    [Public Papers of the Presidents of the United States: William J. Clinton (1997, Book I)]
    [April 28, 1997]
    [Pages 508-509]
    [From the U.S. Government Publishing Office www.gpo.gov]

    Remarks at the Presidents' Summit for America's Future
    Luncheon in Philadelphia
    April 28, 1997

        Thank you, ladies and gentlemen. I've had a great time here, and I
    want to thank all of you for being so patient while I lumber around with
    my temporary disability. Can you imagine how bad I would look if I had
    actually jumped out of an airplane? [Laughter] I'm looking forward to
    not being President. You know, if I can jump out of an airplane and look
    like Jerry Ford does in 30 years, I'll be one happy guy. That's a great
    thing.
        I want to thank President Bush for all of the people that he
    mentioned and thanking them--I join with that--and especially Ray
    Chambers and Stuart Shapiro and General Powell for their extraordinary
    efforts. I'd also like to thank the leaders of the corporate and
    nonprofit sector who are here today, including my longtime friend
    Millard Fuller, Bob Allen, Doug Watson, and Gerry Greenwald and so many
    others. We've all been washed in the warm glow of lots of words and
    music and the powerful examples. And I must say, I will live with the
    stories that the young people told last night at that event for the rest
    of my life.
        I would just like to make two points here, because I really want
    this to make a difference. I think there are two keys to whether, when
    people look back on this moment 10 years from now, they say, ``These
    people really did something special; they changed America.'' The first
    is what General Powell and Ray Chambers and others are doing with the
    followup on America's Promise. And everything you can do to support
    that, you should, making those promises. We're going to try to do our
    part.
        I said yesterday that the Department of Defense will tutor or teach
    a million children in the next 4 years. The Department of Transportation
    and the contractors with whom it works have committed to reach another
    million kids with tutoring or teaching. We are going to go from 1,500 to
    2,000 schools we've adopted. Going back to what Eli said--we'll have
    more to say about that later--we're going to hire 10,000 people to move
    from welfare to work so they can support their children better. We're
    going to try to extend health insurance to 5 million kids and try to at
    least make the first 2 years of college as available as a high school
    education is today. We'll try to do our part, and we'll try to do it in
    very personal ways.
        The last Christmas and the last birthday I had were some of the best
    I ever had in my life because my gift from the White House staff was a
    notebook of personal pledges for community service. My Secret Service
    detail adopted

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    a junior high school in Washington, DC, where those young people are
    getting the role models that they need. We'll try to do our part.
        And the followup--one reason I wanted to do this summit so badly was
    that I thought we could find a completely nonpartisan way to embrace
    this issue, and then I knew I could trust Colin Powell and Ray Chambers
    and the others to do good followup. That's the first thing.
        Here's the second thing. Let me just tell you a brief story. Before
    I came to Philadelphia, I asked a man in Washington, DC, named Kent
    Amos, a lot of you know, to come in and see me. I met him when my friend
    Ron Brown died in a plane crash, and he was Ron's next-door neighbor.
    And a lot of you know he and his wife, Carmen, kind of got into this
    volunteer work by just taking in kids that their children went to school
    with who came from dysfunctional backgrounds. And they wound up having
    20 or more at a time that were, in effect, living with them. And now
    he's tried to take the model that he--I thought he perfected in his own
    home and kind of took it into neighborhoods and communities.
        But I asked him to come see me. And I said, ``What do you want me to
    do now? What can I do to help you, and what do we have to do now?'' He
    said, ``Go to that summit and tell them the breakout sessions are the
    most important thing that's going to occur, because unless every
    community gets organized, community by community, we will not have the
    maximum benefit of this, because essentially the problem is we have an
    unacceptably high percentage of people living in dysfunctional
    environments. And you can do a number of good things for them
    sporadically, but until you completely change the environment, we won't
    have the success rate we need.''
        That's essentially what General Powell said in our last conversation
    before he took his uniform off, that all the troubled young people that
    he knew who came into the military had gone from whatever dysfunctional
    environment they had into a completely functional environment. Now, you
    can't guarantee that, any of you individually. But collectively,
    community by community, we can. So, in that sense, the Governors and the
    mayors who are here are profoundly important people. And the people who
    run community-based nonprofits are important people.
        But the only other thing I would say is, let's really pay attention
    to these breakout sessions, and let's promise ourselves that in addition
    to running up the numbers that we all promised--and since I've got a big
    organization, I can promise big numbers--but we're, honest to goodness,
    going to promise ourselves that we will try to change the culture in
    these communities from dysfunctional environments to functional ones.
    You saw these kids. They're great. They're going to make it. They're
    going to do just fine if we just give them what they need in a
    systematic way, place by place.
        Thank you, and God bless you all.

    Note: The President spoke at 1:05 p.m. in the Ballroom at the Benjamin
    Franklin Hotel. In his remarks, he referred to Raymond G. Chambers,
    cofounder, Points of Light Foundation; Stuart Shapiro, president and
    chief executive officer, Presidents' Summit for America's Future; Gen.
    Colin L. Powell, USA (ret.), chairman, America's Promise--the Alliance
    for Youth; Eli Segal, Board of Directors member, Corporation for
    National and Community Service; Millard Fuller, founder, Habitat for
    Humanity; Robert E. Allen, chairman and chief executive officer, AT&T
    Corp.; Douglas Watson, president and chief executive officer, Novartis
    Corp.; and Gerald Greenwald, chief executive officer, United Airlines.