Project YouthPact: Youth Perspectives of Public Service

By Alexander Chaitoff, Dheeraj Duggineni, Sejal Hathi and 2 more

Now, more than ever, the complexity and interconnectedness of the world’s challenges demand that we embolden young, capable, and inspired service leaders to conceive of novel ways to address them. Many young people express an interest in social issues, yet while thousands enter college each year hungry to serve the greater good, competitive pressures and stark economic realities have pushed many to abandon these aspirations and choose careers more remunerative, if less civically impactful.

So why do some youth persist and still live with a public service mindset? This is where this project, this book, comes in. In communities across the country, students and young professionals are committing their talents and passions to produce sustainable social good. Each of them has come to this work for a reason, and each cherishes a powerful story.

This is why Project YouthPact, which was started by a group of students, collected stories from young individuals who have resisted the self-interested path in order to act on ideals larger than themselves. "Project YouthPact: Youth Perspectives of Public Service" contains the perspectives from 30 young individuals from around the world. These stories range from the extraordinary student-turned-social entrepreneur to the high school student volunteering for a club. They are written in a variety of styles, from narrative to expository. All are followed by discussion questions to help young adults interact with the text and truly reflect on what a life acting on public service ideals might entail.

In this way, this book is different from all other products currently on the market. By embodying a variety of stories, themes, and styles, this is a book written specifically with the wide and diverse young adult population in-mind; it is hoped that at least one story will speak to each reader. That the initiative was supported by over two dozen organizations as well as prominent leaders in public service speaks to its unique and important mission.

Project YouthPact was conceptualized to empower the next generation of students to discover the value of public service, and the collaborative effort resulted in this book that equips readers with the wisdom, the tools, and the courage to choose to act on public service ideals.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Alexander Chaitoff
• Release date: Jun 9, 2015
• ISBN: 9781311525826

Book preview

I. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

"The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others."

-Ralph Waldo Emerson

Project YouthPact is a collaboration in the truest sense of the word: from its preface to the conclusion, its introduction to the 30 vignettes, the Project YouthPact anthology makes manifest the visions and aspirations of dozens of individuals across the globe. More than 30 organizations facilitated outreach for the initiative or offered their support in other ways, and a panel of distinguished leaders reviewed screened entries. For their partnership and consideration, we would like to express special gratitude to the following organizations and individuals:

Organizations

• AMOS Health and Hope

• Ashoka's Youth Venture

• Atlas Corps

• Campaign for a Presidential Youth Council

• Columbus Council on World Affairs

• Engineers Without Borders - USA (DC Chapter)

• Girltank

• Global Brigades

• GlobeMed

• Honor Good Deeds

• Independent Thought and Social Action (ITSA) in India

• Junior State of America

• Just Save 1

• Knowledge Aid

• Megabook Initiative

• Music is Medicine

• Nspire

• One Bead

• PovSolve

• Project MASH

• Project Nicaragua

• Pure Water Access Project, Inc.

• Recesspreneurs

• Roosevelt Institute Campus Network

• S2 Capital

• SHARE in Africa

• The Ohio State University

• Three Dot Dash

• We Are Family Foundation

• World STEM Works

• Youth Service America

Reviewers

• Alec Ross

- Alec Ross served as Secretary of State Hillary Clinton’s Senior Advisor for Innovation for the duration of her term. In 2010, Ross was named one of both Devex’s 40 Under 40 Leaders in International Development, and The Huffington Post’s Game Changers in politics. He is also one of Politico's 50 Politicos to Watch as for bringing transformative change to the government. Foreign Policy magazine named Ross a Top Global Thinker in 2011. And in 2012, Newsweek named Ross to its Digital Power Index Top 100 influencers, listing him with other public servants defining digital regulatory boundaries.

• Andrew Rich

- Dr. Andrew Rich became Executive Secretary of the Truman Scholarship Foundation in October 2011. As Executive Secretary, he directs the independent federal agency that provides merit-based Truman Scholarships to college students who plan to attend graduate school in preparation for careers in public service. Prior to his current role, Dr. Rich was President and CEO of the Roosevelt Institute, an associate professor and chairman of the Political Science Department at the City College of New York (CCNY), and Deputy Director and Director of Programs at CCNY’s Colin Powell Center for Policy Studies.

• Douglas Kridler

- Douglas Kridler is the fifth president of The Columbus Foundation, a community foundation serving the central Ohio region since 1943. Kridler’s honors include: #1 Civic CEO, CEO Magazine, April 2005; an Honorary Doctorate in Humanities from Capital University in December 2004; The Huntington’s Disease Society of America’s Central Ohio Chapter’s Distinguished Leadership in the Arts award in September 2001; The Public Relations Society of America 1997 Prism Award for Citizen of the Year; and the 1995 Governor’s Awards for the Arts by the Ohio Arts Council in the category of Arts Administration.

