5 Reasons All Americans Should Support Mandatory National Service

AmeriCorps VISTA radically altered the course of my life, and I think service opportunities (in any form) could do the same for many other people. Instituting mandatory National Service could provide meaning, purpose, and a sense of connectedness for tens of millions of young people. National Service could radically transform our current approach to higher education — both in terms of exposing young people to potential career paths and creating a new way to pay for continuing education. National Service could provide the people-power necessary to address some of our country’s biggest socioeconomic and environmental challenges. And, most importantly of all, National Service could mark the beginning of a potent new patriotism based on selflessness and empathy.

How I Found AmeriCorps

After graduating from college in 2008, I wanted to go to law school, so I moved back to my hometown of Richmond, VA and started working at a local law firm to get a taste for the field while I studied for the LSAT. To my complete surprise, I loved my co-workers, but I hated the job. My day-to-day workload consisted of thumbing through injured peoples’ medical records to help find ways to defend insurance companies against accident claims.

In an effort to salvage some meaning in my life, I started taking time off from work to volunteer in the community. I helped out at the local Holocaust Museum, “urban gardened” at the science museum, and even got an internship with the City of Richmond’s Economic Development Department. Sadly, none of these opportunities truly resonated with me, and I was on the verge of giving up (being a lawyer must be better than being a paralegal, right?) when I stumbled on Project Homeless Connect (PHC).

PHC is a one-day resource fair for people experiencing homelessness. Picture a job fair but throw in housing providers, medical services, showers, and food. I would later learn that Project Homeless Connect started in San Francisco in the mid-2000s and has now been replicated in hundreds of communities around the world.

Shortly after arriving at my first PHC event in the fall of 2009, I was connected with an elderly homeless woman named Mary. My assignment was to help her navigate the event space, which filled an entire exhibit hall at the Richmond Convention Center. We connected with employers, free dental services, and a healthcare provider for people with HIV/AIDs (she was the first person I had ever met with HIV/AIDs).

We had a great time together, but after about an hour, it felt like Mary hadn’t really made the connection that was going to help her end her homelessness, so I turned to her and asked what I should have asked in the beginning, “What do you think you need?” She leveled me with her quiet reply, “I just need help finding an apartment.” I smiled at the simplicity of the request and told her we weren’t going to find a landlord wandering around the convention center, so we went over to one of the event organizers and asked if we could leave to go look for apartments. I was hooked.

After my experience with PHC, I wanted to make community service a central part of my life, and that’s when I discovered AmeriCorps. Founded in 1965, AmeriCorps is the domestic version of the PeaceCorps, which is a federal program that coordinates long-term volunteer assignments in “difficult” parts of the world. There are a variety of AmeriCorps programs, and I gravitated towards VISTA.

VISTAs, like PeaceCorps volunteers, are supposed to provide “indirect” service. The best way to think about indirect service is to imagine a tutoring program. If you want to provide direct service, you would become a tutor. If you want to provide indirect service, you would either start or manage the program. The goal of VISTA is to help nonprofits and government agencies create or sustain additional capacity. Neither direct nor indirect service is better than the other — they are both critical and are both important ways to serve.

With VISTA, rather than being randomly assigned to a role, you actually apply for year-long positions. I was looking for assignments anywhere west of the Mississippi, and as fate would have it, the City of San Jose was recruiting for the “Santa Clara County Project Homeless Connect Coordinator.” I had zero experience with event planning or community organizing, let alone homeless outreach, but I felt like this was too big of a coincidence to pass up. I pleaded my case, and somehow got the job. I didn’t know a single person in the San Francisco Bay Area, but in June of 2010, I packed up everything I owned and drove across the country for a fresh start.

Almost 10 Years Later

A lot has happened since that initial move. During my year with VISTA, I ended up coordinating 14 Project Homeless Connect events throughout Santa Clara County, including a 500+ person event at San Jose’s City Hall.

After VISTA, I got a job with Downtown Streets Team (DST). DST is a Bay Area-based nonprofit that provides volunteer work experience opportunities for people experiencing homelessness. By sweeping streets, cleaning up parks, and providing outreach to other people on the street, people rebuild their ability to obtain regular employment.

I was the first Employment Developer for DST (i.e. the person helping program participants — or “Team Members” — get jobs). At DST we successfully placed people who hadn’t worked in 20+ years, people with felonies, people with developmental challenges, or often all of these challenges at once.

