and training as might be determined to be desirable. The bill would constitute a "blank check" to the administrator to assign such workers for virtually any purpose and to virtually any person he, in his discretion, might decide.. We therefore respectfully recommend that S. 1321 not be approved..

PREPARED STATEMENT OF NATIONAL COUNCIL OF JEWISH WOMEN, INC.

The National Council of Jewish Women, a voluntary organization with membership of 123,000 in 329 affiliated local units is happy to testify in support of the National Service Corps. We have a long history of providing help through appropriate volunteer services to the less fortunate members of the community—the sick, elderly, children with special needs.

At our biennial convention last March, our delegates adopted the following resolution:

"The National Service Program aims to mobilize skill, commitment and intelligence throughout America for voluntary services to meet urgent human needs. The National Council of Jewish Women, whose voluntary services bring its members into daily contact with the health, welfare, and educational problems. facing millions of families in this country, applauds this purpose. Our organization's community knowledge and experience can therefore be of value and is. available to the National Service Program.

"We support the National Service Program because we are confident it will stimulate the recruitment of volunteers in community services, will heighten public interest in meeting the needs of underprivileged groups, and will function in cooperation with the established network of health and welfare services now sponsored by both public and private agencies."

We are not in any position to testify to the particular administrative structure proposed in S. 1321. However, because of our experience, we are able to testify to the effectiveness of properly planned and organized volunteer service, and to the need for even greater numbers of volunteers to participate in new and expanded service projects. We are particularly hopeful that the National Service Corps will be able to reach into areas of relatively sparse population where welfare and educational service of all kinds are minimal. We are more than willing to offer the cooperation of our experience and our womanpower to make this program a success.

The National Council of Jewish Women, throughout its 70 years of experience, has seen and helped meet the need for supplementary assistance in many areas of health, education, and welfare. Volunteers-citizens with skills acquired professionally or developed through training—have broadened and deepened the extent of services rendered and have, in innumerable instances, initiated new forms of services lacking in a community. Through demonstration or long-term programs, NCJW has pointed up needs, encouraged community backing, and helped in the attainment of beneficial communitywide projects. At present we estimate that about 25,000 council volunteers are working in various community projects.

Let us tell you about a group of volunteers whose service has stimulated both an increase of professional work and additional voluntary activity. As far back as 1920, council volunteers in one community began visiting patients in mental hospitals-a revolutionary thing, for at that time, mental patients were put away and forgotten. A large scale, planned program grew out of this, operated under hospital auspices. The council women then sought new ways to assist. Working with skilled professionals, they developed recreational and leisure time programs for the patients, taking them to parks, on picnics, or helping them plan and participate in musical activities. Their latest activity is a clothing center where patients can "shop" for clothing in which they will look especially well when going some place special-for entertainment, home for a weekend, or possibly to a job interview prior to discharge. Undertaken as a citywide operation, our volunteers solicited and collected clothing, obtained donations of racks, signs and shelves from stores, and cooperation from cleaners to clean the clothing when needed. Many volunteers sorted and stored the clothing in a room at the hospital. Patients can choose a dress, a suit with the help and friendly advice of the volunteers.

This pattern of volunteer service, of meeting needs as they appear, developing services, and moving on to new programs and activities has been a highly fruitful and successful way of working in our organization. As we understand the

intent of the National Service Corps, a similar pattern is proposed. If it is well planned and administered, it should provide new avenues of service for many other community volunteers outside the corps.

Such a program can enable the young to serve the old, the able to aid the handicapped, the strong to aid the ill, and completing the cycle, the older citizen to help the younger one. Each in his turn may be giver and receiver as service also enriches the lives of the teachers.

Just such an idea is behind the senior service program now being inaugurated by the National Council of Jewish Women. Ours is a plan for volunteer service to enable the elderly-only 6 percent of whom attend gold age clubs and centers to use their lifelong experience and skills in service to the community, and particularly in teaching skills to young people.