• Gordon Gee

- Dr. Gordon Gee is currently serving as President of West Virginia University. Previously, he was Professor Emeritus at The Ohio State University and has served as president or chancellor of numerous universities, including Brown, Vanderbilt, The University of Colorado, and The Ohio State University. In 2009, Time Magazine named him one of the top 10 university presidents in the United States.

• Sonal Shah

- Sonal Shah is currently a Senior Fellow at the Case Foundation. Previously, she served as the Deputy Assistant to the President and Director of the first White House Office of Social Innovation and Civic Participation, as a member of President Obama’s Transition Board, as a leader at Google.org, as a Vice President at Goldman Sachs, and as an economist at the Department of Treasury.

All authors’ names are listed above their respective pieces. Victoria Chaitoff contributed the introduction and conclusion.

In addition to the aforementioned individuals, the leadership team would like to thank the entire Truman Scholar community for its willingness to challenge the premise and advance the vision of Project YouthPact— as well as our family members, without whom we might never have been empowered enough to endeavor together this work.

Alexander Chaitoff

Dheeraj Duggineni

Sejal Hathi

Rahul Rekhi

Shuvro Roy

II. INTRODUCTION

"For what are we born if not to aid one another."

-For Whom the Bell Tolls

Can we maybe just talk about what public service is, exactly?

We can! We totally can. Except, bad news: this introduction didn’t come with an instruction manual. I didn’t realize that when I agreed to write it.

You see, a bunch of do-gooders approached me because apparently public servants can’t write anything that will keep an audience’s attention long enough to get to the good stuff (the 30 vignettes from real, young public servants that make up the bulk of this book).

Maybe that explains why CSPAN isn’t interesting.

I feel a little bit like I’m being asked to build the LEGO model of the Millennium Falcon without looking at the directions. It’s 5,195 pieces. That’s a lot of pieces. But, hey, we’re here together, right? We’ll work through this side-by-side - or, more accurately, word-by-word. One plastic brick at a time. We’ll just start at the very beginning (a very good place to start): what is public service?

Like most things, if you ask multiple people, you’ll get multiple answers. To some, if you’re not spending your days constructing latrines in poverty-stricken villages, you’re not doing public service right. To others, public service is simply writing checks to charities a couple of times per year. Others think of public service as a set of careers in government or education or with some type of nonprofit organization. We think the issue is a bit more complicated than that.

Let’s turn to the ultimate source of truth, shall we? According to Wikipedia, A public service is a service which is provided by government to people living within its jurisdiction, either directly (through the public sector) or by financing provision of services.

Ok. Somehow I’m thinking that Wikipedia’s information here isn’t entirely accurate.

Don’t get me wrong - that definition holds in it some legitimacy. A portion of public service is indeed based in government. There are plenty of governmental programs in the United States that focus on making improvements within the public sector, such as Social Security, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families, Medicaid and Medicare, the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program, and the Head Start program. Certain departments concentrate almost entirely on enhancing social welfare, including the Department of Housing and Urban Development and the Department of Health and Human Services. But although the government has its place in public service, it is only one small aspect of a much larger whole.

Maybe we should take it to the next level: the Merriam-Webster online dictionary. Merriam-Webster defines public service as something that is done to help people rather than to make a profit. Now that’s beautiful, isn’t it?

Unfortunately, that view is similarly limited. Based on that definition Willy Wonka would be the quintessential public servant, because he sure wasn’t about to make a profit by turning over his multi-million dollar company to a kid with no business experience.

See, we live in this place called the real world (the non-MTV version), and money matters. Money matters a lot, and going into public service doesn’t mean suggesting that all things material are bad. In fact, oftentimes it’s just the opposite. Some public servants, especially social entrepreneurs, harness the power of markets to help people. Take for example Housing Works, which is a healing community for individuals with HIV/AIDS. This group helps the homeless and those living with disease, funding itself through thrift shops, catering networks, and bookstores, which creates a self-sustaining model to continue its social missions.