Two years after starting with DST, I relocated to Marin County, CA (the community immediately north of the Golden Gate Bridge) to launch a new branch of the program in San Rafael, CA. With just 60,000 people, San Rafael is the “largest” city in this affluent county outside of San Francisco. I spent almost three years building up the DST program in Marin.

In 2016 I became the Director of Homeless Planning and Outreach with the City of San Rafael. This is a unique role that most small to medium-sized cities do not have. Working as a peer to the Fire Chief, Police Chief, City Attorney, and the rest of the executive management team, the position was meant to bring a strategic focus to addressing homelessness. In that role I have helped launch a new outreach program for chronically homeless people called the HOT Team; helped develop a new countywide strategic framework for prioritizing chronically homeless people for supportive housing; launched a mobile shower program; created a countywide affordable housing collaborative; and worked on a variety of real estate projects.

As I now enter my 10th year of doing this work, I never would have found this path if it weren’t for National Service.

#1 A Lifelong Commitment to Public Service

AmeriCorps VISTA was my gateway to a career in public service. I had been completely convinced that I wanted to be a lawyer. Even after I knew it wasn’t for me, it was still alluring. Why? Our culture tells us that the pursuit of money, power, and influence are more important than anything else. However, even a small dose of public service reminds us that compassion, generosity, and selflessness are what really matter, and once you realize that, why would you want to do anything else?

I know countless people who have had this realization after early exposure to public service. Of my original AmeriCorps VISTA cohort, one person moved up to a management role with AmeriCorps itself, another went on to work in corporate social responsibility, and another still is running a large nonprofit program in San Francisco. My wife, an alum of Teach for America, has spent nine years working in low-income schools in the Bay Area. My current boss, San Rafael’s City Manager, spent two years with the PeaceCorps in West Africa. He has worked in local government ever since.

Not everyone who is exposed to public service stays in it. That’s totally fine and not what I’m advocating. Importantly though, there is plenty of evidence to suggest public service does in fact leave an indelible mark on those who experience it; it’s difficult to shake the values and ethics it instills. As Teach for America describes of its 50,000+ alumni, “They could not turn away. They could not stop caring about the students who had touched their hearts and broadened their minds. They could not stop thinking about about the passion and potential waiting to be unlocked. They could not forget the lessons taught and learned … [this is why] they continue to work toward educational equity.”

At a moment of such deep division, partisanship, and isolation, what would it feel like if more of us had a lifelong calling to help others?

#2 Exploratory for Young Adults

Beyond creating more compassionate people, I’ve come to realize that National Service has some “logistical” strengths going for it as well.

When I think back to middle school, I can’t remember too many specifics from history, science, or math, but for whatever reason, I do vividly remember the first time I tried to sew in “Home Ec.” It wasn’t just theory. It was one of the most practical things I had ever learned in school.

Home Ec had been part of a year long rotation of shorter classes — drama, typing, shop — called “Exploratory” that had been designed to expose students to a variety of different skill sets to see if they sparked a deeper passion that students would want to pursue in future years.

College is meant to serve this same function, especially at Liberal Arts schools. Students expose themselves to a variety of different subjects and eventually pick something they want to major in. While this is all well and good, there are some major downsides to our current system.

• A minority of Americans actually get to experience and benefit from this system of exploration. Approximately 84% of Americans graduate from high school, and of that group, 70% go to college (meaning less than 60% of 18-year-olds go to college). Of that group, only 54% complete a credential within eight years of first enrolling (meaning just 1/3 of the original group ends up with a degree).
• While people with a college degree do earn significantly more than those without one, the cost of the experience is huge. Among the Class of 2018, 69% of college students took out student loans, and they graduated with an average debt of $29,800. Americans now owe over $1.5 trillion in school loan debt (this includes people who never graduated and, thus, never gained the economic benefit of the degree).

What if there was an alternative way to expose young people to different career paths? You don’t have to attend college to learn about engineering, healthcare, or education. Mandatory National Service could expose ALL young people to these fields. Like middle school exploratory, what if young people could spend a few months building a clean energy project, a few months constructing affordable homes for low-income families, a few months helping senior citizens, or a few months tutoring at a school? Like I learned as a paralegal, you only need a few months on the job to know whether or not a career is for you.

