state legislatures and everything. Everybody has their little bailey whip and they want to keep it that way. We can identify 194 programs that serve youth, and they are in 10 different agencies, and that is why they will stay fragmented.
MR. PAGE: Peter?
MR. EDELMAN: I think, Marti, I can just say "amen." I mean, I had one in my long-life story when we tried to create what we called the Onset Prevention Program with homage to our friends in Chicago who invented the phrase in this field. I went up to the Hill to try to get a pool of money, essentially authorization from Congress for agencies to take X amount of money that they already have and pour it into a pool that would exist in the middle of the mall, where you would have decategorized money that could be put out there for comprehensive programs in the area of youth development.
And the problem was not in the executive branch; it was the turf in Congress. I mean, I literally—they are really good at it. Well, if you go to see so-and-so over on the such-and-such subcommittee and they say it's okay with them, then you come back to me and then we will do something about it, all right, and multiply that one by about 10 or maybe 20, and that is what we went through. So amen to that.
MR. PAGE: Does anybody have any insight as to whether that coordination bill is in the Senate right now? If you do, it will be welcome either in public or whisper it to me afterwards.
The gentleman right here?
Q: Nice seeing you again, Clarence, from the Black Caucus. You know, I have a question for David and maybe the other group can look at it. Leave No Child Behind has been a very controversial bill, but one of the things it has done for a lot of us is given us data, and data have been very critical in some of this work. I am wondering, when I go out and talk to groups of African-American organizations about this issue about high completion rates, a lot of our communities don't know what the data are. We don't have a vehicle to get this information out and this data out on what and where we are now. This is a huge issue, an economic issue as well as an education issue.
Because Leave No Child Behind offers that data, you can go on any web site now. I pulled a web site down that said how many black males took an SAT test at Blue High School and I found only 20 took the SAT at Blue last year. I mean, the kind of data that I'm able to get and develop a strategy around is amazing.
I'm just wondering, Karen or David, is there next step with the data to really look at best practices to get the resource community in with the practitioners and then really merge those two
groups together to take a look at this issue and have a strategy because I haven't really seen a strategy yet. I have seen single-sex schools, I have seen violence prevention programs, but I haven't seen across the board where best practices will work and how we can address these issues from infancies to adulthood.
Sorry, I'm Greg Robertson with D.C. Children Youth Investment Trust Corporation. I have got three black men here. We are all working on a black-boys initiative here in the District of Columbia as well.
MR. PAGE: Thank you. It sounds like you're talking about access to information and perhaps more user friendly web site, et cetera. Does anybody have something to add to that?
MS. PITTMAN: Well, I mean, you asked two questions and the second was harder than the first. I mean, you're absolutely right that No Child Left Behind—among many of the things it's doing, some good, some bad—is generating new information. I mean, it's also absolutely true that whether you like the exact way they have been done or not, the efforts to actually talk about graduation rates for those—and dropout rates, and recalculate, has sort of sparked a new sense of urgency around the number of young people who aren't coming out of high school, or at least not coming out with a diploma on time.
I mean, you have got groups like the Education Trust. You have got—I think there is a group, it's based in Texas, called Just for the Kids. It is really trying to pull that data
together. And you have got school districts that are actually trying to step up to the plate. The Chicago public schools are doing an amazing job of really trying to take not just data about how well the students are doing but data about how well the school is doing and data about how well students who come out of each school are doing two and three years later, and giving that back to
parents in one—(inaudible)—so I mean, we can talk more, but there are some efforts to actually use data as an advocacy tool for family.
MR. REINGOLD: Just quickly, actually, the Urban Institute's own Harry Hatry was a contributor on the White House Task Force report. And one of the things that Harry did was actually kind of helping us draw up what would some national indicators look like for you serving programs that perhaps could be the basis for some uniform data reporting and data collection, and then feeding that back into the public.
