Alan Khazei stepped into the spotlight last fall when he ran in the special election race to fill Ted Kennedy’s seat in the US Senate. But the high-profile race was hardly his initial foray into public service. In fact, it represented more of a capstone to the more than 20 years Khazei has devoted to building a movement that calls on all Americans to think about how they can give back to their communities and country.
In 1987, together with his former Harvard roommate, Michael Brown, Khazei founded City Year. The Boston-based nonprofit has grown to 22 cities, with more than 12,000 young people, aged 17 to 24, having taken part in its one-year program of community service work. City Year “corps members” are a familiar sight in Boston, sometimes gathering in their trademark red jackets on City Hall Plaza or other prominent locations for morning calisthenics to start the day before heading off to work at community centers, schools, or other programs.
City Year has been at the forefront of a wave of service-oriented programs that have sprouted nationally over the last several decades. Though it’s a decidedly different phenomenon than the insurgent movements of the 1960s, the service movement has, in many ways, become the face of activism on college campuses and among people in their 20s.
“Give a year. Change the world.” That is the City Year motto, but that change doesn’t necessarily happen in a straight line. Organizations such as City Year, which enjoy bipartisan political backing and support from corporate sponsors, have consciously avoided the partisan political fray.
City Year may not push for change in the way Khazei heroes like Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy did. But the 49-year-old New Hampshire native says the service movement is a powerful force cultivating young people to become engaged citizens. The service work done by those who sign-up with City Year, Teach for America, and other groups, he says, helps ignite their “justice nerve” and inspires them to join political battles to reform urban education or make the other kinds of change needed to address issues their work has focused on.
City Year served as the mdel for the federal AmeriCorps program, started in 1994, which now funds hundreds of service-oriented nonprofits across the country —and accounts for about a quarter of City Year’s budget.
Khazei has had a long interest in politics—he cut his teeth as a volunteer on Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign. But he says his real awakening on the need to get more directly involved in politics and public policy came in 2003, when a budget move by some House Republicans threatened to slash AmeriCorps funding by 80 percent. He credits a grassroots mobilization of activists—together with a bipartisan coalition of Congressional allies, including Ted Kennedy and John McCain—with beating back the threatened cuts.
In 2007, he left City Year to found a new nonprofit, Be The Change, which aims to promote citizen service and build bipartisan coalitions to advocate for policy changes in education, workforce training, and other areas. Two years later, he jumped into the political mix as a candidate in the race for Senate.
Though he finished third in the four-way Democratic primary, Khazei’s campaign sparked enthusiasm—and support—across the state and country. He was endorsed by the Boston Globe, the Worcester Telegram & Gazette, and the Cape Cod Times, and drew backing from a bipartisan roster of national heavy hitters, including New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg and retired General Wesley Clark.
Khazei resists political labels, but his embrace of the Democratic Party values of opportunity for all combined with a yen for entrepreneurial thinking and openness to market-based solutions to problems put him in the tradition of “New Democrats” who have insisted on fresh approaches that reject the traditional ideologies that have dominated both major parties.
Khazei says everything from grassroots community service work to involvement in political campaigns makes up what he refers to as “big citizenship.” He has pieced these various strands together in a book, Big Citizenship: How Pragmatic Idealism Can Bring Out The Best in America, published in August. What it sometimes lacks in literary polish, the book makes up for with inspiring personal stories leavened with the history and political philosophy that underpins the service movement. It is an engaging window into how Khazei believes “big citizenship” can help us reach that “more perfect union” the country’s founders envisioned.
Khazei doesn’t put his thinking about social innovation on hold when he gets home. His wife, Vanessa Kirsch, is founder of New Profit, a “venture philanthropy” nonprofit that funds organizations with promising solutions to social problems. I sat down with Khazei at his home in Brookline, where he lives with Kirsch and their two children. (Even his 2-year-old son, Reece, seems drawn to these issues, climbing into Khazei’s lap at one point to join the discussion.) What follows is an edited transcript of our conversation.
—michael jonas
khazei: For me, big citizenship is simply a person or people’s willingness to contribute to a cause larger than their own self-interest, to give some of their time, their talent, their resources to try to make a difference in the world. I harken back to President Harry Truman.
When he was leaving the White House, a reporter called out to him, “Mr. President, what are you going to do now that you’re leaving the highest office in the land?” And Truman, who was a very modest person who never thought he’d actually be president, shot back right away, “I’m not leaving the highest office. I’m assuming the highest office—that of citizen.”