#3 Funding Continued Education vs. College

As the 2020 Election heats up, many Democratic presidential candidates like Bernie Sanders and Elizabeth Warren are calling for free college tuition. While I think no-strings-attached investment in young people is a no-brainer, is universal college really the answer?

If National Service becomes our collective “exploratory,” young people will have a better idea of what type of work they want to do in the future. Rather than saying young people then need to go to college, we could simply fund “continuing education scholarships.” When I did AmeriCorps, I got a $5,000 educational scholarship, which I later used for grad school. This amount could be doubled, tripled, or quadrupled.

If tens of millions of Americans suddenly had these scholarships, I believe the education market (let’s not kid ourselves, education is a business) would fundamentally shift to match the nuanced interests of young people who had a better idea of what they wanted to do for a living and who suddenly had the resources to pay for more tailored paths of study. Right now college is four years — why? Why can’t it be three years or even two? There are many other training and degree programs that are much shorter, especially for people who know exactly what they want to do.

For those individuals who still want to go college, that’s great, and I totally applaud that, but what I love above having college AFTER National Service is that young people would apply to schools based on their actual work ethic, real world career interests, and track record during their service. Whether we want to admit it or not, our current educational “meritocracy” is largely shaped by who our parents are and where we grow up, not necessarily our ability to work hard, help others, and demonstrate the content of our character.

#4 Our Country Has Some Major Challenges

Homelessness is at crisis levels in many of America’s biggest cities. Signs of the climate crisis are increasingly evident in our day-to-day lives. Healthcare and housing costs continue to rise. Suicides and drug overdoses are lowering life expectancy. Our mental health system is a hollow shell of what it used to be.

America isn’t lacking for challenges at the beginning of the 21st Century; instead, there are a lack of opportunities for regular people to get involved and help out. Think of all of the amazing projects an army of young Americans could tackle:

• Installing high-speed internet and broadband in rural communities
• Building solar and wind energy projects
• Tutoring young people in struggling neighborhoods
• Creating pop-up health clinics in under-served communities
• Planting urban gardens
• Constructing seawalls for coastal cities
• Removing plastic and other waste from parks and waterways

Let’s take just one example — planting trees. This relatively simple act requires nothing more than some seeds, some shovels, some watering cans, and some people. On just one day in 2017, 1.5 million volunteers in India planted 66 million trees. A new study from National Geographic has found that planting enough trees could completely reverse the damage that has been done by emitting so much carbon into the atmosphere. We don’t always need radical ideas — we just need more people helping out.

#5 A Deeper Respect for ALL Americans

If you ask me, reasons #1 through #4 are logical, rational no-brainers, but of course, everyone in America in 2019 believes that their ideas are logical, rational no-brainers, and anyone who disagrees is a close-minded idiot.

We are living through one of the most polarized and partisan periods in our country’s history. We seek agreement with those who already agree with us, and we are quick to dismiss differing perspectives. We have no problem lobbing mean and hurtful comments online even though we would never dare to say such things in-person. America in 2019 is less about building something amazing together and more about tearing each other down.

It is for these reasons that for me, Mandatory National Service’s greatest promise is its potential to restore our culture.

When I originally came to the Bay Area, I had no idea what to expect. I had spent my entire life in Virginia. Even though San Jose is the 10th largest city in the country, I had never heard of it before. In fact, I initially thought it was in Southern California.

We all think our town, our city, or our neighborhood are the middle of the universe, but they’re not. There are over 300 million people scattered across our vast and beautiful and sprawling country, yet less than half of us have visited more than 10 states.

I’ll never forget pulling off the freeway into San Jose. There were signs in languages I couldn’t read. There were people who looked very different from the people I grew up around. If I’m really honest, I thought I made a huge mistake.

Gradually, however, I began making new friends. I started eating new foods and participating in new cultural practices. I experienced profound generosity, openness, and love from people with very different backgrounds than me, and I gained radically new perspectives on what being an American meant for different people. Hesitancy turned into profound gratitude.

What if everyone could have that experience?

When I think about what mandatory National Service could do for our country, I genuinely get chills. I imagine sending young people from New York City to the middle of Kansas and Nebraska or sending young people from Alabama and Mississippi to Skid Row in Los Angeles. I imagine what this country would be like 20, 30, or 50 years from now, when you could ask almost any other living American — what did you do during your Service? What would our civic discourse be like then? What would it feel like to be an American then?

Like all of the best things that have ever happened in America, we don’t need to dream — we need to roll up our sleeves and make it happen.