 for National and Community Service, a federal agency that administers AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, the Social Innovation Fund, and other programs. Under her leadership, the corporation has launched new partnerships, including FEMA Corps, School Turnaround Corps, STEM AmeriCorps, That Success AmeriCorps, and Financial Opportunity Corps. She's also increased the agency's focus on veterans and military families. Can folks hear me? Yeah. And she's led National Service Response to a number of severe disasters. Spencer's management career spans 30 years and includes leadership roles in governments, non-profits, and the private sector. Among her many honors, she has received the prestigious Governor's Award from Governor Jeb Bush for her disaster work. Spencer holds a bachelor's degree in fine arts and communications from Valdosta State University. Please welcome me in joining Wendy Spencer. All right. Good morning, everyone. Thank you, Holly. I appreciate it. Thank you so much. I appreciate it. Okay, ladies, Holly mentioned I was confirmed by the Senate. It was unanimous, thank goodness, because that would have been awkward, right? But here's what's really good, ladies. First woman as the CEO for this job, ever. What? Yes! Thank you, guys, for clapping. I appreciate that. I really appreciate being here. So my career, she mentioned 30 years, because I want to fit in to be a millennial. I started when I was one, so that still keeps me in the millennial age group at 31. So I'm really pleased to be a part of that. Who is Corporation of National Community Service? She mentioned a couple of our programs. So 75,000 American members serving today. Today, all across the country. 300,000 senior club volunteers and senior companion at RSVP and foster grandparents serving today, all across America. And then we sponsor Grades of Service, like 9-11 Day of Service, and Dr. Martin Luther King Day of Service as well. If you take the volunteers serving alongside the American members and the senior club volunteers, and our Days of Service, we're engaging about five million people in service across America. Now, today we are serving in 60,000 locations across America. 60,000 locations, undepicated schools, healthcare facilities, parks. So what that means is just about any place I step out of your door, I can holler out, AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, are you out there? And someone would just holler about randomly, like, yeah, I'm out here. So I'm gonna give this a try. It works just about everywhere I've ever been. In fact, I'm warning 100% now. If there's any alarms on AmeriCorps members, AmeriCorps, are you out there? There are some members on arms. Whoo! I'm so happy you all did not make a fool of me because I didn't say, well, God, I'm back in 100% for that. I'm really pleased that Citi Foundation, one of our friends here, Rosemary's here and a brandy spoke to you yesterday, is one of the lead sponsors. And we really compliment what Citi is doing for millennials. They really care about lifting up this age group and making sure that they are set up for success in life. And Rosemary and I have worked very closely together and we're very proud that Citi we announced recently joined a partnership for us. It's a $10 million investment to engage 225 AmeriCorps VISTAs in 10 major cities where Citi has a big presence. They recruit volunteers to serve alongside those AmeriCorps VISTAs over the next three years and here's the goal. To recruit and engage 25,000 young millennials who are out of work, maybe out of school, not connected in life to a real successful path and to get them engaged in service, teach them things about the community and help connect them to resources that will get them on a path for success. So big hand for Citi and what you're doing with that. Thank you guys very, very much, very good. All right, so I figure if you can't join them, if you can't beat them, try to join them and get in the game with millennials. So I am trying to be, pretend to be a millennial. I now am a big Twitter person. I tweet, so follow me, WendyCNCS. I'm on Facebook, I know y'all are moving out of Facebook but I'm loving Facebook. I'm not doing that much with Instagram but I'm doing a little bit. I do now know what a thunder clap is. Congratulations for that. Because we just had our 20th anniversary for AmeriCorps and for our agency and here's how we celebrated. On September 12th, the very day, 20 years to the day that President Clinton inducted the first AmeriCorps member, 20 years ago in 1994, we had another, a new induction ceremony for all 75,000 AmeriCorps members and we invited the alums to participate, the President, President Obama, President Clinton came to the White House, there were 1,000 people in the White House long but in every single state, 50 states, 100 locations, AmeriCorps members and alums gathered together and were inducted at the same moment in time. Pretty cool, huh? 900,000 AmeriCorps alums have graduated since that day. Pretty, pretty neat since 20 years ago. Now, what was made about that is, we'll be with Thunderclap. And at 11 o'clock that morning, we sent out a message, congratulations, AmeriCorps 20th anniversary. We also had President George W. Bush and Laura Bush did a video that was presented in programs across the country. President George H. W. Bush, Senior Bush, participated in a swearing-in ceremony on the lawn of his home in Kinney-Buntport, Maine. So it was great to see this bipartisan support but the Thunderclap was 52 million people and it was the largest Thunderclap of any federal agency and the fourth largest in history. So we're pretty proud of that. So we're getting hip with you, millennials, right? Is that okay? All right. Now, I love the difference that we've had trying to make sure that we're cool. So my son is my coach, millennial son. And he just moved away from mama. He just left and moved from my home in Florida to Denver last week. So here he is on FaceTime because I'm cool and I can do that now. So say hello to the board. Board, say hello. Can I have nothing here you, boy? You say hello. Hey. He says hey. Says hey. This is a group of really smart people, boy. They're much smarter than I am but I'm gonna learn from you and from them. We are, all the adults in the room are