It is evident that the skills and resources of the elderly can be of vital importance to the community itself and in meeting human needs. Recognizing this and utilizing their abilities help these older people to feel constructive, and to remain actively contributing members of their communities. Some of our programs will operate as corps-with their own identity-some through volunteer bureaus and others in clubs and centers. The senior service program now taking place in the Brooklyn section's council center for older adults is of particular interest because it is devoted to enabling the elderly to teach their skills to the young. Voluntary efforts to meet critical needs of families and children in the United States are to be encouraged, when initiated by private agencies or as in this case, as the outgrowth of national legislation. We endorse the National Service Corps as set forth in S. 1321.

PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE INDIAN RIGHTS ASSOCIATION, PHILADELPHIA, PA.

At its regular meeting on March 6, 1963, the board of directors of the Indian Rights Association gave further consideration to the proposal for a National Service Corps. It was the sense of the board that a National Service Corps could be of great service to the Indian people.

Technical assistance is one of the important services that can be rendered the Indians in the development of resources which they own or have available to them including the rather new field of recreation for profit. Technical assistance is also urgently needed in such areas as homebuilding, the development of sanitation facilities, in the construction of community buildings and improvements, in health education and in child care.

National Service Corps work could probably be coordinated very helpfully with Youth Conservation Corps projects manned by Indian youth. The possibilities for usefulness of the work of a National Service Corps are endless.

PREPARED STATEMENT OF NATIONAL COUNCIL FOR THE SPANISH SPEAKING, SAN ANTONIO, TEX.

THE NATIONAL SERVICE CORPS-ITS SERVICE NEEDED FOR DISADVANTAGED CITIZENS Society is measured not by what it does for the affluent and strong but by what it makes possible for the poorest and weakest of its members. In partienlar it is judged by what it does to prevent poverty and needless suffering. Those to whom society should direct its efforts may be generally termed as “disadvantaged citizens" because almost without exception they live on the fringes of society and are the recipients of almost no social assistance since they do not relate to the overall community.

Among the disadvantaged persons we find those with cultural problems and educational disabilities which prevent them from becoming useful and productive citizens in our highly competitive society. Among this group are found many minorities living in the United States. While I recognize the problems of various minorities I will, in particular, stress in this statement the problems of the Spanish-speaking minority.

Strangely enough the Spanish-speaking minority is either forgotten or taken for granted and when we speak in areas of civil rights, unemployment, job discrimination, etc., we immediately solidify our thinking only in respect to the Negro and forget that the same applies to other groups, among them the Spanish speaking. In the United States today the Spanish-speaking population is about 8 million, composed mostly of Mexican-Americans, Puerto Ricans, and Cubans.

It is a fast-growing population as it doubled in the past 10 years. This is also a minority which will grow faster than any other minority in the United States because it has the highest natural fertility rate in the United States and is bolstered by the highest in-migration today of any ethnic group in the United States.

The demographic characteristics of the population (housing, employment, education, income, and occupation), when compared to the nonwhites and Anglos, reveal that the Spanish speaking, in general, are less well off than the nonwhites and very much worse off than the Anglos.

The increase of the Spanish-speaking population in the United States during the last 10 years, judging from the persons of Spanish surnames listed in the 1960 census report for the five Southwestern States, is as follows: Arizona increased 51 percent; California, 88 percent; Colorado, 33 percent; New Mexico, 8 percent; and Texas, 37 percent. Moreover, it must be noted that there are at least 5,000 new residents each month arriving from Mexico into the United States and this new immigrant group is in dire need of immediate help and assistance. The new immigrants, almost to a person, have come to the United States because of social and economic oppression in Mexico and they come to the United States, for the most part, without any formal education, with no knowledge of the English language and no concept of the American way of life and how one must survive and exist in our affluent society.

There are people who claim that the Spanish speaking are not industrious or ambitious and do not take to education but these fail to review for themselves the history of this population in the United States. The general situation is this: we find a people who came to this country in the early 1600's and 1700's who established a folk society based on European tradition; who were isolated geographically and, therefore, culturally from the Western civilization; who lived a relatively slow life based on agriculture and the seasons; who had no particular need for education as we know it today; who when conquered were not assisted by the conquerors to make an adjustment into the new society; and who, when forced with the competition of the dominant society, could do little but withdraw into further isolation. When educational facilities were finally established the Spanish-Americans could not be expected to flock to the institutions since essentially these were not an integral part of their culture. Even today, although facilities are generally adequate, the consequences of long historical tradition are evident.

