[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.