learning from the millennials. So I've got that straight. I know exactly what my role is. So are you having fun in Denver? Yeah, it's all having a great time. He's having a great time in Denver. He's working for a company there that's real high tech companies. His degree is from Florida State University, goes to Seminole's and communications, information and technology. So he was really being my guide to being here. So thanks for what I'm gonna sign off now but we're called. It's your second week on the job. Please don't embarrass the family name, all right? All right, see you later. Thanks. All right, so I'm just trying, I'm just trying to, we're trying to use everybody's technology. All right, so a couple of cool facts about millennials that I really like. Millennials are the largest, most diverse generation in the country. That has a lot of advantages, folks. Millennials have either gone to college or most millennials have either gone to college or attending college. That's promising for our future. I observe millennials wanting to make a difference, wanting to have an impact, wanting to be involved in something that they feel like. Now that they're in charge, I think we all kind of at some point in our life want to be in charge. That's not necessarily true, although oftentimes it is. But really just want to make sure that their time is well spent. If they're going to give any money, it's well invested. If they're going to vote, it's going to count. So I think that's something we can take and run with and be successful with. Ryan Brownstein is an editor at The National Journal and I like what he said about the defining characteristics of millennials. He said, they have an impulse towards service. That's a really good thing, folks. An impulse towards service. In fact, we do a study each year called the Volunteering in Civic Life in America. And our study, we do this work very closely with you at Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics, tells us something interesting this year. We'll release a study in a couple of weeks, but I'm going to give you a little sneak preview today. The 18 to 24-year-olds attending college volunteer at a rate through organizations, through organizations formally, at a rate of 25.9%. Now that's a little bit higher than actually the average of American adults, which is right, holding steady around 25%. Here's what's significant about this. Those one-year-olds that are attending college are at that rate, 25.9%. But the ones who are not attending college, the 18 to 24-year-olds, same age group, are volunteering at a rate about 13.8%. Big gap there. The panel that you're going to see in a few minutes after me, I've challenged them to talk about that. What do they think the difference is in those attending college with a high rate of volunteerism and those are not attending college? That's something that we need to look at. And then how should we address that? I see that as an opportunity and a challenge, but how should we address that? What's good about that is more millennials are attending college, so more people are volunteering just to share numbers, so that's a good thing. Now I'm speaking about through formal organizations. When we test Americans about who's helping others, who's helping your neighbors, it's about two thirds of Americans. But this particular stat is around through a formal organization like signed up, they're not just helping your neighbors driving a friend to a doctor's appointment, pitching in for someone who's sick or doing their lawn, but through a formal organization. So park that in the parking lot for something to consider. Here's what we're learning after our 20 years in doing national service work with AmeriCorps and also Senior Corps. We're collaborating better. The problems AmeriCorps is working to address hunger and homelessness and the dropout crisis do not respect neat boundary lines and neither do the solutions. We've increased the collaboration and partnerships between government agencies, nonprofits, the private sector, as I just mentioned, city. We're doing great partnerships with FEMA, Department of Education, we're working with states very closely, governors, mayors, all for a unified strategy to tackle problems and I think we're doing that much better than when we started 20 years ago. The AmeriCorps member experience over 20 years, we've improved on our training, our professional development is stronger, we understand how to make AmeriCorps a very powerful jumpstart to a career and I'm gonna give you some clues and some research about that in a minute as well. Our alumni network now that it's 900,000 strong, that's a movement folks. It's really strong and that helps to strengthen the career pipeline as well and they're very focused on that. I don't have the exact statistic but I can share with you that in all likelihood about 70% of our 75,000 AmeriCorps members serving today are under the age of 30 or certainly under the age of 35. So it's strong, strong leaning towards millennials. We thought we had more impact focused. It's very important. So you're hearing a couple themes here, right? You're hearing about the individuals supported. We're collaborating better for higher impact. We're measuring this now. We have performance measures in our programs. We're collecting data, we're evaluating it. We're selecting grantees who can bring on AmeriCorps members based on evidence oftentimes. So we're really looking for strong programs and evidence what works and also where there are our needs and communities. But this has been very different now when we started 20 years ago, we were accepting applications through something called a fax machine, F-A-X. It's the thing, you put a piece of paper in a machine and it's connected to a phone line and you type in the number that you wanted to go to on the other end and it's amazing. Like on the other end, it's printed out, piece of paper comes out and you're standing over there and you could be in another part of the world. It comes out, that's a fax machine. I know we're not using those anymore and you don't know what that is but that's actually how we communicated and how applications were submitted 20 years ago. And we were doing email, no Facebook, no Instagram, no Thunderclap, certainly no FaceTime with your son. So we really