Part of the reason I wrote the book is to try and send this message, just as a citizen living in America, we all hold an office, and I’m trying to encourage people to think of it that way and to think about, well, as an office-holder, what do you do? Hopefully, you engage in politics and government and the political process. Secondly, it’s about giving back and doing community service work. Being a big citizen means that you share your gift, your talents, whether it’s helping to build homes with Habitat for Humanity or volunteering to tutor kids in schools or working on the environment. Third, being a big citizen means joining with others in movements for change. Pick a cause, an issue, something that you really care about, and join together with other citizens.
cw: You cite the long history of citizen-led efforts in this country driving big change at times of crisis and major challenge.
khazei: The history of this country is that we’ve made great breakthroughs when we’ve had a combination of citizen movements combined with visionary political leadership. And it’s often the citizens in movements that make the visionary leadership possible. You think of the very founding of the country with the citizen soldiers. Without the willingness of those journeyman farmers to put down their pitchforks and pick up their muskets, there is no American Revolution. The abolitionists helped to make the Emancipation Proclamation possible. Without the suffragist movement, we wouldn’t have had the 19th Amendment. We’re still revering the Greatest Generation because of the collective effort to survive the Depression and then fight Hitler and the Nazis. So, for me, at the micro level, that’s what big citizenship means, and I think we’re at a similar time.
cw: But what is the big challenge today? It’s not nearly as clear-cut as the Nazis in Europe or the Great Depression or the issue of slavery in the Civil War.
khazei: I think that’s been part of the challenge ever since the end of the Cold War. What’s our mission as a country? During the Cold War, it was pretty straightforward. The battle was between freedom and democracy and free market capitalism versus Communism and dictatorship. Ever since then we’ve sort of been searching for a mission, and the world has become more complicated and we don’t have that one great challenge. As we enter the 21st century, we’ve got multiple challenges. The economy is obviously number one. We’ve got millions of people unemployed, and it’s affecting people of every strata. Climate change is a crisis that’s literally affecting everyone, and we’re in danger of losing the planet as we know it. Extreme poverty is an extreme challenge, poverty both in America, which, sadly, is on the rise, and globally—the fact that a billion people, our fellow global citizens, live on less than $1 a day. And we’ve got the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. The Iraq war, thankfully, is winding down. And then the education system. We rank almost last among developing countries in terms of how our students are performing on tests once they get through high school. So there are multiple challenges, and we need more citizen engagement on all of these. That’s why I say pick the cause you care most about and try to dedicate some of your time and your energy to it.
cw: You cite the history of these citizen-led efforts going back to the taking up of muskets here as part of the tradition City Year and other service-oriented organizations draw from. But these were all decidedly more political battles. People were in the streets. There was a clash of interest groups. The whole service phenomenon seems very apolitical. It has very explicitly tried to draw people from across the political spectrum toward these common goals, focused on what you could do as an individual or community to fix this playground, tutor these kids. How do you claim it as part of that tradition when it has seemed to want to hold at arm’s length this idea of jumping into the political fray?
khazei: It’s a very good point, and I guess I’d say a couple of things in response to that. First, what the service movement shares with these other movements is the idea that it’s up to individual citizens to choose to get involved to try to make a difference, and empowering individuals. And it’s not necessarily the name-brand people or the famous leaders. All these movements started with individual citizens. The leaders then emerged. You think of Rosa Parks launching the Montgomery bus boycott, which gave Martin Luther King the opportunity at age 26 to then become a great leader. But it started with Rosa Parks, who was a regular citizen, who had been to some civil rights trainings.
I think you’re right about the political piece. I think people involved in the service movement, including myself when I was helping to lead City Year, are vehemently nonpartisan, partially because this is an idea that we wanted to be embraced by all sides, and that’s one of the successes of the service movement. Also, because of government funding, we’ve had to be careful about not being political on one side or the other. But what I always have hoped is that national service is sort of the entry point to what I like to call big citizenship. For me, big citizenship is not just doing service; it’s also engaging in democracy and politics and voting and engaging in movements.
My own evolution involves going from the service movement to advocacy to then politics itself. My second organization is called Be The Change, inspired by Gandhi, who taught that there are three keys to building a strong, robust democratic society: the ballot, the spinning wheel, and the jail. The ballot is your political rights, and people’s willingness to exercise their political rights. The spinning wheel is service, and Gandhi actually said it often started there, because it’s through that direct work, teaching people to read, building housing for the homeless, or joining with others in economic empowerment projects, that you get what I like to call your “justice nerve” turned on, where you get educated about what’s really going on and then think about making change by exercising your political rights. Finally, jail for Gandhi had to do with civil disobedience, because people who believed something was so wrong would give up the greatest gift you have in a democracy, your freedom. I think what’s happening with the service movement is it is that entry point where people get their justice nerve turned on.
