1. NYS and the Military - should there be a linkage between them, and if so, what should it be? Donald Eberly suggests that, to encourage young people to serve - by giving them a choice, as some prefer military and some prefer civilian service - an approach worth considering is a training programme that is a feeder for both NYS and the military. Young people would undergo three months of training with military discipline, but without weapons. They would be familiarized with the full spectrum of service opportunities and those who then wanted to go into military or civilian service could do so.
   
   
2. The Work of NYS - there are two closely related dilemmas here - firstly, how can NYS participants provide services that are useful to others and challenging to themselves without replacing paid workers, and secondly, how can the private sector and governments satisfy the ever-increasing demand for services especially in such areas as elder care and child care? As most governments seem barely able to find sufficient money to meet the basic minimum social needs, and are unable to find the money to provide paid workers to meet the myriad of social needs (for example, helping with necessary household chores and repairs which may be beyond the reach of infirm elderly people, so enabling them to continue living in their own homes), NYS participants have the ability to do these jobs, are affordable in doing so, and are not replacing paid workers. These responsibilities should not be forsaken in the name of economics.
   
   
3. NYS as an Institution - just as education has been institutionalised globally in the course of the last one hundred years, as society has come to realise its worth, NYS has the same potential in the 21^st Century, but it first needs a solid foundation (political, public and financial support). That support needs to be broad and rooted in vested interest, and it needs to be diversified to reflect the contributions NYS makes to society: it should come from those who benefit from NYS - local and national government agencies whose services NYS helps provide, the private sector (eg day-care centres, hospitals), the business and commercial sectors and educational institutions (NYS provides better-prepared young people as further education students and employees). The economic benefit is already proven: studies show that for every dollar invested in NYS, between one and two dollars worth of services are delivered.
   
   
4. NYS as Global Service - our Association (the IANYS) and our Global Conferences can help forge the bonds needed to make NYS a universal practice. The Internet can be used as a powerful communication tool, for example, with different countries' NYS programmes feeding updates, research/evaluation findings and news into a central bank of information, so sharing it with others, and helping promote a sense of common endeavour. Even better, we can arrange exchanges of NYS participants and officials to increase international understanding, and perhaps have disaster relief training as a standard part of NYS in each country, so enabling multi-national NYS disaster relief task forces when the need arises. These moves are, of course, contingent on resources. Participants at this conference should consult with each other and with colleagues on their NYS programmes to see how we might better move these proposals forward. Finally, we must remember that, to help meet the challenges ahead, the help, co-operation and leadership of young people, the NYS participants themselves, is vital.

For full details of the fours issues facing NYS in the 21^st Century, see Eberly, D. J. (1997) National youth service in the 20th and 21st Centuries. CSV, London. 36 pages. Available from CSV.