The biggest problem today in the Spanish-speaking community in regard to education is the dropout problem. In the United States, formal education has been considered important for enlightened citizenship and in recent years education has also become the foundation for occupational opportunities and a related social and economic status. Very many reasons, among them cultural factors such as language handicaps and little value placed on educational achievement, low socioeconomic status, inadequate facilities, and a lack of enforcement of the laws by local officers, have constantly contributed to the low educational level of the Spanish speaking. The result has been that over the years Spanish-speaking children have either not attended school or have attended irregularly or have received an inferior education.

To exemplify the problem of education among the Spanish speaking, especially those 25 years of age and over, let me quote the statistics from the 1960 census for Texas: Those with Spanish surnames with 4 years or less of education, 52 percent; those with high school education or more, 11.7 percent; the nonwhite with 4 years education, or less, 23.6 percent; high school or more, 20.9 percent; the Anglo with 4 years or less, 6.3 percent; high school or more, 46.3 percent. You will note from these statistics that more than twice as many Spanishspeaking persons living in Texas, 25 years and older, have less than 4 years of education compared with the total for the nonwhite. Also, you will note that among the nonwhite almost twice as many have a high school education or more compared with those of Spanish surname.

Areas in which the national service program could be used in relation to the Spanish speaking may be summed as follows:

1. Education.-The Spanish speaking have had less than equal opportunity for high educational achievement. They lag behind the nonwhites and the Anglos, regardless of what measure of educational achievement is used.

2. Housing. The Spanish speaking rent more than Anglos, get less for their money, and the houses they live in are more often deteriorated, dilapidated, and overcrowded without basic sanitary facilities. Either voluntarily the Spanish

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speaking live among themselves. The larger the proportion of Spanish speaking in the community the worse their situation appears to be.

3. Employment.-From an analysis of available statistics it appears that on the average the Spanish speaking have lower incomes of the total population and just above or below the nonwhite levels. They also have larger proportions in low status occupations and higher percentages of unemployment than either the nonwhites or Anglos.

4. Justice. People of low social and economic status without purse, power, and pull are disadvantaged before the law. The Spanish speaking fall into this category and for them must be added the dimension of ethnicity.

5. Health. Data in this field is rather meager because many of the Spanish speaking still follow the old customs of health and maintain that the problems of health are a family affair. There is, however, some suggestion of high morbidity rates of tuberculosis and upper respiratory diseases for the population under consideration and infant mortality rates also appear to be higher. All of these conditions appear to be related to the low social and economic status of the Spanish speaking as well as to their housing situation.

6. Cheap labor. The effects of the domestic and foreign agricultural labor system, the commuter worker system in border cities, and the illegal entrance for purposes of employment are among the most serious and depressing. These effects consist of (1) unfair competition for domestic laborers: (2) depression of wages; (3) exploitation of labor; (4) deprivation of civil rights of children; (5) categorical retardation in education; (6) perpetuation of a vicious social system which is detrimental to society. This problem calls for an immediate solution.

With all the interest presently focused on Latin America and the problems of Latin America it would seem that the United States would make some concentrated effort to see to it that the bulk of the Spanish-speaking population in the United States does not continue being termed "second-class citizens” and “disadvantaged citizens." The National Service Corps could well serve as the catalyst which would develop and bring about programs, find solutions, and administer remedies to a situation which has for too long been almost totally neglected. The National Council for the Spanish Speaking strongly urges the passage of the National Service Corps and at the same time pleads that should the national service program become a reality, it will not neglect the many and complex problems of the Spanish speaking.

PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE NATIONAL ASSOCIATION FOR MENTAL HEALTH, INC., PRESENTED BY PHILIP E. RYAN, EXECUTIVE DIRECTOR, JUNE 20, 1963

Hon. HARRISON A. WILLIAMS, JR.,

Chairman, Subcommittee on the National Service Corps,

U.S. Senate, Washington, D.C.

DEAR SENATOR WILLIAMS: In response to your letter of June 18, we are very pleased to submit the following statement expressing the views of the national association on the proposed National Service Corps:

The National Association for Mental Health has long called attention to the shortage of competent manpower as a major bottleneck to better care of the mentally ill. It encourages young people to explore careers in mental health. It also continues to recruit and train volunteers to meet tthe needs of the mentally ill both in hospitals and communities.

