Mainers Active in Public Service, But Nationwide Need is Great
By Dana Razzano
WASHINGTON – A new study indicates the public service workforce is nearing a “crisis” level nationally, but public servants in Maine have been contributing more than their share.
Three Maine colleges are among the top in the nation when it comes to the number of graduates who join the Peace Corp and enrollment at the University of Maine’s ROTC program is at a 10-year high. Despite the state’s strong involvement in public service, a newly formed organization is working to address the national need for government workers.
“There is a true crisis in the public workforce,” said Max Stier, president of the Partnership for Public Service, an organization launched on Oct. 23 that is focusing its efforts on recruiting new talent to public service jobs.
By 2005, over 50 percent of the entire government workforce, including 70 percent of senior-level managers, will be eligible to retire, said Stier. “Sept. 11 made people appreciate government and federal workers more, but people still aren’t interested in becoming public servants,” he said.
The organization is a nonprofit, non-partisan research, education, and lobbying group, created and funded by Connecticut businessman Sam Heyman, who has pledged $25 million to help government agencies address the problem of their shrinking workforce by assisting with the recruitment of highly skilled workers and improving their retention rates.
According to a survey commissioned by the Partnership for Public Service and the Council for Excellence in Government, only one in six college-educated workers expressed significant interest in working for the federal government and 10 percent of recent Phi Beta Kappa graduates from universities rate the government as a first choice for employment.
“Because the work is so critical, and we are seeing that more than ever after Sept. 11, we really do the need to have the best and brightest heading up [government] organizations, said Patricia McGinnis, president and CEO for the Council for Excellence in Government and a Partnership for Public Service board member.
Despite the slump for public servants nationally, Mainers have been contributing their share. Colby College in Waterville is ranked third nationally among the Top 10 Small Colleges and Universities (under 5,000 undergrads) for having alumni Peace Corps volunteers. The school has 21active alumni volunteers for 2001. Two other Maine schools, Bowdoin College and Bates College, rank eighth on the list with 15 alumni each in the Peace Corp this year.
Colby College attributes its high level of Peace Corps involvement to the “international dimension of the undergraduate experience,” said Steve Collins, the director of communications for Colby. “More than two-thirds of students will spend at least a semester abroad.” Along with the Colby Volunteer Center encouraging students to assist others, Collins said the participation of alumni in the Peace Corp. is part of a larger context of the way children are brought up today. He said volunteerism is more strongly encouraged than it was among past generations.
Statewide, 1,359 Mainers have joined the Peace Corps since it was founded in 1961 and this year there are 83 Peace Corp volunteers from Maine. The government’s Americorp program runs 36 national service projects in the state and more than 600 individuals participated in 2001.
“[Students] often look at their first job out of Colby as their opportunity to be involved in service activity,” said Cynthia Parker, director of the school’s career services. Parker said the school has a “very active relationship with the Peace Corps” and many students are encouraged to join because they know someone who served in the organization previously.
But it’s not only recent graduates that lend their services to others. Maryalice Crofton, executive director of the Maine Commission for Community Service, said the state’s annual Measure of Growth survey found that 63 percent of adults identify themselves as participants in some kind of volunteer work.
Following Sept. 11, Crofton said so many organizations were flooded with people who wanted to do something after the attacks, that it spurred the birth of a new volunteer program. The program, yet to be named, brings together the efforts of the Maine Association of Non-Profits, the Maine Commission for Community Service and the Maine Philanthropy Center along with numerous print and broadcast media outlets to advertise the need for volunteers and connect residents with volunteer programs locally.
The good intention of these volunteers, however, doesn’t always translate into long-term service.
“More people have been putting their energy into event-based [volunteering],” said Crofton. People are more likely to “carve out one Saturday” than participate in regularly scheduled volunteer programs. The problem this creates, said Crofton, is that there aren’t many volunteers to rely on for doing Meals On Wheels or afternoon tutoring. This phenomenon is indicative of the overall need for full time public servants nationwide.
The Partnership for Public Service hopes to attract more public servants through the passage of new legislation and a media-heavy advertising campaign. “Human Capital” legislation, co-sponsored by Rep. Connie Morella (D-MD) and Sen. George Voinovich (R-Ohio), supports having a human resources officer in every government agency to attract new workers. The partnership hopes legislation will be drafted that would also provide student loan forgiveness to graduates entering into the federal workforce.
Stier attributes the lack of national interest in government service to the government itself, which he said hasn’t been proactive or active in presenting the numerous opportunities available for government employees.
“The No. 1 barrier to [bringing in] young talent, is lack of information or ignorance,” Stier said.
McGinnis, of Council for Excellence in Government, said to break this barrier they would be working with several facets of American culture to improve the government’s image with the public, and hopefully, interest people in working for it. “We are going to be working with producers, directors and writers of television and movies about how government is portrayed,” she said.
This is going to be a long-term campaign, said McGinnis, with changes taking place in the application process for government jobs as well as the overall workplace environment of these agencies. “But I think we can see some measured improvement in the next year.”
Stier said the need for government workers in all fields – engineers, art historians for the Smithsonian, firefighters for the Department of Agriculture, among others – is “greater now than it has been in a long time.” “The federal government performs a huge array of services that very much defines lives,” he said.
Other employees that fall under the label public servant are military personnel. Enrollment in the University of Maine’s ROTC is at a 10 year high with 73 cadets, but the program “didn’t have any spike in recruitment” following the Sept. 11 attacks, said Lt. Col. Charles Forshee who oversees recruitment.
But Forshee said, “cadets report feeling more noticed on campus and are receiving more affirmation from students on campus.”
The importance of government service, Forshee said, is the ability to “do something about the world’s situation,” whether it’s fighting against terrorism or working on a peacekeeping mission.
Recruiting a new group of talent to work as public servants will not only help the government’s diminishing workforce problems, but others as well, said Stier.
“If we do our job right, and other groups do their jobs right, then we’ll have generation of people that are interested in giving back,” he said.
