Statement by the President Marking the Opening of the United Community Campaigns.

[Recorded on film and tape]

Fellow Americans--

For just a minute I would like to visit with you about something very important to every one of us.

Let's call it--stockpiling.

I don't mean the nation's stockpile of minerals or food. I mean the ones most of us have in our home towns--our stockpile of services to strengthen and protect life in time of emergency.

Locally, your stockpile may be known as the United Fund, or the Community Chest. Whatever its name, we must build it together. And--here's the main point--we have to refill it each year.

That is why we are once again launching United Community Campaigns throughout our own country and Canada as well. This is the largest appeal of this kind asked of us, and it is the most far-reaching in people helped and good accomplished.

Your community, as all others, has set its goal. All together, these goals add up to four hundred million dollars. That money will be our stockpile to help bring health and healing to the sick-to help troubled families--to offer new hope to the crippled and handicapped. It will help give guidance to youth--comfort the aged--and help hold high the spiritual level of every community.

And we need to remember this:

Your local community services include not only such fine efforts as the Boy and Girl Scouts, but the more than a thousand united campaigns this year also include the American Red Cross, the USO, and the many national groups waging the all-important battle against deadly disease.

So our job is clear and urgent.

It is to refill these community stockpiles of ours. In that way we will see that these fine services, in which all of us so deeply believe, will continue to go forward.

The way we join that effort is through our United Community Campaigns. I want to stress that word "United." It means that in more than two thousand communities we will have one "United" appeal for funds instead of twenty-five thousand separate, go-it-alone campaigns.

One other thought we should keep in mind.

You and I know that although our heritage is tremendously rich in material things, it is far more important that our heritage is profoundly spiritual. And this spiritual heritage of ours teaches us that we are children of God, responsible to Him, touched by compassion for one another. One of the best ways we can show this compassion is now at hand--for you, for me, for all of us-through these United Community Campaigns.

So, to the citizen volunteers who guide these campaigns--to the volunteers who will do the giving--I say, with all my heart, Godspeed.

With all other Americans I share the hope and the belief that you will build your community stockpiles high.