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Earlier this month the Washington Monthly released its annual college ranking, which evaluates at American colleges and universities in part based on their commitment to service. Social entrepreneur Alan Khazei, CEO of Be the Change, Inc., an organization that works to create national coalitions of non-profits and citizens to address issues like poverty and education, is someone very committed to the idea of service.
Khazei, the co-founder of City Year, recently wrote a book, Big Citizenship. In his book he discusses his experiences with City Year, saving AmeriCorps, and creating a new national campaign to inspire and facilitate citizen involvement. He recently spoke with the College Guide about national service.
Washington Monthly: What is service?
Alan Khazei: It’s when someone decides to dedicate some of their time, energy, talent, to try to make a difference, to help other people in a hands-on, direct way. That is how I would define it.
WM: So that sort of thing is not just volunteer work, it’s also sort of a regular job one can do?
AK: It depends on the context of what you’re talking about. If you’re talking about citizen service, then you’re talking about either volunteering, or some kind of full-time effort like AmeriCorps or the Peace Corps or the military, as distinguished from a service job. I would make that distinction.
WM: Are there other regular jobs you think of as service jobs?
AK: Well sure, there’s a whole bunch of them. But when people talk about citizen service or national service, they’re more talking about when people are dedicating themselves to a cause larger than their own self interest, and they’re trying to make a difference, giving to others, etc. They’re doing it as volunteers or they’re getting paid a stipend, which is less than they would normally make if they were working a regular job.
WM: To address that, one of the things you do point out is that you went to law school, so you have this sort of huge debt and you were able to take care of that through service through a particular agreement that Harvard law school had at the time.
AK: Actually I wasn’t, I actually got turned down for that program. I was hoping I would be able to qualify for this Harvard student loan forgiveness program the year I graduated. But they determined that what I was doing did not qualify for the program, which was geared more toward legal aid work. What I did was just live very cheaply, for the first few years out of law school, and paid back my loans. I was able to defer the loans for up to 9 months under the law that year because I didn’t have any income for starting City Year. We didn’t raise any money for the first 6 months, I didn’t get paid for the first 9 months. So after that I just lived fairly inexpensively and just paid it off over a seven or ten year term, I don’t remember exactly.
WM: In a greater policy sense, are there things that we should be doing to address that? Because you have to be kind of creative to figure that out.
AK: Well interestingly, five or six years later, another law student graduated from Harvard and she applied to start City Year in Columbia, SC and they qualified her for the loan forgiveness program so over time they expanded the definition. But I do think we should have more loan forgiveness programs so that people who go into public service work can help get their loans paid off. For a lot of young people, they graduate from college or from graduate school with huge debt and they feel like they don’t have any choice but to take the highest-paying job offer they can get.
I think we should bring back the GI bill but for civilian service. And what I would do is say that for each year that you do in the Peace Corps or AmeriCorps or another civilian service program, you would get a post-service award equivalent to one year of tuition, of books and fees at a state university.
That would be about $10,000 a year. Right now the AmeriCorps award finally was increased—it hadn’t been increased since ’94. Until the Kennedy Serve America Act it went from about $4,700 to about $5,200. It’s now on par with Pell grants. But I would make it so that for each year you serve you get a year, so essentially if you’re willing to serve for 4 years, anybody could get access to a college education at least at a state school level. I’d like to see a public policy effort whereby, if you were to serve your country and your community, you can actually get access to college.
So I would do that, I would also do more loan forgiveness programs, and I would also expand fellowship opportunities, things like the Echoing Green Foundation Fellowships. Echoing Green gives fellowships for people to be social entrepreneurs, they give two year fellowships. They had over a thousand applicants last year for just 20 fellowships. I’m sure that there were more than 20 great proposals. They just don’t have the resources to fund everybody who applies; it’s harder than getting a Rhodes Scholarship. I would expand opportunities like that to encourage more young people to be social entrepreneurs.
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