Corps Values

A pioneer of social entrepreneurship reflects on his career and the future of public service.

In his recent book Big Citizenship, social entrepreneur Alan Khazei shares a Václav Havel quote to describe the quality that binds the inspirational people he’s met over the years: “Hope is definitely not the same thing as optimism. It is not the conviction that something will turn out well, but the certainty that something makes sense no matter how it turns out.”

Khazei has encountered this quality in numerous individuals throughout his career and all over the world, people “who embodied and embraced this special sense of hope for the future. People who acted on the certainty that something made sense no matter how it turned out.” He might have in mind individuals like the Thai doctor he met bringing access to health care in rural areas, the Indian woman who started an organization to bridge the divide between Hindu and Muslim communities, or the South Korean activist in Vietnam who worked with returning refugees.

But the description fits Khazei (pronounced KAY-zee) as well. Well known in the service movement for his leadership in co-creating City Year, the innovative service program for young people that became the model for Bill Clinton’s AmeriCorps program, Khazei has spent the past quarter-century thinking about service, leadership, and community, and honing his views on social entrepreneurship and its connection to the private sector, government, philanthropy, and the media. His book offers not just a lively story of the roots and rise of social entrepreneurship, but deftly articulates policy recommendations that will ensure a robust future for the service movement.

It wasn’t too long ago in historical terms that social entrepreneurship—the practice of solving a social problem through entrepreneurial means and techniques—didn’t even exist. A tiny movement in the 1960s and ’70s, the nonprofit service sector today is formidable indeed: It represents almost 10 percent of the economy, with one out of 12 citizens working in the sector. A social entrepreneur, Muhammad Yunus, won the Nobel Peace Prize in 2006 for his impressive work in the areas of microcredit and microfinance, helping people with no collateral get loans from banks. Closer to home, programs like Teach For America and AmeriCorps have touched the lives of millions of Americans—and continue to grow in popularity. (Teach For America has seen applications grow by 30 percent for three straight years; AmeriCorps experienced a 170 percent increase in online applications from 2008 to 2009.) Big citizenship has become a big deal. That said, Khazei laments that nonprofit work is still seen as a second-class calling in America, a disappointing condition that he seeks to change.

Khazei’s own journey from Capitol Hill summer intern in 1981 to Senate candidate in Massachusetts 28 years later (he ran in the Democratic primary for Ted Kennedy’s seat) runs parallel to a story of the emergence and evolution of the service movement. He writes affectionately about growing up in New Hampshire in the 1970s with supportive parents and grandparents who instilled in him an ethic of hard work and service. As the son of an immigrant doctor from Iran and an Italian-American nurse, he understood the blessings of the United States as well as the responsibilities of its citizens. The town-hall meetings his father would take him to witness were vivid manifestations of the values of community and civic engagement in this “participatory, citizen democracy.”

With that bedrock of small-town New England values, Khazei would go on to become an instrumental figure in the rise of the service movement. Big Citizenship offers a highly readable history of the emergence of social entrepreneurship and the evolution of the idea of national service in this country, from the historic creation of the Corporation for National and Community Service—the federal grant-making agency operating AmeriCorps, Senior Corps, and Learn and Serve America—to the enactment in 2009 of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act. More than just a recounting of past episodes, Khazei clearly intended his readers to learn from the history of social entrepreneurship. The book even includes a useful appendix that has a timeline of the Save AmeriCorps campaign, which successfully reversed a proposed 80 percent funding cut in AmeriCorps, and the strategic decisions and tactical steps supporters made to ensure adequate funding.

Zelig-like, Khazei appears in some of this history’s major scenes. He worked as an intern for his congressman, Norm D’Amours of New Hampshire, while classmate Michael Brown (who would eventually co-found City Year with him) interned for then-Congressman Leon Panetta. In the first of what would become a pattern for the Khazei-Brown duo, they collaborated as interns advancing the legislation to create a Commission for National Service. That experience would spur Khazei’s scholarly interest in service as an undergraduate and law student, and would become his eventual passion and lifelong commitment.

Later brushes with the powerful follow, offering reminders of the formidable network Khazei has since constructed. There was the little-known presidential candidate making a site visit to a no-frills City Year headquarters: Bill Clinton. Khazei’s remarks at a youth conference introduced him to a supporter and eventual mentor in Senator Harris Wofford of Pennsylvania. An invitation to a senator for City Year’s first graduation would lead to a longstanding relationship with the program’s key congressional champion: Ted Kennedy.

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