These announcements and commitments are inspired by ServiceNation and the broad, bi-partisan coalition of organizations, leaders, and citizens who believe in the power of service to transform America. ServiceNation hopes these announcements and commitments will inspire others to step forward and commit to growing and strengthening the role of service in American life.

If you would like to add your personal or organization's commitment, please do so below. Each week ServiceNation will choose two to highlight on our website.

AARP and Civic Enterprises released a major report this week, "More to Give: Tapping the Talents of the Baby Boomer, Silent and Greatest Generations." While most older Americans (55%) believe they will leave the world in worse condition than they inherited it from their parents, tens of millions of these Americans want to increase their levels of volunteering and do their share. Authored by John Bridgeland, Robert Putnam and Harris Wofford, the report provides a roadmap for how to further engage the longest-living, best-educated, wealthiest, and most highly-skilled generations in our history. AARP Chief Operating Officer Tom Nelson said, "AARP was founded with the motto, "To Serve, Not to Be Served," and we've been engaging volunteers for fifty years. We are putting a high priority on increasing the number and involvement of 50+ volunteers, which will not only keep them active and healthy, but will help meet out country's urgent needs."

Bank of America:

Bank of America has a long-standing commitment to funding leadership, community service projects and civic engagement activities. The hallmark of this commitment is the Student Leader program, a component of the Neighborhood Excellence Initiative, Bank of America’s signature philanthropic program. Through this program, Bank of America selects 225 students from across the U.S. and London who have demonstrated a commitment to community service. The company rewards these students and further fosters their leadership abilities by providing a paid internship at a local nonprofit organization. Additionally, all of the students participate in a week-long, customized civic engagement program in Washington, DC, where they learn more about our government and the value of community and public service. To further demonstrate its commitment to this critical space, Bank of America pledges $20 million over the next four years to community service and civic engagement programs. In addition to extending the Student Leader program, the Bank of America Charitable Foundation will provide funding to organizations including City Year, Big Brothers Big Sisters, Teach for America, Habitat for Humanity, Citizen Schools and several others.

Bentley College and City Year:

Bentley College is proud to commit $1,000,000 in scholarship support over the next five years to the give a year partnership with City Year. Each year as many as 10 Bentley students will receive one-time $20,000 grants as Bentley National Service Scholars, in recognition of their year of volunteer service with City Year. Bentley’s commitment also includes the provision of special internship opportunities for the participating students with leading organizations, non-profit and for-profit. City Year and Bentley will collaborate to train and develop socially responsible business leaders of the future.

Duke University:

Duke University has successfully launched the DukeEngage program, which provides support for Duke undergraduates to pursue an intensive civic engagement effort anywhere in the world, enhanced by educational and mentoring support before, during and after their experience. In 2007, The Duke Endowment and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation each contributed $15 million to start an endowment for the program, which in 2008 made it possible for more than 360 students to serve in more than a dozen countries and throughout the United States. Through its forthcoming global initiatives, Duke will expand on the success of DukeEngage to forge alliances of peace and prosperity through overseas service, and by applying the intellectual resources of a great university to the most pressing international problems of education, economics and the environment.

Goldman Sachs:

In the spring of 2009, Goldman Sachs and the Case Foundation will co-host Leadership in Service, a national leadership summit for non-profit executives. With a focus on capacity building, this daylong summit, held at Goldman Sachs New York offices, will bring together industry leaders for sessions and workshops specifically designed to strengthen a nonprofit organization's growing fiscal, operational and human capital responsibilities. The people of Goldman Sachs will be active participants throughout the day.

The Home Depot Foundation and KaBOOM!:

The Home Depot Foundation announced today that it will continue its 12-year partnership with KaBOOM!, the national nonprofit dedicated to bringing play back into the lives of children. In 2009, KaBOOM! and The Home Depot Foundation will create 57 sustainable play spaces across North America, including three “green” pilot playgrounds built with sustainably-manufactured equipment. In addition to building great places to play, the partnership will focus on creating and sharing sustainable practices for a wide array of volunteer initiatives. These practices will then serve as a green road map to help guide common volunteer projects toward creating a more environmentally friendly work process and end product.

University of Pennsylvania:

Over the next four years, Penn will fund an additional 400 community service opportunities for students to integrate their academic studies with local and global service opportunities. Already, more than forty percent of Penn's 10,000 undergraduate students engage in sustained service under the auspices of a host of signature service programs such as Penn's Fox Leadership Program, Penn Civic House, and Penn's Barbara and Edward Netter Center for Community Partnership. These 400 new opportunities will build on Penn's strong commitment to academically-based community service and will prepare Penn students for service leadership in their professional lives and in their communities. Penn's founder, Benjamin Franklin, would be proud of students' putting theory into practice—and expect no less of higher education.

PricewaterhouseCoopers:

PricewaterhouseCoopers corporate responsibility strategy synthesizes new initiatives with long-standing programs to focus resources in four strategic areas: the marketplace, people, communities, and the environment. A highlight of the firm's commitment is a new benefit that provides all 31,000 PwC employees with 10 paid hours each year - beyond firm sponsored projects - for discretionary community service. PwC and its partners and staff contributed 96,000 staff hours worth an estimated $19 million to hundreds of community projects nationwide during its fiscal year 2008, which ended July 30. The firm also donated more than $30 million to local and national charities during the year.

