David Battey, Class of 1985

The list of great moments in the history of the Williams Snack Bar surely includes the one in which you, under the influence of a double chocolate frost, had what you have described as a near out of body experience with the lightening-bolt realization that the long sought topic of your senior thesis would be the design of a new system of volunteerism for youth. To this vision, you quickly applied skills in organization, recruitment, and fund raising so that within two years you had young volunteers at work in your hometown of Kansas City. That program has evolved into the Youth Volunteer Corps of America with fifty-five chapters across the United States and Canada through which diverse groups of eleven to eighteen-year-aids work together to address community needs. Whether tutoring, serving meals, assisting seniors, or creating Web pages they are learning skills in decision making, cooperation, and communication and developing a lifelong ethic of service. This ethic was crystallized by the young person, who after completing a YVC program declared, “If I didn’t give of myself, I wouldn’t know what to do.” Both Business Week and The New York Times have held the Corps up as a model of civic education, which in the past year alone has engaged more than forty thousand young people in more than half a million hours of service. We will let historians some day apportion the credit among your sense of mission; the guidance of your thesis advisor, Mac Brown; and the effect of that chocolate but we certainly celebrate today, on behalf of all who have benefited from the Youth Volunteer Corps, the fact that your Snack Bar dream has become such a clear reality.