Obama praises Bush “41” for volunteer initiative

“I have been telling folks that I was focused on this event and I was going to do some thinking about (the Senate race), and I’ll be talking about it shortly,” said Nunn, the CEO of Points of Light, a volunteer service nonprofit organization. “But I wanted to get through this event and focus on this.”

Nunn, the daughter of former Georgia Democratic U.S. Sen. Sam Nunn, is being courted by Democrats for next year’s race to replace U.S. Sen. Saxby Chambliss, a Republican who is retiring. Four big-name Republicans already have committed to a run – with at least one more likely to come – but the Democratic race has been slower to develop as the party seeks to find a consensus nominee. The race is nationally watched, and Republicans attacked Nunn on Monday for “embracing” Obama, even though there were plenty of Republicans at the White House, too, to honor Bush.

Of the Bushes and the Obamas, Nunn told the AJC: “I think they really have a shared common ground in their commitment to service and volunteerism.”

Atlanta Journal-Constitution staff writer Daniel Malloy

President Barack Obama welcomed President George H.W. Bush to the White House on Monday in a salute to public service and to the drive for volunteerism that the 41st president inspired with his “thousand points of light” initiative more than two decades ago.

“We are surely a kinder and gentler nation because of you,” Obama told the elder Bush, who sat in a room filled with his friends and former aides.

The first President Bush — “41,” he often calls himself — came to attend a ceremony Obama was holding to recognize the 5,000th Daily Point of Light Award. The award’s name comes from the description in his 1989 inaugural address of Americans serving each other as “a thousand points of light.”

Thanks to Bush, Obama said, “volunteerism has gone from something that some people do some of the time to something that lots of people do as a regular part of their lives.”

Bush responded briefly, thanking the Obamas for their “wonderful hospitality,” and leaving his son Neil Bush to offer more extended remarks.

In addition to Neil Bush, the former president was joined by his wife, Barbara, the former first lady; and Michelle Nunn, CEO of the Points of Light organization and a possible Democratic Senate candidate from Georgia. She’s the daughter of former Sen. Sam Nunn, D-Ga.

President George W. Bush, the 41st president’s son, did not attend.

Obama and first lady Michelle Obama and the Bushes had lunch in the Red Room before the ceremony.

Obama announced creation of a federal task force to come up with new ways for the public and private sectors to collaborate to support national service as a means of tackling national priorities.

In the past year, the Corporation for National and Community Service, sponsor of the AmeriCorps national service program, launched partnerships with the Federal Emergency Management Agency and the Education Department. The 1,600-member FEMA Corps has the sole mission of responding to disasters. School Turnaround AmeriCorps will send 650 volunteers into low-performing schools this fall to help improve academic achievement, attendance, high school graduation rates, and college and career readiness.

Both presidents share a commitment to volunteerism and service.

Bush, 89, established the Daily Point of Light Award in 1990 while in office. More than 1,000 of the awards were distributed between 1989 and 1993, Bush’s single term as the nation’s 41st president. Through its offices around the country and relationships with nonprofit groups and corporations, the Points of Light organization encourages millions of people to volunteer and recognizes those it says are making a difference.

The recipients of the 5,000th Point of Light Award were Floyd Hammer and Kathy Hamilton, a retired couple and farm owners from Union, Iowa, who created Outreach, a nonprofit organization that delivers free meals to children suffering from hunger in more than 15 countries, including the United States.

They launched the program after a trip to Tanzania, where they visited a volunteer mission to help renovate an HIV/AIDS clinic at a village hospital and saw children dying from malnutrition. The couple’s program has relied on thousands of volunteers to help assemble and distribute more than 232 million free meals to children worldwide, the White House said.

Obama also has made volunteerism a theme of his presidency. In 2009, he signed legislation to more than triple the size of the AmeriCorps program from 75,000 volunteers to 250,000 by 2017. Several times a year, including on the Martin Luther King Jr. federal holiday and before Thanksgiving, Obama and his family help out at area food kitchens and community service projects.