And I actually think the work that he did is quite good, and you know, it has—I don't know if anybody has acted on it yet, but there is a nice blueprint that has been produced that I think at least would begin that process. It is really quite an enormous challenge. And I noticed—you know I have been out of public office for a couple of years now but about a year ago, the First Lady's Office actually created a website, which for better or worse has ranks or scores—the strength of evaluations for—and the results of those evaluations for youth-serving organizations and programs, which, you know, if one wants to go look at you can. It's not quite what you're looking for, though.
MR. EDELMAN: Of course the current administration wants to zero out the survey on income and program participation, SIP, which gives absolutely invaluable data for people who are doing these kinds of things. And anybody here who hasn't written a letter to the appropriators in Congress to say that that should not be done ought to do so because that would be—the New York Times editorialized against that cut the other day. It is important enough for them to have done that. I was glad to see they did that.
MR. PAGE: We have more questions here. Let me ask—right here. And please give your name and where you are from.
Q: Carmen Delgado Votaw with the Alliance for Children and Families.
I just want to tell you about one of our agencies, the Community Service Society of New York. It has been doing a survey for the last three years about young black men, particularly, and other
minorities and relating it to the unemployment situation, relating it to incarceration rates, and so on. United Way has been funding them to this. The New York Times loves it and has given them a lot publicity about it.
We are looking to do a teleconference really soon to get other states to undertake similar kinds of efforts so that we have some comparable data, particularly in cities. But if you are interested in that, I think that is one way to go because at least you can highlight the effects of all of these bad things that happen to young black men and get some kind of public support for actually collecting the data.
MR. PAGE: And you'll make this available on the Internet?
Q: Yes.
MR. PAGE: Very good. Right up here, I want to get one more question right here—this gentleman here and then over here. Go ahead. Right here in the front row.
Q: Hi. Rich Lee, the National Multihousing Council.
I understand the focus of this panel is on government intervention, but I'm wondering what sort of role the private sector can take in addressing these problems. Especially as I see it, culturally, a lot of times the private sector contributes to the culture that creates these problems, working with McDonalds, working with, you know, art and music—so to speak organizations—working with sports teams. What kind of work is being done in that area? What kind of work can be done where these organizations—
MR. EDELMAN: Well, the focus of our book is not only on public policy. We are absolutely clear that if we are going to have a serious effort about these, then the private sector needs to be deeply involved, both in terms of participating in the design and carrying out appropriate employment training programs, such as specific training, but also civically within cities to advocate for the business community, other civic leaders, to advocate with local government about what it should do to participate with local government in terms of the design and the carrying out of initiatives.
If we don't have our leading citizens as well as all of the people involved in trying to make a difference, we are not going to get anywhere. We need to have people volunteering. You know, there are people around who say the answer to everything is volunteering or the answer to everything is in the private sector, or the answer to everything is the faith-based program. Right, we have heard all three of those.
Well, they are all part of the answer, but what we need is to get all of that into a unified way of thinking about things that also includes public policy and that means both participating in getting that policy created, doing some things on their own, doing things that help carry it out.
MR. PAGE: Right over here. This gentleman and—
Q: (Off mike.)
MR. PAGE: I hope everyone heard that -
Q: Samuel Halperin, American Youth Policy Forum. Thank you.
There is a resource outside the door called "Whatever It Takes: How 12 Communities Are Reconnecting Out-of-School Youth." I think that this reports bears out the points made by Peter in
particular. These are local communities doing whatever it takes to save young people. Some of them have been doing it for 35 years. Some of them have research that I think you would appreciate. Most of them do not, but they are doing what they need to do in order to get the young people back into some sort of connection with society, whether it's schooling, whether it's the labor force, whether it's community service. They are doing positive things.
These are not federal programs. It is true, David, it is really tough trying to grab money from this pot and that pot. It burns out a lot of good people. Nevertheless, there are results that
are I think transferable if not replicable—they are transferable. We need to learn from them.
The report also contains six national programs, some of which ought to stay just where they are:
uncoordinated with the federal government because they work well. When the federal government put up money for the youth opportunity program, and then withdrew it after two-and-a-half years, no more coordination for me, thank you.
