POWELL'S ARMY CAN START HERE

By STEVE LOPEZ

Every cell in eight-year-old Damaso's body is telling him not to do his homework. School is out. It's a nice day. There's a football game in the park across the street. How can he possibly tear himself away to bother with math and vocabulary?

Jennifer Dore, 20, Damaso's volunteer tutor, has her eye on him. She'll let him have his fun for a few more minutes. But there is no way Damaso will dodge his homework. Dore, a sophomore communications major at Villanova University, which is half an hour and a billion miles away in the wealthy Main Line, travels to inner-city Philadelphia once a week with seven of her classmates. When their van pulls up to the three-story row house that is headquarters for the Norris Square Neighborhood Project, kids storm out to hug the visitors.

So when Colin Powell, assorted Presidents and the corporate chieftains of Powell's volunteer army are in town, they are welcome to drop by. "More than money and materials, that's what we need," says Sister Carol Keck, who has run the Neighborhood Project in West Kensington for 10 years. "Those are good things, and we'll take all we can get. But the personal connection--anyone pairing up with a child for tutoring, field trips, whatever--that's what helps most. It puts a human face on poverty."

Norris Square sits in the middle of a graveyard of shuttered factories, crumbling houses and a thriving drug market, and yet this one city block--a park surrounded by houses, churches and community centers--has looked better every year for a decade. Parents once kept children inside because dealers controlled the park, which was filled with needles, condoms, broken glass and knee-high weeds. Today the park is neatly landscaped and filled with moms pushing strollers and children playing on new equipment.

The Neighborhood Project, a combination library, clubhouse, nature-study lab and community center, has had no small part in the transformation. Operating with a paid staff of just five and an annual budget of $400,000, only 20% of it from government sources, Sister Carol's troops have herded dealers off corners, used amateur detectives to rat out nuisance bars, covered graffiti with murals and planted gardens in vacant lots. Hundreds of volunteers have made that possible.

But Sister Carol hopes that summit participants discover there's a limit to what volunteerism can accomplish. The gathering is little more than a feel-good festival, she says, if it doesn't lead to a strategy for better schools and jobs. Steady work is scarce in the industrial ruins, enrollment at six area schools shows a 95% poverty rate, and two-thirds of the students don't graduate. Villanova's Dore grew up in suburban Philadelphia watching her peers waste opportunities. Here, she says, in a neighborhood 78% Latino and 11% black, kids are hungry for any advantage.

The football game has broken up now, and Dore has finally harnessed Damaso, who says he's behind one year "because I flunked." She sits him down in the library at the project house, waits for him to stop fidgeting, and patiently helps him count coins and make sentences out of his vocabulary words. "Look at him," she says, holding her hand up for a smiling Damaso to slap after he solves an arithmetic problem. "The kid is a math genius."