Political Quotes

“I want to commend Chairman Miller, Chairwoman McCarthy, and others for putting together the GIVE Act, which reauthorizes the National Community Service Act of 1990 and the Domestic Volunteer Service Act of 1973. This act supports the Nation's priorities in a number of important areas. Mr. Speaker, Americans are hungry to serve. Last year, 62 million Americans contributed 8.2 billion hours of volunteer service. And the question is, are we ready to absorb that energy? Do we have a way of capturing it and channeling it? What the GIVE Act does is it creates that infrastructure; and that's why we need it, because if we don't have an infrastructure to respond to that volunteer energy, then people will go away even more disillusioned. So the GIVE Act steps up and does exactly the right thing. And here are some of the things that it does: it sets a goal of 100,000 AmeriCorps volunteers by 2012 putting 25,000 additional volunteers into our communities; it engages youth through a summer of service; and it creates a new energy conservation corps.”