ServiceNation is the next step in Alan Khazei’s 20-year quest to make national service a force for social change.

Khazei, a member of the Encore Leadership Network, talked with Encore.org about his organizing strategies in our latest Encore Leadership Interview.

Khazei’s quest started in 1988, when he cofounded City Year with 50 young people in Boston. City Year now enlists more than 1,500 young adults each year and operates in 18 American cities and in Johannesburg, South Africa, where they serve as teachers’ aides, run after-school programs and school vacation camps, teach violence and AIDS prevention, rehabilitate public housing units and build parks and playgrounds. The writer E.J. Dionne, Jr., called City Year, “a peaceful revolution against cynicism, despair and selfishness.”

City Year served as the model for AmeriCorps, the national service program established by President Bill Clinton in 1993, which offers service opportunities to approximately 75,000 people each year. It was the near-death of AmeriCorps in 2003, and the successful effort to save it, that led Khazei to begin thinking about his next step. The Strengthen AmeriCorps Program Act, signed by President Bush in 2003, nearly doubled the number of AmeriCorps members. AmeriCorps funding has declined since then, however.

“That was a good experience in terms of making change and seeing the value of both a grass roots and a ‘grass tops’ strategy,” Khazei said in the interview. “But once we all went back to our day jobs of running our programs, the support wasn’t there. I realized that if we’re really going to make change we’ve got to take this energy that is in the two movements that I’ve been a part of — the national service movement and the social entrepreneurship movement — and bring it to policy and to citizen mobilization.”

That thinking led Khazei to establish Be the Change, which has bold plans to transform education and tackle other huge challenges after it succeeds in promoting a vast expansion of national service. ServiceNation, which has attracted a long list of leaders to its summit gathering this week, is the organization’s first major initiative.

Read the full interview.