But if you want to look at how that program could have made a difference and is doing good work today, look at Philadelphia and Baltimore, which are described in this report. They are using
the money in ways that meet their needs and their students' needs. Thank you.
MR. PAGE: Thank you.
MR. HOLZER: (Off mike)—mentioned youth opportunities, and I know Linda Harris also has a new report out on youth opportunities and maybe she will talk about that. But there is an important point there because, yes, what happens as the local level is very important—private sector, employers, nonprofits. But there was a federal effort not just to coordinate the existing programs, but at the federal support for these activities at the local level through the Youth's Opportunities Program, which many of us thought was one of the most promising things to come out of the Department of Labor in many, many years to fund 36 sites in high-poverty communities at the local level, to do what Karen said, to not only pull everything together but to identify gaps—and there were large gaps—try to create comprehensive approaches where the whole range of services needed by different kinds of youth could be created and found, and what a tragedy, as Sam said, that that effort was cut off at the knees—the federal funding. Now, again, at the local level a lot of those efforts continue. But, you know, here was an opportunity that the federal government actually took to not only coordinate but to fill gaps, to identify gaps and—(inaudible)—and create the kinds of systems we need.
And there was even some evidence in some pilot programs that, by the way, were embargoed by the Labor Department—some positive early evidence of good things happening in these sites. And, again, another piece of evidence—it's good that these good things continue to happen at the local level, but wouldn't it be a good thing if the federal government could play this more constructive role and not cut off at the knees this kind of support just two years after it gets off the ground?
MR. PAGE: We have a gentleman right here.
Q: Good morning. My name is Dr. Spencer Holland. I'm the founder and former executive director of Project 2000, which was a program that is specifically aimed at African-American boys. We have made an assumption here evidently that these children were connected in this first place, okay. You started at 16, 14, and what have you. These children were never connected, and we have known—and I have been doing this for the last 20 years—and we have known this even longer that one of the major, most salient characteristic for this group of people is they cannot read, and it did not start at 14, or 16, or 24.
So the fundamental question is how are we going to connect them when they are little and make sure they know how to read—K-3 you learn to read; grade 4 and above you read to learn. When you never learn how to read, you're not going to get reconnected.
MR. PAGE: Hard to improve on that.
I want to get the gentleman right here. I think you are next.
Q: Good afternoon. Adrienne Burnham, youth policy associate with the National Clearinghouse on Families & Youth.
I just wanted to go with what Peter was saying earlier. Part of the matter is race and also poverty, you know, where those intersections occur. What I am doing personally is attempting,
along with my colleague Derrick Dolphet, who began a youth outreach foundation. It is going to be called Beat the Streets.
What the comment just there—was made about the connection, you know, the title of the forum—reconnecting. I don't feel that black men have ever been connected in America in the first place. And so when I asked the question in developing programs and thinking about policy, I am thinking about how does the young person I'm seeking to work with and help, how do they think—what is their cognitive state.
And the truth of the matter is, they are not connected, haven't been connected, and don't want to be connected to the current society that is here in America. They want to change their opportunities and things. So what my approach is, is character development, to teach them that no matter what the external circumstances that we are facing are, we have the power on the inside of ourselves and in our history and our true heritage, not to miss education that occurred in this country for a—about who we are to overcome any external circumstance.
And so character development programs I think are going to be essential to gaining a connection and creating a connection and creating a niche for black males in this country, and then also the educational opportunities of course are important. That starts early on with the early childhood education. Just as we just said, if you can't read you can't succeed in this country.
And so—but character education and individual empowerment for the young people I think—so you know, the problem I always have that I debate with my parents frequently is, you know, why should I tell the kid to go to high school, finish and get your diploma and then you're just going to go work for the man and make him more money. They are going to pay, you know, much less to you; they are going to be the ones reaping all of the benefit; they are going to be ones saving the manager positions and the executive positions for their children, their relatives.
And so the question is—I'm not going to tell them to do that. I'm going to tell them to improve themselves individually—do what they can for themselves, and the reason—what I'm reconnecting them to is their true selves, who they were before they got here to this country, who they were in God's eyes. Once they get connected to that then they will be able to navigate through the rest of all of the mess that is out there right now.
