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National and state service programs such as AmeriCorps, YouthBuild and youth conservation corps provide a variety of socially useful activities: tutoring children, building affordable housing, assisting with disaster response, maintaining public infrastructure and restoring the environment. A closer look of some of these programs underscores their value.

The AmeriCorps National Service Program, established by the Clinton administration, provides full- and part-time community service opportunities to individuals in education, public safety, the environment and human needs. AmeriCorps helps volunteers even more than the communities they serve. For one participant, her 10-month term at a health center in Boston, working with the Latino community, gave her the opportunity to live in a new city while furthering her language skills. It also taught her how to work in a professional setting, learn more about social systems in the United States, and discover what it's like to do social work.

Clive Belfield, a professor of economics at Queens College, City University of New York, notes that studies of AmeriCorps have found a significant upgrading of skills and emotional well-being, as well as gains in civic engagement and improvements in community infrastructure. For youth, there are substantial benefits from gains in self-worth and from behavioral change, including lower delinquency and improved health status.

National service has also been associated with lower criminal activity. A cost-benefit analysis of AmeriCorps programs found that for each $1 spent, taxpayers receive a return of more than $2 in the form of increased tax revenues and productivity. The social benefits are even greater, with a return of more than 3.5 times the cost.

Remember President Franklin D. Roosevelt and the creation of the Civilian Conservation Corps, which put Americans left jobless by the Great Depression into community service projects building bridges and highways and helping to establish the U.S. national park system? The program employed more than 3 million people until the onset of World War II. The Roosevelt administration also created the Works Progress Administration in 1935, offering jobs to more than 3.4 million unemployed by the next year.

Today, YouthBuild, a nonprofit organization, provides education, counseling, leadership skills and job skills to unemployed young American adults between ages 16 and 24, generally high school dropouts. Students learn the construction trade by building housing for low-income people in their own communities.

In New Hampshire, Senior Corps volunteers are engaged at more than 200 locations across the state, working in schools, food banks, homeless shelters, health clinics, youth centers, veterans facilities and other nonprofit and faith-based organizations. Participants showed gains in health (physical and psychological), self-esteem, life satisfaction and civic participation.

There were also gains in financial security from expanded employment opportunities subsequent to service. Communities, meanwhile, gained from improvements in local services -- most notably in schools, as many seniors provide tutoring and educational assistance.

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