IN THE NEWS

The state has been written off as a woke wasteland. But it’s still inventing the future on a bunch of frontiers nobody’s talking about. Even if Trump wins, it will remain a golden, global example.

Thursday, October 31, 2024 – By James Fallows
(Excerpt below)

The Next Peace Corps

California’s new rail system is meant to set a model for addressing a fundamental “hardware” problem for the state and much of America. What is the main “software” problem for modern America? Disconnection, loneliness, the withering-away of “social capital,” the conversion of neighborhoods and real communities into mere lodging sites, whose residents have as weak a common bond as guests at a crowded hotel. The idea of an atomized America may be overstated—when my wife, Deb, and I spent several years reporting from smaller-town America through the 2010s, we found enough examples of reconnection and civic-mindedness to have made Alexis de Tocqueville proud. But polls, news accounts, and the hell of national politics all suggest that the problem is real.

The official name for this five-year-old project—a big, sprawling set of programs—is California Volunteers, or CalVolunteers for short. It is already bigger than the entire Peace Corps. Its programs have more applicants than spaces to fill and are limited only by how quickly the state can expand funding. And states across the country are embracing the model, with credit to its California origins.

CalVolunteers falls under the purview of the state’s chief service officer, a new position in the governor’s cabinet that Gavin Newsom established early in his first term. Since the start of the program, its director has been Josh Fryday, who, like his friend Pete Buttigieg, is in his early forties and has similarities in background and role as “chief explainer” and advocate for his programs. Fryday, from the small Bay Area town of Novato, graduated from UC Berkeley and its law school, then served as Navy JAG officer (and handled Guantanamo cases), then returned to Novato and was elected mayor. He was named to Newsom’s cabinet five years ago, at age 38.

Long before Newsom’s arrival as governor, California—like most states—had a variety of public service and volunteer programs under the CalVolunteers label, many of them in partnership with the nationwide AmeriCorps system. Newsom’s innovation was to elevate them to cabinet level in a new department, with more funding, and to make them a personal trademark issue. (His wife, Jennifer Siebel Newsom, plays an active role as honorary chair of CalVolunteers.)

I began to pay serious attention to this new program in the early stages of the pandemic, when it quickly organized ways around the state for volunteers to fill suddenly-emerging needs—for instance, delivering food or medical supplies to people who were quarantined or unable to go out for it, or working in shelters or other crucial facilities that had lost their normal staff.

I had happened to meet Fryday just before the pandemic lockdowns, when I was visiting my Southern California home town and he was launching a tree-planting program for student volunteers there. As the scope of CalVolunteers programs has expanded since then, my wife and I have been to visit more than a dozen CalVolunteers worksites. Teenagers training for new job skills in downtown Oakland and starting urban gardens in places that had been “heat islands.” Young artists in a beaten-down part of Riverside helping to restore and beautify buildings. Grade-school children around the state learning how to plant and tend to trees.

College Corps members commit to spending up to 450 hours on projects in their locality, tutoring and mentoring younger students, assisting in eldercare, working in food banks, doing environmental work, and so on. In return, they earn up to $10,000 toward their college expenses, plus other support from the partner schools themselves, all toward creating a “debt-free path” to a college education. Why $10,000? That’s a typical amount that recipients of Pell Grants, the main federal financial-aid program for college students, provide toward college costs, which often requires their taking out a loan or getting a part-time job. “Ten thousand dollars is a very intentional number,” Fryday told me. “It’s a way to have a debt-free path to an education. It makes the difference between working in a coffee shop to raise the money or serving the community.”

The groups we met were “majority-minority” and in that way representative of the state’s population as a whole. Nearly all said they were the first in their families ever to go to college—and that the financial support and organizational structure of the College Corps had made that step more practical for them. In this third year of operations alone, the College Corps program received 10,000 applications for 3,000 available slots. Fryday’s goal is to have 10,000 graduates of the program by the end of its fourth year. And the number of “partner schools” has expanded from eight the first year to 44 now, ranging from the flagship UC Berkeley campus to small-town community colleges.

“Absolutely, our ambition is to export this,” Newsom told us.

If there’s any program more popular than the College Corps, it would be the California Climate Action Corps, which in its latest cycle had six applicants for each of the 400 spaces it could offer. The people in the program improve waterways, plant native drought-resistant trees, restore marshlands, develop urban gardens, equip homes for fire-resistance. This year its members committed to planting 90,000 trees across the state—the sort of long-term, public-benefit project you would associate with Franklin Roosevelt’s Civilian Conservation Corps.

People who have read about the death of civic culture and the despair of screen-bound young Americans should see and meet some of these corps members. One example of hundreds: Chiena Ty, now 27, came to northern California at age 3 from the Philippines with her parents, who were from Manila and southern China. She graduated from California High School in San Ramon and went to college at UC Riverside. But she was attracted to the Climate Action Corps and the chance to serve back in the Bay Area, near her family.

We met her at the White Pony Express food reclamation site in Contra Costa County, on the east side of the San Francisco Bay. Volunteers ranging from teenagers to retirees spend hours there sorting through expired food from major grocery chains or restaurants and repacking it for food banks, homeless shelters, assisted-living facilities, and other places of need—rather than sending it to a methane-producing landfill. Chiena spent part of each Climate Corps day on the sorting line and part making videos or giving public presentations about the climate consequences of wasted food.

Last year, Deb and I asked the governor why he had put so much emphasis on CalVolunteers. “What are the two driving forces in life?” Newsom responded. “They’re inspiration and desperation, and in this case it was probably the latter.” The worsening polarization of public life made him wonder, he said: “How do we reconcile our differences? How do we soften the edges and tone it down, since divorce is not an option for the country and we have to live together?”

Newsom said that one of his heroes was Sargent Shriver, the brother-in-law of John F. Kennedy, who is best known for leading the Peace Corps through its celebrated founding years in the 1960s. Shriver, like so many American civic and cultural leaders of that era, had been a combat veteran of World War II and was forever affected and inspired by the enforced sense of civic connection through the Depression, New Deal, and wartime years.

“The fact is, we no longer have these widely shared experiences,” Newsom told us, referring to Shriver’s time in uniform. In those days, nearly every family had some direct exposure to military service. Now comparatively few do. The point is not that the US needs more wars or more people in uniform but rather that it has dramatically fewer people routinely exposed to fellow citizens of different backgrounds.

In the summer of 2023, a few weeks after Chiena Ty guided us through the White Pony Express food reclamation site, she introduced another visitor for a look around another Bay Area conservation site: President Joe Biden. This summer, Biden swore in the inaugural class of the American Climate Corps, citing California as an example for the nation. Half a dozen governors have started projects similar to California’s climate corps and college corps in their states: Vermont, Minnesota, New Mexico, Colorado, Iowa, and more, with Republican-led Utah probably next on the list. Kathy Hochul , governor of New York, has explicitly credited CalVolunteers as an inspiration for her new statewide service program. In Maryland, Wes Moore, now in his first term as governor, has launched a new program for volunteer service. “I don’t think we would have been able to do it at this scale if not for the work of California, and other states,” he told me this summer.

Moore is, like Fryday, a young veteran of the “long wars”-era military. He was in the 82nd Airborne in Afghanistan. “I believe that in a time of divisiveness and vitriol, service will save us,” he said. “Service is sticky. If we can serve together we can thrive.”