Arkansas Democrat-Gazette: Bill Clinton joins summit in Little Rock marking AmeriCorps milestone

This article originally appeared in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette on October 27, 2023. 

Domingo Morales grew up knowing only inner-city poverty.

Not long after entering adulthood, he realized his life was in a spin cycle — working menial jobs to keep food on the table for him and his family – and he wanted something different.

Then one day, Morales read the words on an AmeriCorps recruitment flyer posted on the elevator door inside his New York City apartment building, and did what the flyer urged him to do — sign up and become a part of a national service group that offered a pathway to a life of greater fulfillment and impact.

On Thursday, while on a stage with five other people — including former President Bill Clinton, who signed the law 30 years ago that launched AmeriCorps — Morales told his story of how his service altered his life’s trajectory.

“AmeriCorps was the army I could get into,” he said. “There, I could fight for people.”

Clinton moderated a panel discussion in Little Rock with a group of AmeriCorps alumni that included Morales, who is the founder of Compost Power, a company that builds composting sites across New York City.

The other panelists who joined Morales and Clinton on stage were U.S. Air Force Col. Rebecca Lange; Leroy “J.R.” LaPlante, the provost of South Dakota State University and associate vice president for its Wokini Initiative aimed at supporting American Indian students and partnerships with tribal organizations; Kyle Kimball, vice president of government relations and community engagement at New York University; and AnnMaura Connolly, president of the advocacy group Voices for National Service. All of them talked about how their AmeriCorps membership changed their lives for the better.

Kimball said that not a day goes by in which he doesn’t think about his start with AmeriCorps 29 years ago. He called it a “transformative experience” that has been a major part of his “professional and personal journey.”

Throughout the day Thursday, the Clinton Presidential Center hosted “AmeriCorps: 30 Years Forward, a Summit for the Future of National Service,” which featured several panel discussions and speeches from AmeriCorps supporters and alumni.

The event marked the 30th anniversary of Clinton signing the National and Community Trust Act of 1993, the law that created AmeriCorps.

Clinton moderated the first panel, during which he said signing the law that launched AmeriCorps was “one of the happiest days of my life.”

Since the first class of AmeriCorps members was formed in 1994, nearly 1.3 million Americans have logged 1.8 billion service hours in more than 36,000 communities through the program, according to summit organizers.

Stephanie Streett, executive director of the Clinton Foundation, said participants have earned more than $4 billion to help pay for their college education or pay back student loans.

Lange talked about how she had to figure out how to enroll in college because her parents didn’t have the financial means to help her. AmeriCorps got her “foot in the door” at the University of Colorado, where she took part in the Air Force ROTC program.

Her life today would be vastly different had it not been for AmeriCorps, she said.

She learned about the program when she watched Clinton mention it during one of his State of the Union speeches.

“That was my ah-ha moment,” Lange said.

That was when she figured out how she could attend and pay for college.

She got more than she bargained for. AmeriCorps imbued her with the love of service, which has carried her through a military career, Lange said.

Kimball was an undergraduate at Harvard University when he decided to take a year off and join AmeriCorps.

In spite of being at a famously prestigious university, he was feeling aimless and wanted to immerse himself in something that gave him the assurance that he was making a difference in the world.

During the 1990s, tens of thousands of people were being ravaged by the AIDS virus, and the University of Alabama at Birmingham was on the cutting edge of treatment.

A lot of people, including those stricken with AIDS, moved to Birmingham, Ala., with the hope they could be treated or even saved.

As a result, there was a concentration of patients carrying a deadly disease and a need for volunteers to provide hospice care for many of them.

That’s when AmeriCorps volunteers, like Kimball, stepped in.

They all came from various backgrounds — rich, poor, American-born, foreign-born.

Differences didn’t matter, Kimball said. All that mattered was helping the sick.

“We were all so focused on the goal and the mission,” he said. “We were all there by choice. That experience brought us together.”

Clinton took a few moments after Kimball spoke to talk about his firsthand experiences dealing with the AIDS crisis while he was Arkansas governor and later president.

He said people knew so little about AIDS and were so scared of it that AIDS patients and their families couldn’t find burial grounds. He told one story about a patient whose own mother refused to see him on his deathbed because she was swallowed up by the misguided hysteria that AIDS was easily infectious.

A random woman at the hospital heard one of the doctors tell that patient that his mother wasn’t coming. That moved the woman — a conservative Christian — to walk to that man’s hospital bed and hold his hand while he took his last breaths, Clinton said.

After telling that story, Clinton segued to a theme that he often leans on when he gives public speeches — that people with differing political, cultural and religious backgrounds need to come together more for the greater good.

That sense of unity and compromise seems to be felt less often today, he said.

People need to work harder, and keep scratching, “to find their common humanity,” Clinton told the crowd.

The story that generated the biggest response came from Morales, who admitted to not only being a city-slicker but a “germophobe” who hated the thought of working on a farm. But farm work was what AmeriCorps pushed him into.

“I thought, ‘I’m going to die,'” he said.

In the end, he fell in love with being outside, digging in the dirt with his bare hands and learning all he could about the very things that scared him the most – insects and microbes.

“I fell in love with biology and the chemical process,” he said. “I fell in love with the germs that previously scared me. I went from being a germaphobe to eating random things in the field.”

His life and career are now centered on growing healthy foods in places where crops aren’t plentiful.

Clinton thanked the panel members and said that if all people thought, talked and acted the way they did, more than half of the world’s problems would evaporate.

It made him ponder whether AmeriCorps and its benefits were ever emphasized enough.

“We should’ve done even more,” Clinton said, “but I think we can now.”

CORRECTION: A previous version of this story incorrectly stated the year the National and Community Trust Act was enacted.