Our alumni vote at rates much higher than their peers, so it’s translating. They give to political and other causes at four times the rate of their peers, in terms of donating money. They volunteer their time after City Year at much higher rates. They become leaders at much higher rates.
cw: So you see national service as sort of a springboard to fuller participation in politics, rather than the solution in and of itself to our big challenges.
khazei: That’s right. I think national service is necessary but not sufficient. I do think it’s foundational. I do think if you did have a million people per year doing national service and, say, 250,000 of them were working in urban and rural low-income public schools, you would then build a constituency for education reform. You can talk to any City Year alumni or Teach for America alumni or Citizen Schools alumni, and they will tell you, “We need change in public education,” and they can give you five, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 ideas of what to do, and they’re not the same ideas you’re hearing from the political parties. They are more creative. They are more integrated. They are more reform-oriented.
Part of the reason I decided to run for office is there has been within some areas of the service movement a feeling of, well, politics is dirty, and government is dirty, and you can’t get anything done. Let me just go build a house with Habitat [for Humanity] or tutor a kid to read through City Year, or serve with Citizen Schools as an apprentice. I want to send the message, if you believe in this stuff, if you believe in educating kids or building houses for the homeless or taking care of the hungry through food banks, ultimately it’s through public policy that we make the big decisions. Even if we had City Year in every single school in this country, which I’d love to see, and Teach for America teachers, we’re ultimately not going to solve the problem of public education unless we have public policy that goes beyond that.
cw: Can you talk a little about your own political outlook? You talk about trying to forge a new kind of political philosophy. You write about this in your book, and during your campaign you talked about this idea that the models that people have clung to are outmoded, whether it’s the New Deal-FDR view of big government having the answer to every problem, or the Reagan era lack of faith in government being the solution to anything. Although that suggests an approach that eschews those decidedly partisan views, what emerges is a political philosophy of its own. There’s a lot in the service movement that seems to connect with thinking in the Democratic Leadership Council and other centrist strains of thought. It seems to be an effort to embrace some of the values of the Democratic party of opportunity for all, but with approaches to dealing with issues that bring in a lot of the entrepreneurial energy and models of competition and choice of the business world.
khazei: I am trying to articulate a new public philosophy. My public philosophy comes from a combination of my hands-on practical experience of 25 years in the service and social entrepreneurship movement combined with studying democratic theory and political philosophy and government efforts, both throughout history and, particularly, in the time that I’ve actually been in the workforce. We have jumped back and forth between this debate between FDR and Reagan for the past 30 years, and I think we need to shift onto a different territory, stop talking about government and talk about how do we address our problems and our challenges. It is entrepreneurs and innovators that throughout our history drive change—not the government.
cw: But that’s not always been a view that dominated policy-making, right?
khazei: That’s right. It hasn’t been, and it’s sort of a counterintuitive view, especially for Democrats. But I’m a social entrepreneur. I helped to create an organization from scratch that’s now an international institution with over a $65 million budget. If you study our history, social entrepreneurs invented the first public school, the first public library, the first volunteer fire department, [the first] settlement houses. So in our social history, this idea of social entrepreneurship goes right back to the beginning, and it’s similar in the private sector. It is the private sector entrepreneurs that create the jobs that drive the economy and often create the breakthroughs.
cw: So, is it fair to place you as a New Democrat?
khazei: In some ways, but I don’t like labels. I do think we need a fundamentally different approach to how we address problems and seize opportunities in the 21st century. But this isn’t just theory for me. It’s grounded in my own life experience. I’ve seen it work over and over and over, both through my own work and then through the network that I’ve been in. It’s definitely goring some oxen, it’s definitely fighting the existing system. There are a lot of people in my party who don’t agree with this, who have a more traditional liberal, special interest group view of things, and believe as long as you line up all the interest groups, you’re going to get your right answer, and it’s also the way to win an election. I don’t think that works anymore. I think there’s a lot of common sense among people, and they understand that the solutions of the past don’t apply today. But entrenched interests are hard to move.
cw: Is part of what’s missing in our politics today a kind of vigorous center? You are drawing from some elements that have traditionally defined the left and the right, whether it’s this belief in market-based approaches to some problems, or whether it’s this belief in—
khazei: Justice.
cw: Yet we keep hearing about how polarized things are now.
khazei: Again, I don’t like the labels. When you say centrist, sometimes people think, “well, you’re just a mushy compromiser,” and that’s not me. I prefer innovative thinking. We need new thinking, and one of the ways we built City Year is we took the best of all the sectors. I think part of City Year’s success has been we took from the military the idea of uniforms and calisthenics and a culture of discipline and pride. We took from the business world an entrepreneurial approach and a focus on the bottom line getting results. We took from the government a sense of everybody participating, equality of opportunity. I’m not an ideologue. In everything I’ve done, I’ve said, “well, what works?” And what can you take the best from? And if it’s a market idea or if it’s a justice idea, it’s often integrating those you think will get you the best answer.
