Author Talk With Alan Khazei
Alan Khazei explains why bigger is better when it comes to dealing with our nation's most urgent problems.
In 1988, fresh out of Harvard Law School, my college roommate Michael Brown and I started a national service program called City Year. The idea to give young people from all backgrounds ages 17 to 24 an opportunity to serve their country for a year in exchange for living expenses and a scholarship for college or graduate school. As students, we felt grassroots stirring around the idea of national service. We wanted to contribute by developing a Boston-based program that could serve as a model for a national service program.
Our underlying idea wasn’t complicated. American democracy doens't now, but could, provide a shared citizenship experience—a civic rite of passage—that could spark a sense of democratic responsibility in young Americans and, maybe, direct some youthful energy and idealism to a broad range of persisting common troubles.
City Year has since expanded to 20 sites around the country. And we have two international affiliates in London and South Africa. Along the way, we caught the eye of then-Governor Bill Clinton, who, once he was elected, used City Year as a model for AmeriCorps program in 1993. AmeriCorps has flourished; passage of the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act in 2009 prompted the largest commitment to national service since the Great Depression.
Big Citizenship: How Pragmatic Idealism Can Bring Out The Best In America tells the story of my experience and recounts lessons I learned from the nation service and social entrepreneurship movements. The American spirit of innovation and service dates back to the citizen soldiers of our revolution who fought to enshrine self-evident truths. A similar spirit animated the Women’s Suffrage Movement, the Greatest Generation, and the Civil Rights Movements. But it also resides in each of us. And so Big Citizenship is also a call to action to all Americans, each of whom we hope to incite to fully inhabit what President Harry Truman upon leaving the White House called the highest office in the land—that of citizen.
In the two decades since Michael and I founded City Year, remarkable things have happened. The Soviet Union disintegrated; the Berlin Wall fell. Nelson Mandela walked a remarkably peaceful path from prisoner to president. The internet became ubiquitous; scientists’ cracked the DNA code and continue to make breakthrough advances. The light of democracy has swept some of the darkest corners of the globe: the number of democracies across the globe has jumped from 69 democracies in 1989, to 119 today.
Still, the tragedy of September 11 and the growth of global terrorism remind us of the fragility of peace in our time. Heartbreaking natural disasters like Hurricane Katrina, the Indian Ocean tsunami, the earthquakes in Haiti and the devastating floods in Pakistan remind us of the abiding power of Mother Nature, even as we continue to burn—and spill—fossil fuels at rates that put us at serious risk of irreversible climate change. The continuting Great Recession reminds us of the insecurity of our global economic system; millions of Americans still languish in unemployment or underemployment, while more than one billion of our fellow global citizens live on roughly one dollar a day.
Clearly, we live in a time of big challenges and opportunities. Yet we remain trapped in the tired debate between Big Government and No Government—between those who wish to see government as the solution to all problems and those who respond that government itself is the problem.
We would be wise to heed the words President Lincoln spoke at a time of even greater national crisis. “The dogmas of the quiet past are inadequate to the stormy present…as our case is new, we must think anew and act anew,” said Lincoln, “We must disenthrall ourselves and then we shall save our country.”
Big Citizenship is also a call for a new public philosophy, one that urges us to move from worn-out ideologies that depend on one big institution or another to solve our problems. Instead, we need to engage the drive and ingenuity of the American people—all of us—to confront our biggest challenges.
Big Citizenship involves contributing to a cause that extends beyond one’s own self-interest. It calls on each of us to perform community service, to get involved in politics, and to join with others in larger movements for change.
Big Citizenship calls on us to define a new catalytic and transparent role for 21st century government, one that ensures a level playing field, monitors performance, uses competition and choice, and rewards and scales up what works while recognizing and shutting down what doesn’t.
Big Citizenship recognizes that we should forge public-private partnerships among all three sectors that can leverage the strengths of each to address our most pressing challenges.
Most of all, a new philosophy of Big Citizenship and Common Purpose demands that we move away from the old, misguided question—“Are you better off?”—to the real question: “Are we better off?” We must reassert the spirit of our founding fathers and mothers who “mutually pledged their lives, fortunes and sacred honor”—the spirit that we are all in this together.
If you’re a Just Books reader, I am preaching to the choir. But with the challenges ahead, we need to double down on our efforts. It’s easy to cast blame—to say ‘these people did this, those did that.’ Big Citizenship recasts the us versus them trope: will we confront common social problems by saying “look what they did,” or by asking “here’s how we’re going to repair this”?
Alan Khazei’s new book is BIG CITIZENSHIP: How Pragmatic Idealism Can Bring Out the Best in America (PublicAffairs).