changed a lot. All for the, for I consider the better, three days we changed. We're using technology to increase our efficiencies across programs. We're using it to connect to members and we're using to actually enhance the service experience. Here's a great example. We have a new partnership with FEMA where FEMA was impressed with AmeriCorps members who were serving in disaster several years ago. We had the nation's most frequent federally declared disasters several years ago. At one time there was 17 federal declared disasters going on at the same time across the country in the summer. The FEMA administrators were witnessing AmeriCorps members across the nation responding. We have planned programs and we have others who are cross-train who can stop their general work, let's say as a tutor and they can go and respond in disasters. And they were doing this very successfully across the country and FEMA said we want some of this. We want some of this ingenuity, these 18 and 24 year olds. In this particular case they were observing our NCCC program which is 18 and 24 year olds in our five campuses across the country. And they said, tell you what we'll do. We will fund all of the underwrite, all of the program operations and the college scholarships that the FEMA, that the AmeriCorps members get when they graduate if you will let us enroll up to as many as 1600 AmeriCorps members in a program we'll call FEMA Corps. So we stood that up just in time for Hurricane Sandy. We had just finished our training for 400 FEMA Corps members and deployed them to Hurricane Sandy and New Jersey and New York and throughout the entire region. Here's what happened as a result of integrating a lot of seasoned FEMA professionals with 18 to 24 year olds. They were going door to door as community resource volunteers and passing out paper information to information telling them, giving them advice of where they could go sign up for services to something called a DRC, Disaster Recovery Center which is really strange if you're in a community. You don't know what a DRC is. It sounds kind of weird. You don't have, maybe your transportation has been hampered. You don't have power yet. You're asking these people, how am I gonna get there? I don't have any transportation. I don't wanna go there. I don't understand these people. This is foreign to me. So the FEMA Corps members went back to the offices and they said, you know, we've got these iPads that you all have issued us. And this is all technology. People are actually walking in the door and they're signing up for their services that they're eligible for. Why can't we just take the iPad door to door and sign them up while we're walking door to door or maybe even go to a grocery store where they're gathering or maybe a house of faith or somewhere where people are gathering that are in the impacted area. We're an idea. FEMA embraced it. The FEMA Corps members implemented it. It's now an official title called a DSAT and another acronym, Disaster Survivor Assistance Team. But how neat is that? Taking the professionalism of an organization that's been in operation for decades and then adding to it the ingenuity of young people who on the fly figured this out. I think it's brilliant. I actually did one of these, signed up, an individual in the Moore, Oklahoma after the tornadoes there in her garage. You know, it was being met. So anyway, so you see why we are thrilled to take the power and ingenuity of millennials and make sure we take advantage of them. I said my time is up so I'm gonna wrap up on a couple stats that I think are important. Here's what we learned about volunteerism. If you are unemployed and looking for work, and this is all age groups, and you volunteer, you increase the likelihood of gaining a job by 27%. Pretty amazing. Never before we had this kind of statistic. This is a pool of 85,000 people are in this pool. It's data over 10 years working with the Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. Very good research. If you live in a rural community and you're unemployed looking for work, the likelihood of you getting a job jumps up to 55%. You can imagine the difference there. Rural community, fewer jobs, more people competing for them. So you need an advantage. And volunteering connects you to people. You gain skills, you have a network. You're not at home alone. You're expanding your social networks by being out and about and volunteering. So I don't just make a plea to millennials that the only reason you should volunteer is to get a job because I think you should care about your community as well and volunteer for those altruistic reasons. But I'm shameless. I don't mind using that as a hook. I really don't because I want more people, especially millennials, engaged in nonprofit organizations in faith community, in schools, in the public sector where we need support. And I want your ideas. And I want your energy. Remember, I still want to be you. So I really think there's some magic there where you blend the ingenuity and creativity of millennials with seasoned professionals in a setting, in a volunteer setting and gaining all these experiences are very, very valuable. So I think we ought to, I want your help in encouraging people to volunteer of all ages, but particular millennials. There is a benefit personally to you. We know now through our research, but I think that employers are going to value you as well. In fact, we just announced at the White House two weeks ago the Employers of National Service Initiative where we're asking employers to value AmeriCorps members, Peace Corps members, those who have graduated from these programs and put maybe in your advertisement, list in your job posting alumni of Peace Corps and AmeriCorps encouraged to apply or maybe even put a checkbox on the application. Have you served in AmeriCorps or Peace Corps? Please describe your experience. Anyone take a step further, maybe even give them a little bit of a preference and interview them. So there's lots of ways that we can help millennials help themselves and give them onto a great pathways for success all while making our country a better nation. Thanks so much for allowing me to connect with you. I appreciate the opportunity to speak with you. Go millennials, you're the future. Thank you so much. Thank you.