The President’s Council on Service and Civic Participation and the Corporation for National and Community Service:

The President's Council on Service and Civic Participation together with the Corporation for National and Community Service has challenged corporate America to commit one billion dollars in pro bono services to help build the capacity of the nonprofit sector. To date, 23 corporations have pledged more than $400 millions dollars worth of pro bono and skills-based volunteering from their employees in order to help meet this billion dollar challenge.

Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne:

Secretary of the Interior Dirk Kempthorne announces the first ever federal data on voluntourism. Also known as a volunteer vacation, voluntourism is the concept that combines destination travel with volunteer service. New data from the Corporation for National and Community Service showed that, in 2007, more than 3.7 million Americans volunteered more than 120 miles from their home. Take Pride in America® offers resources for the public lands voluntourist, including assistance in identifying possible volunteer vacations, voluntourism grants through a partnership with Travelocity, open participation in the Toyota-sponsored Voluntour Across America, and national recognition for outstanding voluntourists.

Target:

Since 1946, Target has given 5% of our income to support education, the arts, safe families and communities. Today that equals more than $3 million every week. Our team members and retirees have volunteered millions of hours to community projects. This commitment is part of our legacy. As a new chapter in this legacy, Target is launching the Target Volunteers school library makeover program. Part of the ServiceNation call to action, Target volunteers will makeover 23 elementary school libraries and volunteer at more than 350 additional schools in September. The program leverages our team's time and talent by providing pro bono expertise of our design and construction teams to renovate school libraries – giving kids the tools they need to learn, thrive and succeed. We're proud to partner with the Heart of America Foundation and HandsOn Network and will expand the program to over 1,600 stores in 2009.

Teach for America:

Teach For America will double in scale to 12,000 corps members by 2015, reaching more than 750,000 students each day in nearly 50 urban and rural sites. At that point, we will have more than 50,000 corps members and alumni across the country, working from within education and from other sectors to close the gap in educational outcomes that persists between children in low-income communities and their higher income peers.

Tufts University:

Tufts University's commitment is to establish a university-wide Loan Repayment Assistance Program to help graduates working in the nonprofit and public service sectors to pay part of their annual education loan bills. Our commitment will make it possible for more Tufts graduates with education debt to follow their dreams and to become active, engaged citizens from Day One -- to become school teachers or community organizers or to take an entry-level public health position. We believe that Tufts is the first university to apply this approach to all of its degree programs and all of its alumni. We encourage other colleges and universities to join us -- to establish loan repayment assistance programs that will lower the serious financial barrier that keeps their alumni from embarking on profit and public sector careers.

Tulane University:

Tulane University is committed to healing New Orleans communities devastated by Hurricane Katrina by leading efforts to redesign the city’s historically underperforming health sector, which funneled the medically underserved to emergency rooms for primary care with scant neighborhood based options for health care. Tulane University will dramatically expand access to high quality, community health care for all New Orleans citizens irrespective of socioeconomic status by building on the successes of own safety-net neighborhood health centers created in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. These patient-centered medical homes will empower communities and bring new resources to build innovative, replicable and sustainable models of community care. These neighborhood centers also will offer after-school, literacy and job training programs -- resources and services critical to rebuilding communities. Our students have the opportunity to work and train in these neighborhood health sites, providing an unprecedented university wide service opportunity all aimed at developing an aware and capable workforce to meet the challenges of low-income populations. Ultimately, we expect to develop a gold standard community health care and training model that can be successfully implemented by other universities in urban and rural settings.

ServiceNation Policy Agenda:

Today, the ServiceNation Coalition released a policy agenda—Strategies for Becoming a Nation of Service—that was developed through an open process that included more than 100 organizations representing millions of Americans. A core working-group of 40 volunteers, representing the entire political spectrum and many decades of experience in developing national, state and local policies on service, worked together over nine months to shape this agenda into a broad vision for taking service to scale in America by 2020 and releasing citizen energy and idealism to help solve our most pressing challenges. We hope that Strategies for Becoming a Nation of Service will spark a broader conversation about the role of service in America, and we encourage those who believe in citizen service to join our coalition and work toward the day when meaningful opportunities for every American—from early childhood through retirement—are both a common expectation and common experience.

ServiceNation Day of Action:

ServiceNation announces that it has confirmed more than 2,500 events nation-wide—and in all 50 states—for the ServiceNation Day of Action on September 27th, 2008. The Day of Action is a grassroots-led demonstration of the impact that service has upon our country and the power of citizens to create large-scale change. Day of Action events are organized by ServiceNation coalition partner organizations and individual citizens across the country. Anyone can register an event on our big map simply by going onto www.servicenation.org and following the links for the Day of Action. The Day of Action will be on September 27th for three key reasons: it’s the day after the first Presidential debate; it’s the day after Congress adjourns for recess so congressional members are likely to be in home districts; and it is National Public Lands Day, a day to highlight and celebrate our public green spaces across the country. With 2,500 events (and growing!), the ServiceNation Day of Action on September 27th, 2008 will be a day that unites citizens and leaders at the grassroots level across the country in a powerful display of service, and a demonstration of the impact that is possible when citizen energy is unleashed in our communities nationwide.