In a Long-Shot Bid, City-Year’s Co-Founder Hopes to Add ‘Senator’ to His Credentials

Whether Alan Khazei, co-founder of the City Year youth-service corps, wins or loses his bid for a U.S. Senate seat in Massachusetts, his campaign has offered a rare glimpse at how a candidate can parlay a career as a nonprofit leader into a political asset. And it has also demonstrated the conflicts that can emerge when charity officials step into the electoral arena.

Mr. Khazei — who temporarily stepped aside from his position as leader of Be the Change, a group he started to mobilize citizens to work on social problems — is a long shot to win the December 8 Democratic primary for the seat held by the late Sen. Edward M. Kennedy. But he has managed to raise an impressive amount of money for a political novice, his poll numbers have steadily risen, and last week he won the endorsement of The Boston Globe over two experienced politicians and a co-owner of the Boston Celtics. (To read more about Mr. Khazei’s background, see an article from The Chronicle’s archive.)

The newspaper praised Mr. Khazei’s two decades of work bringing together politicians and “citizen activists” to fight for national-service programs and his promise to build grassroots networks to push for social change. “Extended to issues like health care, the environment, energy, and job training, this entrepreneurial model of progressive politics offers hope for real improvements,” it said.

If Mr. Khazei pulls off an upset victory, he will be one of a kind in the Senate. Jennifer E. Duffy, senior editor of the Cook Political Report, says she is not aware of any senators, or even recent Senate candidates, who sought their office as nonprofit leaders. “He’s pretty unique,” she says.

Mr. Khazei says the dearth of nonprofit expertise in Congress is one reason he decided to run.

“We’re never surprised when a business entrepreneur runs for the Senate,” he says. “In fact, there are a bunch of them, people who are multimillionaires who’ve been very successful in business and say, I could take these skills to the country. Nonprofit skills are as applicable or even more so because you’re out there making change every day.”

Separating Politics

Mr. Khazei worked closely with Senator Kennedy — who was often spotted wearing a City Year jacket — on national service issues. After the senator died in August, Mr. Khazei scrambled to pull together a quick campaign.

He took an unpaid leave of absence from Be the Change, in Boston, and handed the reins to a longtime associate — Bill McClements, a partner at the Monitor Group, an international advisory and financial-services firm. Emily Cherniack, chief of staff at Be the Change, also took a leave of absence to work on his campaign.

The campaign started off with a flub — it sent e-mail appeals for political support to a list that included contacts that Mr. Khazei and Ms. Cherniack had developed at Be the Change. That was a problem because charities like Be the Change are legally prohibited from supporting political candidates. After some people contacted Be the Change about the messages, both Mr. Khazei and Mr. McClements say, they worked to correct what they call an inadvertent mistake.

Be the Change examined the campaign’s e-mail lists to check for inappropriate names — and Mr. Khazei agreed to pay the going rate for the names his campaign had used.

That mix-up highlights the challenges that nonprofit employees face when venturing into politics. Both Be the Change and City Year have issued guidelines to staff members reminding them not to use office telephones, space, e-mail accounts, contact lists, or their professional affiliations for partisan political activities.

Mr. McClements and Michael Brown — Mr. Khazei’s longtime friend and co-founder of City Year — are both working on Mr. Khazei’s campaign on their personal time. But they say they take pains not to bring the election into the office.

Aside from the legal issue, Mr. McClements says, Be the Change’s strategy counts on winning bipartisan political support for its goals.

Mr. Brown says he expects to see future Alan Khazeis in the political arena because the “social entrepreneurship” movement is maturing. Social entrepreneurs, he says, are passionate about making fundamental social change, which makes entering public life a natural progression.

“Over time, we’ll probably see it as less unique or rare that this is a pathway for some very talented people who in a previous generation might have only gone the traditional political route.”

Getting More Done

Since it started in 2007, Be the Change has focused largely on managing ServiceNation, a coalition of more than 250 organizations that promotes volunteerism and national service. The group has now started a second campaign, OpportunityNation, which seeks to build a similar movement to fight poverty.

Mr. Khazei says he feels the pull of elected office because he could work on multiple issues at once and get things accomplished more quickly than in the nonprofit world.

“You’re a senator, you can call a meeting and people are going to show up,” he says. “You can call a press conference and people will show up. You commit to go to an event, people will show up.”

While he is more likely to be asked about the war in Afghanistan, efforts to overhaul health care, and casino gambling, Mr. Khazei also has a nonprofit agenda: Speed up the planned expansion of AmeriCorps, the national-service program, from seven years to two years to provide desperately needed jobs; provide $500-million a year to the Social Innovation Fund, the federal grants program for charities with promising approaches to social problems, instead of the $50-million proposed by President Obama; and relax rules that limit the amount of money charities can spend on lobbying.

Mr. Khazei still trails in the polls, although his share has risen from single digits at the beginning of his campaign to 14 percent in a recent Rasmussen Reports survey.

Ms. Duffy of the Cook Political Report says Mr. Khazei has done well at raising money, taking in $1-million during the first two weeks of his campaign. But she questions his campaign strategy — which relies heavily on mobilizing volunteers rather than tactics like television advertising — given how little time he has had to reach out to voters.

Mr. Khazei says he intentionally did not run a conventional campaign. He refuses to accept money from lobbyists or political-action committees and is running on the theme of “big citizenship” — a counterpoint to “big business” and “big government.”

He insists that momentum is building and he still has a chance to win. If not, he says, he will return to Be the Change and pursue his mission of “empowering citizens to get more involved in our democracy.”

Mr. Khazei declines to speculate about his political future, but given his ability to raise money, Ms. Duffy says, “I wouldn’t be surprised if this was not his one and only run.”