Obama joins Bush in announcing service initiative

WASHINGTON, July 16 -- President Barack Obama hosted former President George H.W. Bush at the White House Monday to honor the winners of 5000th Daily Point of Light Award founded by the former president to highlight acts of volunteerism.

“Thanks to those programs and others like them, volunteerism has gone from being what some people do some of the time to what many people do,” Obama said.

Points of Light was named after a line from Bush’s 1989 inaugural address in which he referred to the need for volunteers to launch “a thousand points of light.” He created a foundation to continue the daily awards.

Monday’s winners, Floyd Hammer and Kathy Hamilton of Union, Iowa, were presented with their award by Obama and Bush together. The former farm owners created a nonprofit program in Tanzania that has fed 233 million hungry children.

Bush made volunteerism a cornerstone of his presidency and called it the “antidote” to societal ills, according to his son, Neil Bush, chairman of the Points of Light Foundation.

“’If I can leave but one legacy in this country, it would be a return to a moral compass that must guide America into the next century,’” Bush recalled his father saying.

First Lady Michelle Obama and former First Lady Barbara Bush also were on hand for the ceremony.

The younger Bush joked that the elderly Bush, who was in a wheelchair but appeared healthy, had upped his fashion game with a pair of red and white striped socks peeking from the bottom hem of his pants.

Before the awards ceremony, Obama announced the appointment of a task force to create a national volunteer corps whose members would improve schools and provide emergency response teams for natural disasters that would be headed by Wendy Spencer, CEO of the Corporation for National and Community Service.

“Our country is a better and stronger force for good in the world because -- more and more -- we are a people that serve,” Obama said.

“Service is not a Democratic value or a Republican value. It’s a core part of being an American.”