— which focuses on che critical need to strengthen reading 

 skills. Last year RIF cooperated with the Department of 

 Education in helping kick off the program and in notifying 

 RIF projects about the chance to participate. 



RIF's volunteer force of 202,000 citizens was cited for its 

 role in promoting children's literacy in the 1996 President's 

 Service Awards, which are co-sponsored by the Points of Light 

 Foundation and the Corporation for National Service. The 

 awards are designed to recognize the important role com- 

 munity groups play in helping our country solve its problems. 



RIF's program for Native American children was aug- 

 mented through a grant from the New York Life Foundation 

 and a donation from the estate of the late Louise Seaman Be- 

 chtel (1894— 1985), the noted editor, author, and critic, and the 

 first woman to head the juvenile book department of an 

 American publishing house. 



RIF's Project Open Book program, introduced in 1990 to 

 bring books and reading activities to America's most dispos- 

 sessed children, got a big boost when the Meadows Founda- 

 tion in Houston announced that it would help fund Open 

 Book reading corners across the state of Texas. Thanks to 

 private sector support, RIF has been able to make the lives of 

 children richer with books and fun reading activities in home- 

 less shelters, Salvation Army Centers, prison waiting rooms, 

 and clinics. 



A National RIF Exchange showcased RIF programs reach- 

 ing children in a range of sites, including urban and rural 

 schools, a migrant education program in California, Boys and 

 Girls Clubs in Kansas and Minnesota, statewide RIF 

 programs in Alabama and Indiana, and a library program in 

 Brooklyn that reaches children at 65 sites. 



The coordinator of RIF in Chicago spoke about how her 

 program enlists parents in high crime areas in helping their 

 children learn to read. And the coordinator of Rolling Readers 

 USA talked about how his dedicated corps of 600 volunteers 

 read to more than 30,000 children on a weekly basis at home- 

 less shelters, welfare offices, courts, public housing sites, Title 

 I schools, and Head Start projects throughout Southern 

 California. 



Woodrow Wilson International 

 Center for Scholars 



Charles Blitzer, Director 



The Woodrow Wilson Center was established as the official 

 living memorial to the nation's 28th president and as a place 

 of free intellectual inquiry reflecting the full range of 

 Woodrow Wilson's ideals and concerns. Through an annual 

 fellowship competition, outstanding scholars from around the 



world are invited to the center for extended periods of research 

 and writing. In addition, the center sponsors public meetings, 

 generates publications, and produces broadcast programs that 

 make individual scholarship accessible to policy makers and a 

 broad public. 



Vice-President Al Gore gave a speech in October 1995 on is- 

 sues of critical importance to the Russian-American relation- 

 ship. The presentation was cosponsoted by the center's 

 Kennan Institute for Advanced Russian Studies and the U.S.- 

 Russian Business Council and was held in Washington, D.C., 

 on the eve of President Clinton's summit with Russian Presi- 

 dent Boris Yeltsin. 



In June, a distinguished panel of scholars and policy offi- 

 cials, led by former Speaker of the House Thomas S. Foley and 

 U.S. Senator Carol Moseley-Braun, framed and catalyzed a 

 debate on the future of American foreign policy. The con- 

 ference brought together participants with diverse perspec- 

 tives who made connections across regions and issues, 

 including domestic policy affairs, that are often missed in the 

 fragmented national foreign policy debate. 



The center's Division of United States Studies presented a 

 conference and evening dialogue titled "Presidential Power 

 Revisited." Several of the country's most eminent political 

 scientists examined the politics of leadership and the exercise 

 of presidential power today. 



At the 1996 United Nations Conference on Human Set- 

 tlements (Habitat II) in Istanbul, the center presented its 

 recently published volume, Preparing for the Urban Fu- 

 ture: Global Pressures and Local Forces, which resulted 

 from a 1994 project coordinated by the center and involv- 

 ing the United Nations and the World Bank. Urban 

 specialists from around the world, including practitioners 

 and academics representing a variety of disciplines, con- 

 vened at the center to compile an agenda for cities at the 

 end of the millennium. 



President Clinton appointed center trustee Joseph A. Cari 

 Jr. as vice-chairman of the board, succeeding Dwayne O. 

 Andreas, who served in that capaciry for six years. The Presi- 

 dent also named Stephen Alan Bennett, Columbus, Ohio, and 

 Daniel L. Lamaute, Beverly Hills, California, as trustees. 

 Several distinguished citizens joined the Wilson Council, the 

 center's group of private-sector advisors, including John L. 

 Bryant Jr., Washington, D.C.; Daniel L. Doctoroff, New 

 York; Fred P. DuVal, Washington, D.C; Michael B. 

 Goldberg, New York; John P. La Ware, Chestnut Hill, Mas- 

 sachusetts; Edwin Robbins, New York; and Philip Rollhaus 

 Jr., Chicago. 



The Wilson Quarterly, the center's journal of scholarly ideas, 

 underwent a dramatic change in trim size, layout, and 

 typeface this year. The redesign complements the magazine's 

 editorial quality and its unique approach to addressing 

 scholarly issues. 



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