Director's Welcome
Message from the Director:
An appreciation of service has long been embedded in American popular culture. Americans have characteristically regarded the voluntary act of serving – one’s God, one’s country, one’s fellow citizens, even one’s neighbors – to be the highest sort of interpersonal, prosocial activity one can undertake.
The French author Alexis de Tocqueville admired the Americans he met on his travels in the 1830s for what we would call their attachment to community service and their capacity to associate voluntarily in collective endeavors. “The health of a democratic society may be measured by the quality of functions performed by private citizens,” he concluded.
150 years later later Michael Dukakis, the Greek-American governor of Massachusetts who ran in 1988 for President of the United States, rallied his young supporters “There is nothing you can do in this world more fulfilling and more satisfying than giving of yourself to others, and making a contribution to your community and your state or your nation and your fellow citizens…”
Nowadays many people are ambivalent about the ideals of service and participation and engagement. Who among us has not felt of late as if they were bowling alone?
We are tempted to respond as did Michael Dukakis when he first visited Thessaloniki in 1999, when he exclaimed, “Surprise! This is a great time for public service.” There are signs moreover that we may be witnessing the advent of a new golden age of voluntarism and public service initiatives right here in Greece, where, fittingly, a sophisticated notion of public service was first articulated more than two millennia ago. (The word used then was philanthrōpía.)
If so, then this is the place we want to be, and the place we invite you to be.
Join us, then, as we showcase inspiring new approaches to public service programming, as we share the many lessons we continue to learn from our local peers. As Governor Dukakis might have put it, is there any greater gesture of service than listening carefully to one another?
David Wisner, Executive Director
