ENCORE You’ve been talking about taking AmeriCorps from 75,000 people each year to a million, and Peace Corp from 7,500 to 100,000. How do we get things ramped up at that kind of level?

KHAZEI National service is a fabulous idea and the real impact is if we get up to scale. I feel like national service is a systemic solution to a lot of different challenges, but the big impact is when it becomes universal. I use the number of a million because that would be one out of four 18-year-olds in the country. You start to get to critical mass, both in terms of the impact that people can have on all the problems that can be addressed in education and the environment, housing, poverty, etc., but also in the spillover effects.

They vote at much higher rates. They volunteer at much higher rates. They contribute to causes, political and otherwise at much higher rates. They continue to volunteer and to lead other people in volunteering at much higher rates than their peers. They make and maintain friendships with people who are from diverse backgrounds. So it has a tremendous impact both in terms of the work that gets done as well as the spill over effects for the rest of their lives.

If we really had a million people a year doing national service that would fundamentally change the country. If the Peace Corps had gotten to 100,000 people a year by, say, 1965 we’d have now four million people in America who would have had an intensive international experience. Just think of how that would affect our foreign policy and how it would effect the world’s view of America. So the value of these ideas at scale is just enormous and right now.

I love AmeriCorps but it’s still a drop in the bucket and it’s not transforming the country.
I think we could get to a million people a year in AmeriCorps and some kind of civilian national service program if we phased it in over time. You could easily grow AmeriCorps over a ten year period to a million people.

The genius of AmeriCorps is that it’s not one federal program. It releases the entrepreneurial energy of a lot of different people. I would change the funding structure to put grantees into three buckets -- Start-ups, sustaining organizations and growth organizations. Start-ups being people are just getting off the ground. Sustaining, organizations that have reached a certain level and they just want to have modest annual growth. And scaling organizations – like Teach for America or City Year or Experience Corps or Jump Start -- that really want to try to get to every community in the country.

If you staged it like that you’d have different levels, you could be much more of a strategic funder, the way venture capital firms or investment banks are. The private marketplace doesn’t treat every single business the same way. There are different levels of capital and opportunities to generate capital at different stages.

We know Teach for America works. It’s 25 or 28 communities now. Why shouldn’t it be in every single community in the country that needs it? We know it works and they’ve demonstrated they know how to do it and they’ve demonstrated they know how to grow it.

The other way you could get to real scale when it comes to national service, is to have a piece of a national service system that was a service fellowship or a voucher. People who want to do national service would apply, they’d get a voucher and then that voucher could cover some percentage of their stipend. They could take that to any number of approved non-profits. There are 1.9 million non-profits in the country now. If you had a system where you say to anybody who is willing to serve their country for a year at some level of minimal compensation, ‘We’ll get you a voucher,’ then you can just take it into the market.

Let’s say all four million people in America who turn 18 wanted to do national service. How could you possibly have the opportunities? Well if you just said you could use this voucher in any approved non-profit, you could find the spots for people. There are almost two million non-profits in the country now. So let’s say if every single one of them took one person, that’s half the cohort right there.

ENCORE The argument against all of this is always that it’s too expensive?

KHAZEI It would be anywhere from $10,000 to $15,000 a person, depending on the post-service education award, the level of the stipend, the matching funds. If you’re talking a million people you’re probably talking a minimum of $10 billion, $15 billion.

That’s significant, but when you look at other things that we spend money on…the GI Bill at it’s height was $50 billion dollars in one year. And it’s seen as one of the best pieces of social policy we ever did. We spend now close to $13 billion a year on Pell Grants – another great thing. The war is everybody’s favorite. We’re spending $10 billion, $12 billion a month on the war. You could have a full scale national service program for one month of the war.

And it’s not just money down the drain. There have been a number of studies that have shown that for every dollar invested in national service there’s anywhere from $1.60 to $2.60 return on investment. That’s in social benefits back to the society, whether it’s kids being tutored, vacant lots turned into playgrounds and parks, etc. It’s an investment that pays for itself.

And the federal government is not paying the full cost. The private sector contributes. You could have national service system with a federal government contribution, a state and local government contribution and the private sector. Because it’s not a federal program, it’s a federal funding source. At City Year, for example, we raise two dollars privately for every dollar we get from the federal government. You could grow things to scale more rapidly if government resources were leveraged in a different way.

For example, part of our national service agenda that we’re pushing is a new commitment to international service. There are two levels on that. We should grow the Peace Corps but in addition to that I think we should have an AmeriCorps-type program for international service. The genius of AmeriCorps was it didn’t set up a new government program. It leveraged the existing non-profit structure that was out there and encouraged new innovations by setting standards and regulations and providing funding. I love the Peace Corps. It’s a great program. The Peace Corps is 7,500 people. AmeriCorps is 75,000. And part of the reason AmeriCorps has scaled – even though it’s not nearly where it should be – is that it’s not one big federal program. There are 2,000 AmeriCorps programs. It’s hard to run one big federal bureaucracy.

Habitat for Humanity is an AmeriCorps program domestically. They operate all over the world. The Red Cross, Heifer International, City Years is now working abroad, Teach for America is going abroad. If there was funding available that said hey we’ll give you money for stipends and for a post-service award and a little bit for training, I think you could have a 100,000 people in international service within a few years.