To push for Race to the Top [the federal competition that awarded funds to states committing to a set of school reform measures] and charter schools and education reform, that’s not compromise. That says, here’s a new way to do it, and it’s getting results, and you’ve got to be open to breaking with the past. It’s also about justice. Every single child born in this country should have a really robust, powerfully strong public school education.
cw: When we look today at where we see the most grassroots activism, people would probably point to the Tea Party movement. Are those big citizens?
khazei: I think they are. Look, I don’t subscribe to what’s been articulated as a Tea Party philosophy. My issue with the Tea Party is it seems more about tearing down than building up. But the Tea Party is mostly citizens who are exercising their political and democratic rights, and they’re having an unbelievable effect. I’m more of a progressive. But if we could get that same kind of energy going in another direction, I even think we could bring over some of the Tea Party people. I know there is a frustration with government.
cw: What did you learn from your own run for office about what is broken with the political system?
khazei: I learned a lot about that. I think money does dominate politics too much. You can talk to anybody who’s in politics and they’ll tell you the one thing they don’t like is the time on the phone begging people for money. Part of the reason the PACs and the lobbyists have so much power is they make it easy so you don’t have to do that, they come with big bundles of money.
We need campaign finance reform. I would have matching funds for contributions of $200 or less for all political races. The Internet provides an opportunity here that didn’t exist. Look at all the money Barack Obama raised running for president with the Internet, or even before him, John McCain and Howard Dean. Before the age of the Internet, it was much harder to raise a lot of money in $25 or $50 chunks. I would also provide free TV time. One of the things I learned is it’s the TV time that’s so expensive. The consultants will tell you unless you’re spending $500,000 a week on television, you’re not credible. That’s an enormous amount of money. So I’d provide either free TV time or drastically reduced TV time. Now TV stations won’t be happy with that, but it’s the public airwaves. We own them. We license them.
cw: Is there something broken about what’s happened with the political parties? People talk increasingly about how primaries now drive things to the fringe, and that seems to be a dynamic that works against some of the ideas you talk about. There’s a lot of pressure for people to fall into line and to fall into line at the extreme of the parties. I’m struck by, for example, John McCain who, I think, has probably most popularized this notion you use a lot in the book of being about “a cause greater than yourself”—and he certainly has been that through his military service and otherwise. This year he found himself in a tough primary race, with a challenger from the hard right, and he veered sharply right and cast off a lot of the views he’d had about trying to strike a compromise on immigration, in particular. Was that disappointing? When you see a guy like McCain do that, doesn’t it make you think, how could there possibly be hope of getting away from that kind of polarization?
khazei: The primaries tend to be dominated by the activists, who tend to come from the more extreme wings of the parties. It’s part of the reason the Tea Party was able to defeat [in the Republican primary] Senator [Robert] Bennett in Utah, who is a strong conservative. Part of my message to people about being a big citizen is engaging in politics, and the truth is, if you don’t engage in the primary, you don’t have as robust a choice when you get to the general election. But right now, very few people engage in the primary process. In the election I ran in, I think it was 16 percent or 17 percent turnout for the primary.
cw: Was that disappointing to you to see how McCain tacked so sharply to the right that way?
khazei: I admire John McCain. I’ve worked closely with him on service. I did not follow all the details of that race. I hope that if he is reelected that he exercises the kind of leadership he’s exercised in the past where he has been bipartisan and has been able to work across the aisle. He did that with Senator Kennedy on immigration reform and on the Patients’ Bill of Rights. He certainly did it on national service. He was a key leader. When the AmeriCorps program was wiped out, McCain was one of the leading Republicans who actually helped us to save it.
cw: You write that running for Senate was an exhilarating experience for you, in spite of the outcome. A lot of people have said it’s something you’ll look at again in two years when Scott Brown is up for reelection. What are the chances of that?
khazei: I’m not ruling anything out right now. I’m trying to promote the message of the book. The reason I ran for the Senate is the same reason I wrote the book. I’ve been trying to push this idea of public service and citizen participation in democracy and how do we really reach our potential as a country and fulfill that journey towards a more perfect union. That’s been my life’s work, and I saw that campaign as another opportunity to do that. I did have a great experience. It is a unique privilege when you run for office. It’s like having a passport to talk to anyone at any time about anything. I’ve worked with a lot of diverse people, but it’s a whole other level when you’re running for office, in terms of the people you get to meet, who will open up to you and will share with you their hopes and dreams and their anxieties and their fears and what’s going on in their lives. Even in these challenging times, I felt people wanting to come together, wanting to come up with new solutions. I had a good experience. Right now, I’m trying to promote the message of this book and get back to Be The Change. We’ll see what happens in the future.