January 11, 2007 | Read Time: 6 minutes
In the fall of 1986, Alan Khazei huddled over one of the earliest Apple Macintosh computers with a college pal, Michael Brown, and drafted a plan for a grass-roots effort that could become a model for a national-service effort.
Their hope was to show that young people who devoted a year of their life to volunteer work could be a powerful force for social change, and to build support for passage of a nationwide program.
At the time, the idea of volunteer national service wasn’t universally embraced. Even people who were inclined to support the concept questioned just how big a contribution teenagers and people in their 20s, who lacked any specialized training, could give to the country. Others heard the term “community service” and thought of students serving detention by picking up trash or scrubbing blackboards.
But Mr. Khazei and Mr. Brown, then students at Harvard Law School, helped to change that. Today, City Year, the charity they founded, enrolls 1,200 young people a year who perform community service in 17 cities in the United States and South Africa.
It has also helped spark broader support for youth service: Former President Bill Clinton has said that a trip to the charity’s Boston site in part inspired him to create AmeriCorps, the national network of volunteer programs that now enlists 75,000 young people each year to perform community service.
“Very few people in life can say they’ve played a role in starting a social movement,” says Hubie Jones, a former City Year board member and dean emeritus of Boston University’s School of Social Work. “City Year has played a major role in starting this national-service social movement.”
Mr. Khazei, now 45, spent a summer as a college intern working for Rep. Norman D’Amours, who was then a Democratic member of Congress from New Hampshire, for whom he wrote a 23-page report outlining national service as an alternative to the draft. (Mr. D’Amours later co-sponsored a bill that would have set up a commission to study the idea.)
When he graduated, Mr. Khazei took a job with Gary Hart’s presidential campaign because the Democratic senator pledged to push for universal national service if elected.
After nearly 20 years at City Year, Mr. Khazei says he left the charity both to explore new ways to advance social change and to help expand support for national service.
He has begun work on a book that will tell the story of City Year while making the case for a universal national service. His goal is to encourage one million people each year to postpone college or careers to work for AmeriCorps and other nonprofit programs.
For that to happen, Mr. Khazei says, the country needs to adopt a new GI Bill that would make a year of service possible for all young people regardless of their economic situations. He also hopes to persuade more political leaders to rally behind the concept.
“The time is so ripe for a universal voluntary national-service program,” says Mr. Khazei. “By the time the next president takes office, we will have had a 20-year commitment to the idea of voluntary national service. But we’re still a long way away from what most people would consider taking national service to scale.”
In an interview with The Chronicle, Mr. Khazei discussed his transition.
What advice do you give to the next generation of social entrepreneurs?
Find a partner and build a team. Nobody changes the world by themselves. If you have a burning passion, it’s a great thing to do. The landscape for social entrepreneurs is getting better and better every single day.
Think about what is your one big statement. For us, it’s that one day we hope the most commonly asked question of a young person will be, “Where are you doing your service year?”
Set high goals and work hard to achieve them but also understand there is a big gap between idea and implementation. You have to try to visualize where you want to be and then work backward.
What was the biggest challenge you faced at City Year?
Funding was definitely a challenge. It still is. I don’t think that there is a functioning capital market in the nonprofit sector. In the private sector, we have a whole system designed to provide capital to good ideas and to grow businesses. That doesn’t exist in the nonprofit sector. There aren’t different organizations designed to help you at different levels.
Also, just learning how to build an organization while also building a program and trying to be part of a movement is a challenge. Finding the right balance between being a movement and organization builder and pushing for policy change while also making sure your organization thrives is a challenge. That is something every social entrepreneur faces.
What advice do you have for small nonprofit groups that are looking to grow?
The key is to think, what is your pie chart, so to speak, and can you have a balanced stream of revenues so you aren’t overly dependent on any one source. If you have a corporate-funding strategy, have you got an individual-funding strategy, and a government-funding strategy?
Foundations need to think bigger. If I had a billion dollars to give away, I would find 20 organizations I thought had great potential to become national institutions and I would give them each $50-million as challenge grants. I would say, why don’t you match this and bring your organization to scale and become a $100-million organization so we can build the next Boys and Girls Clubs, the next Habitat for Humanity, the next Red Cross.
What impact did the AmeriCorps financing crisis of 2003 have on City Year?
On the macro level, the whole reason we started City Year was to help inspire something like AmeriCorps. City Year is great but we’re 1,200 people a year and AmeriCorps has 75,000. So we felt like we had been working on this idea of national service for 16 years and the idea that all this would just be wiped out, all these organizations that were meeting tremendous needs, was terrible for the country and the communities.
In terms of City Year specifically, we lost half of our government funding. Because we had somewhat of a balanced revenue stream — one third comes from AmeriCorps — we had to cut the organization by 25 percent, which was still terrible. It took three years to recover.
How have attitudes toward national service changed in the 20 years since you started City Year?
Citizens are ahead of our political leaders. The other thing that came out of the AmeriCorps crisis is we found out that Americans love AmeriCorps. There were 100 editorials written across the country saying, This program deserves support and funding and should be saved. There were two opposed. The biggest change we’ve seen is, this idea of national service works. It’s not theory anymore.
ABOUT ALAN KHAZEI, CO-FOUNDER, CITY YEAR
Education: Mr. Khazei holds a bachelor’s degree in government and a law degree, both from Harvard University.
Experience: He served as field coordinator on the New Hampshire primary staff of Gary Hart’s 1984 presidential campaign. He co-founded City Year in 1988, and was its chief executive officer until last year.
Books he’s reading: A Problem From Hell: America and the Age of Genocide, by Samantha Power; The Audacity of Hope: Thoughts on Reclaiming the American Dream, by Barack Obama; and The Rising Tide: A Novel of World War II, by Jeff Shaara.