The proposed National Service Corps could be an effective device for supplying needed supporting manpower, for giving competent young people an oppor tunity to explore the mental health field as a possible area for life work, and for providing organizational personnel to increase substantially the number of traditional volunteers engaged in hospital and community service.

I hope this information will be helpful to you in the hearings on the National Service Corps bill, S. 1321.

PREPARED STATEMENT OF THE COUNCIL OF THE GOLDEN RING CLUBS OF SENIOR CITIZENS, NEW YORK, N.Y.

This statement is submitted for the record by the Council of Golden Ring Clubs, Mr. Adolph Held, chairman; Mr. Zalmen J. Lichtenstein, executive director: George Orth and John Columbro, board members; in support of proposed National Service Corps (bill S. 1321).

The Golden Ring Council of Senior Citizens enthusiastically supports the grand idea of establishing a National Service Corps (bill S. 1321).

The Golden Ring Council is a national organization consisting of clubs and organizations of elderly people of all walks of life. It is a nonpartisan, nonprofit, voluntary movement. Affiliated with the council are retirees of day centers, trade unions, community centers, church groups, etc.

Our organizations function on the basis of "do-it-yourself" and "pay-as-you-go" by the senior citizens themselves. Starting with everyday local gathering in the neighborhoods and ending with huge undertakings such as senior citizens rallies at Madison Square Garden, all these functions are planned, organized, and carried through by the leadership and membership of the senior citizens.

All the activities of our clubs and the huge affairs are financed by the elderly people themselves. They take pride in the fact that it is their own brain, their own heart, and their own (however meager) pocketbook, that keeps this movement in orbit.

The 17 million senior citizens all over the country can best realize how much more has to be done for the underprivileged. These people have experienced the hardships of life for the last 50 to 75 years. They are the generation of the sweatshops and cold-water flats. The senior citizens have a deep understanding and great devotion to the social values of community service and for helping their fellow citizens.

There could not be a more imaginative idea for harnessing the potential productive energies of the millions of our senior citizens for helping themeselves and their communities than through this concerted endeavor to be implemented by a National Service Corps.

The senior citizens can also be helpful in trying to solve the problems and needs of the younger generation. We dare to state that the communication between the grandparents and grandchildren is a good one, full of affection, love, and understanding. In the devastating problem of juvenile delinquency, the experience and warmth of the elderly people can be used in the battle to eliminate this social malady. Millions of retirees possess valuable educational and technical skills that can be extremely useful in the all-important retraining program to be undertaken by the Government.

There are now millions of retired people in our country and they still expect a long period of living in the autumn of their lives. For many of them, these years are empty ones, devoid of meaning and purpose. This proposed National Service Corps, with its vital community program, could fill those long retirement years with useful activities for themselves and for their fellow citizens.

The Golden Ring Council of Senior Citizens therefore urges Congress to establish the National Service Corps without delay. We say to our Representatives and Senators-give us, the millions of senior citizens-the opportunity for human endeavor, purposeful living in our later years and we will through the National Service Corps make an outstanding contribution to the health and welfare of American society.

PREPARED STATEMENT OF HON. ALBERT D. ROSELLINI, GOVERNOR, State of WASHINGTON, AND CHAIRMAN, CONFERENCE OF GOVERNORS

Mr. Chairman and members of the subcommittee, I am pleased to submit this statement in support of H.R. 5625 (S. 1321), the National Service Corps bill. I consider this bill a call to service-in the most outstanding tradition of our Nation. It is not a charity effort. It does not propose to give money to people in need. It is not simply an attempt to meet these needs by extending the efforts of several professions.

It is a broad citizen effort, and as such, it embodies America's great tradition of volunteer citizen service. It is a bill to highlight such service and dignify it further-offering national attention and support. The National Service Corps is a program to provide a new opportunity for Americans who have the ability and motivation to work with their less fortunate fellows-those who remain outside the mainstream of American life.

This program would constitute a vivid reaffirmation of national purpose. In recent years the great expression of these ideals has been the Peace Corps. The National Service Corps would be another step toward the reassertion of principles so basic to our heritage.

Is there a need for such a program in a nation standard of living? Some say there is no need.

known for its unprecedented Others say that only a very