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| Bought in October | Finished in April |
This past week, I finished a book that when I started it, I thought "dang, I should have read this a long time ago". But, as I finished it out after 6-ish months of letting its lessons marinate in the back of my mind (it was one of those books you pick up and put down, maybe read some other things in between), I'm finding that I'm happy I waited to read it. Both because of the point in my life I'm at, but also because of the state of the world. If I'd read it while I was still employed at City Year, the book would have served my confirmation bias a lot more, and if I'd read it while a student at a very liberal university, it might've made me a little angry.
Now that I've had space from both experiences, and traveled to other corners of the globe (some for the first time, some for the millionth time), it genuinely surprised me at how necessary some of the lessons are in this book. Sure, in some ways it still confirms a bias I have that City Year is truly one of the greatest organizations in the US. Khazei's message also strikes me as a marriage between the old school and the new school. There are some "traditional" values that some millenials might take issue with - e.g. it's not always wise to lose your temper (or, to be "brutally honest all the time") when you feel something is unjust - you never know if the person you're yelling at/acting too cool for might be in a position to help you out later. I know I've made this mistake - for things I've felt are completely worth making a fuss about, like the gender pay gap, or someone not paying attention when the traffic light turns green - and it's good to have a reminder. In another vein, he proposes a link between the private sector and the public sector, and why they need each other - another good reminder in an age in the US where the majority of young people are (rightfully so, in some cases) fed up with capitalism.
Further than that, though, it has served as a reminder in this US presidential election year that being a Big Citizen is one of the most important and unique duties we have as Americans. The idea that we have freedom to be critical of our leaders but then cease to do anything about it is unacceptable. To have that kind of apathy is a different kind of privilege, it seems.
As I read, I found myself highlighting, underlining and dog-earing pages of things that struck me. Here are some of my favorite insights:
Ch. 2 - Be Prepared To Give Up Your Shirt
"...you never know who is going to be in the position to help you, so be open to everyone; and the best ambassadors for any program are not its founders and theorists, but the people who sign up for it and make it their own."
"...many speakers talked about how, in spite of having so many issues in common with other members of the City Year corps, there had been no connections or efforts to work together until City Year had begun to establish them."
"Through their idealism and service, [young people] could show that they and their young peers were not the selfish, self-centered, and self-absorbed caricatures often portrayed in the popular media. Instead, they were a dedicated generation, ready and willing to try to change the world if challenged and given the chance."
Ch. 3 - An "Action Tank"
"For example, we only have the right to a jury trial because other citizens take their responsibility to to give up their time to serve on a jury, seriously."
"One of the great things that national service can and must do is to give every young person a chance to be a civic activist. Through service, a young person can discover abilities and talents she or he may not realize they possess."
"Becoming a truly inclusive nation remains a great challenge for America, even in 2010. A national service program, created on a scale that links people from different backgrounds to work together for the common good and on the common ground of service, is one of the best ways for America to travel the path from diversity to genuine inclusivity."
"...we wanted to send the message that the private sector has an essential role to play in any ongoing national service system. We believed that, given more than seventy percent of people work in the private sector, we needed to engage that sector if national service was going to be truly transformational."
"We argued that if you wanted to have a truly diverse program in which people committed to work full-time for a year, you would have to pay them; otherwise your program would be limited to a very small slice of America that could afford to volunteer full-time for free...nevertheless, it was a significant difference of opinion, even principle, that we could not immediately resolve. Ultimately, we did what we always did when meeting new people whom we were trying to convince of the value of City Year's approach to national service -- we asked [Gregg] Petersmeyer to come visit City Year so he could see firsthand what we were doing and how it worked...When Petersmeyer emerged, he sat down with us and said, "OK, I get it. I get it. This was a terrific discussion. The lower income young people made it clear they weren't doing City Year for the money, but without the stipend, there was no way they could afford to do this full-time."
Ch. 5 - Social Entrepreneurs Around The World
"Entrepreneurship, according to the French economist Jean-Baptiste Say, is the "rearranging of economic resources out of an area of lower utility into an area of high productivity and greater yield". Social entrepreneurs, by contrast, practice rearranging resources out of an area of lower public utility, into an area of higher public productivity and greater public yield."
"Vaclav Havel best captured the spirit of hope we witnessed over and over, when he said (Disturbing the Peace: A Conversation with Karel Huizdala): 'Either we have hope within us or we don't, it is a dimension of the soul, and it's not essentially dependent on some particular observation of the world or estimate of the situation...Hope in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well or the willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously headed for early success, but rather, an ability to work for something because it is good, not just because it stands a chance to succeed...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'."
"The Rural ENT Foundation could be replicated anywhere there were doctors and people in need of medical care. But it wasn't. MTV or an MTV-like spin-off, was on TV in almost every country we visited, while Soul City was limited to South Africa...When it came to delivery and ability to scale, the private sector had and still has so much to teach most not-for-profits, which is why we have long believed that private involvement in social entrepreneurial activity is essential: uniting the entrepreneurs and entrepreneurial efforts of both sectors is where breakthrough change will come from. Too often, what philanthropic support could be obtained was focused more on starting up a new idea or organization, or responding to a foundation's program guidelines, rather than figuring out how to replicate and grow a successful existing effort, or how to change government policy as a result of that successful innovation."
Ch. 6 - Saving AmeriCorps
"After fifteen years of fighting to get America to embrace national service in a new way, it was unfathomable to realize it could all be wiped out in an instant, with no warning, no explanation, and no good reason. I immediately thought of the tens of thousands of young people who had committed themselves to a year of service and who had put off college or other work opportunities, or for whom AmeriCorps was the best chance to get their lives on track. Thousands of schools and community-based organizations and hundreds of thousands of children all over America were depending on these dedicated and idealistic volunteers.
Ch. 9 - The Long Campaign For Big Citizenship And Common Purpose
"...I have become convinced of an overall view. We need a fundamentally new approach to how we meet the challenges and seize the opportunities of our times. This requires moving beyond the stale debate of big government versus no government to embrace a new public philosophy of Big Citizenship and Common Purpose. Globalization...has opened up a host of new possibilities in education and economic development. New citizen movements are possible as are, unfortunately, new terrorist organizations. The march of democracy from sixty-nine democracies in the world when the Berlin Wall came down to 119 today is a source of great hope; the displacement of communities as jobs are relocated or lost can be a source of great despair. Many of the challenges of our times are interrelated and cannot be addressed in silos. Climate change is not only an environmental issue, but also an economic issue, an energy issue, a national security issue, and an issue that requires global diplomacy and international agreement to successfully confront it. It also provides the opportunity to embrace a clean energy revolution that could provide millions of new jobs."
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Proudly putting my stamp of approval on this one, y'all.