Second, it would be fabulous if America took the lead in organizing a truly global service corps that says we’re not going to do it all. We’re going to serve alongside Asians and Africans and Latin Americans and Europeans and Middle Easterners and whatnot. What a statement that would be to the world, of bringing people together.

ENCORE You’ve said that ‘encore service’ is a key piece of any national service proposal.

KHAZEI The next big frontier for the idea of national service in our country is this encore service.

I can’t tell you the number of baby boomers that have approached me and said, ‘Can you start a City Year for me? I want to do this. This generation of boomers, they grew up in the 60s, they were the generation that was called by Jack Kennedy. They were part of that whole movement for change in the 60s, whether it was civil rights, women’s rights or ending the war or the environmental movement. So it’s in their DNA and in their roots. That’s number one.

Number two, people are retiring. I think that people just don’t want to go play golf and they didn’t necessarily want continue their traditional work. There is a big desire to give back, to participate, get involved in non-profit and charitable activities.

Our third reason is they have real experience. They can add real value in a whole variety of areas.

And fourthly, they’re needed. There is a big human solution to a lot of our problems whether it’s in education or fighting poverty or community development. And again this generation, this encore generation, this baby boomer generation that is just starting to get to that traditional retirement age, has tremendous ability to make a difference on these problems.

We’re in a time where the social sector has grown significantly. It’s the fastest growing sector. So there’s more capacity to absorb people. The Internet makes it possible to organize people in a different way, to raise money in a different way. It is the next big frontier for the idea of national service.

ENCORE What would be different in an encore service model than a youth service model?

KHAZEI My guess is that most people who are at that encore level – or at least a number of people -- won’t necessarily want to do a full-time 45-, 50-, 60-hour week. At City Year or Teach for America, they’re often doing 50 or 60 hours a week because they don’t have the experience so they make up for it with energy, and also they’re just young.

For an encore, more people will want to do 20 hours or week or 25. Or maybe they want to do four days a week or three days a week. Some people would want to do an intensive six-month engagement as opposed to committing for a full year.

ENCORE Maybe not. If City Year is the gap year between school and something else, maybe it’s not for these older folks. Maybe this in fact is where they’ve arrived after their earlier career. Maybe it’s a five year thing.

KHAZEI That’s exactly right. They may say I’m going to do four days a week but I’m going to make a four or five year commitment. Some of them may do it full time. We need to do some work into figuring out what are the opportunities.

I also think that for Encore people – and this applies to the younger generation too – there will be a big interest serving abroad. I have a lot of friends that when they retire, they want to travel. They want to have another experience in another country. I think that’s a huge area of opportunity and need, again because they have real experience.

I also think there are interesting intergenerational opportunities. There are a lot of young people doing service or starting organizations and you could get Encore people to be board members, to be lead staffers. Alot of the challenges in startups are, who is going to do your accounting? Who’s going to do your legal work? Who’s going to do your infrastructure? Who’s going to do your marketing and communications? A lot of social entrepreneurs can take advantage of Encore people for the stuff that you really need expertise like accounting, legal, marketing, all that stuff that any startup non-profit needs. Young people come in with incredible ideas and energy and enthusiasm but don’t have that expertise.

ENCORE What is Be the Change?

KHAZEI Gandhi said you need the three keys to building a democratic and just society: the ballot, the spinning wheel and the jail. The ballot is political rights and political activity. The spinning wheel is service and the jail is civil disobedience or mass citizen action.

I spent twenty years in the service movement, doing the spinning wheel work. I’ve come to realize that we need to get people more engaged on the policy side and on the mass citizen action side. Be the Change is a different kind of action tank or think tank to work on a bold agenda for the country, geared at 2020. That’s a long enough time horizon that you can really think systemically but short enough that we can actually see whether we can we get there.

Rather than trying to rely on a handful of really smart people in any given area to come up with the answers, we’re starting to convene social entrepreneurs and practitioners along with a few policy experts in different issue areas. We say, ‘Okay if you were in charge, based on what you’ve learned making hands on grass root change and at the national level, what would you do?’

We’re just getting started on education, but I’ve started to talk to people who are some of the leaders in that field and when you start bringing the people together, a) they do have good ideas and b) they have hands on experience.

We’re totally non partisan and it’s not ideological. We want to ground stuff in things that work, that have real world experience. There are schools out there like the Kipp schools that are showing a longer school day and a longer school year and different standards can succeed with kids who traditionally people thought couldn’t succeed. Teach for America is showing you that you can recruit the best and the brightest in the teaching. There are a number of examples and what I’m trying to do is bring these people together. Try to tease out form them what is a vision of a new approach and then help to build a base of citizen support for that change.

My partner Michael has this wonderful notion he came up with which he calls the social entrepreneur’s trap. Basically, how much time do you spend building organization versus how much time do you spend on the larger movement that you’re a part of? Generally the pressure is, you know, to focus on your own organization because your funders want you to do that, your supporters, your clients. What I’m trying to do is help to deal with that trap by saying, Can we build an infrastructure that allows you to participate in a larger movement but really leverages your time and energy?