MR. PAGE: Thank you very much.
We have got time for one more question. Before I ask it, I'm going to ask a—I'm sorry, before I call a person to ask it, I'm going to ask a question of my own while I have got this
brilliant panel here.
Poverty, the P word, was oddly missing from recent election campaigns. From the agenda, the 2004, 2000 campaign—'96 barely there—does anybody have any suggestion for getting this
back on the table of a national discussion? I have been hearing a lot of brilliant ideas here today that the rest of the country really isn't debating that much.
(Off mike, laughter.)
MR. EDELMAN: If everybody didn't hear that, Sam said nominate John Edwards. That wouldn't be a bad idea. Speak up, speak out, organize, be involved with people who are organizing, insist and pan out around the country to insist—as was just said here, young people have to get in touch with themselves and speak out.
The Center for American Progress—some of you may know—is about to have a poverty taskforce, which Angel Blackwell and I are going to cochair. And we have got a very distinguished
group of people who are going to join us in that work over the next year and we hope at least will make some difference—inserting issues of poverty and race into the political dialogue and the national dialogue generally.
MR. REINGOLD: When we talk about so often, it becomes—it's framed as an issue, a moral issue, one of social justice, which of course it is. It is not just that. The country has an interest in solving this problem that is not frequently perceived. Middleclass taxpayers have an interest in solving this problem. Employers who so frequently get their—baby boomers are going to retire soon. You have so many employers scratching their heads saying, geez, where are my next workers going to come from. Well, that problem might be a little less daunting if we were doing a better job educating our young people, training them, preparing them for the labor force.
I think the broader interest of the country and society—and putting some effort and paying some attention and some resources at this problem I think need to be stressed if we are ever going to take it seriously.
MR. PAGE: Any other input? Well, good.
MR. REINGOLD: Well, you know, as folks who are historians will probably look back at this time. We have been a country so externally directed, and usually that is followed in some historical
period by an internally directed kind of change of pace. And, you know, I live in Southern Indiana and, you know, I have got to say—you know, you go to the local diner and here the folks who are the janitors and the garbage collectors and that sort of thing sit and talk about their livelihoods and the like, and, you know, it is on their minds in part of the country.
So I actually think as—in the next decade, maybe in five years, I am willing to bet that this historical dynamic of looking inward again is going to resonate, especially if wages, particularly for low-skilled folks, continue to stagnate. I think you're going to see a switch but it is still fermenting.
MR. PAGE: On their minds in terms of the direction the country is going, shrinking opportunities—
MR. REINGOLD: Absolutely in terms of just—you know, the challenges of being able to make a living and the fact that they are just having to work harder and get less.
MR. PAGE: Being a native of Southern Ohio, I know what you are saying.
Okay, now I get to choose the last questioner. Who shall step forward? Yes, sir, right here. If we could get a microphone over to this gentleman, the second row.
Q: Hi. Patrick Boyle from Youth Today. Mr. Reingold, I just had a question about the Task Force report. We did cover it when it came out a couple of years ago, and I appreciated what you said
about the youth-serving organizations using it on the Hill. I was wondering, did the White House ever have a reaction to it or did anything ever come of it from the executive branch?
MR. REINGOLD: Well, I don't think that you would have seen a bill passed in the House if there wasn't support from the legislative side at the White House. The—you know, in terms of any kind of more overt external reactions, you know, nothing that is kind of worth talking about, but, I think that it's certainly still a document that is organizing internally a lot of activity, both in the Domestic Policy Council as well as over at the Freedom Corps office and at the Faith-Based office. But I think people are sitting around waiting to see whether or not there is going to actually be a legislative action on it. But, you know, I'm not the right person to answer that question. I have been out of the loop for a couple of years on what is actually going on right now.
MR. PAGE: Well, thank you very much. I promised to get us out of here by 1:30. I'm only typically tardy. But it's been a great program. Let's have a round of applause for our panel and for yourselves. Thank you very much for being with us today.
(Applause.)
(END)
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