There are plenty of examples of these types of businesses. Opower, Solar Sister, Seventh Generation, and others aren’t looking at profits as negative, but rather as tools to do good! Even the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation is behind the movement, providing large sums of money to well-known groups, like Ashoka, to foster social innovation. One of the most eminent public servants in the world, Muhammad Yunus, explains the philosophy behind businesses that seek both profit and to promote social welfare. Haven’t heard of him? Walk with me:

Professor Yunus founded the first official Grameen Bank in Jobra, Bangladesh in 1983. A decade earlier, as the Head of the Rural Economics Program at University of Chittagong, he had launched an action research project to examine the feasibility of designing a credit delivery system to provide banking services targeted at the poor. From its humble beginnings in Jobra more than 30 years ago, Grameen Bank has expanded to over 2,500 branches in nearly 82,000 villages. Since its inception, the bank has disbursed more than $12 billion in loans to its borrowers. Moreover, in 2006, Yunus and the entirety of the Grameen Bank were awarded the Nobel Peace Prize for their efforts to create economic and social development from below.

I mean, last week I ate an entire roll of cookie dough in under an hour. I think that’s equally deserving of worldwide recognition. Still, Yunus seems to be onto something with this venture. In his book Creating a World Without Poverty: Social Business and the Future of Capitalism, Yunus coins this term social business. According to his definition, A social business aims for full cost recovery, or more, even as it concentrates on creating products or services that provide a social benefit. It pursues this goal by charging a price or fee for the products or services it creates.

One popular example of a social business that you may recognize is TOMS. Just in case you haven’t seen this footwear phenomenon, I’ll give you a quick background: it all started on the The Amazing Race. That’s not a joke - TOMS founder Blake Mycoskie competed on the show’s second season. Following his stint in reality television, Mycoskie visited Argentina. He noticed that the children in one of the villages had no shoes to protect their feet and realized that he wanted to help. Thus, TOMS was born.

TOMS is built on a One for One model (a model that has both proponents and opponents, but that’s a debate for a different kind of book). For every pair of shoes they sell, they give one to an impoverished child. As of now, TOMS has donated 10 million pairs of shoes to children in more than 60 countries, everywhere from Belize to Kyrgyzstan to Senegal. In the recent years TOMS has used their success to expand upon the original One for One concept, and they now offer a similar deal with eyewear. Already they have helped restore sight, by providing funding for prescription glasses or medical treatment, to more than 150,000 individuals across the globe.

Not bad, right?

Of course, not every company focuses so intently upon improving public welfare. It’s kind of a jungle out there in the business world - so what about the ravenous beasts that are big-name corporations? Can people working for them still consider themselves public servants?

Probably, at least, in some instances. All the Fortune 500 companies you might think of (and the other 427 of which you haven’t heard) donate incredible amounts of money every year, essentially keeping the nonprofit community afloat. Sure, your bake sale may raise a couple hundred dollars for a cause - and that’s awesome. But it’s the millions donated by companies like Ford, Coca-Cola and even (gasp!) the oil companies that provide the over 1.6 million nonprofit organizations in the United States with a lot of their funding. Many of these companies even have areas of their companies dedicated to philanthropy.

Just a quick aside in case you’re wondering: no, you probably shouldn’t go into job interviews suggesting your experience in hedge fund management is a great example of public service.

But picking back up, are these companies perfect? Heck no. If you go into investment banking, can you call yourself a public servant? Definitely up for a debate (that will probably end with a no). But that’s not to say that acting as Director of Philanthropy for one of these corporations or their nonprofit arms won’t provide you with some of the greatest resources to create change. Can you imagine being in charge of the almost $64 million that Kroger gives to charity each year? How about the $55 million Morgan Stanley provides? You’re right. Those numbers aren’t really all that. Pocket change, really. How about the almost $200 million that Wal-Mart, the Bank of America, and Exxon Mobile provide - each?

Even still, while it’s pretty clear now that profits can be important for public servants just like it is for everybody else, it’s still too narrow a view. Social businesses and big corporations have their own place in public service, and they are definitely an important part of a greater whole. But still there is the notion of this whole, and it isn’t composed solely of moneymakers.

Let’s roll on back to that Merriam-Webster definition of public service: doing something to help people instead of making a profit. We’ve established that sometimes money is involved in or even integral to public service - but you know what? Sometimes it’s not! There are absolutely people (and organizations) out there whose motivation is rooted in the desire to help others. So where would one find this miraculous breed? Well, just look around. Public service is to the world as Tim Hortons’ are to Canada - in a word, it’s everywhere.

A common area in which public service tends to rear its head is medicine. Of course, doctors and nurses are, in a sense, contributing to societal wellbeing just by doing their jobs; however, there are those who practice medicine, and those who propel medicine.

One of the most eminent public servants in the medical field is Doctor Ben Carson, president and co-founder of the Carson Scholars Fund. This fund, which started awarding scholarships in 1996, supports two main programs: Carson Scholarships and the Ben Carson Reading Project (they were very creative with the names). The former recognizes students who have embraced high levels of academic excellence and community service, while the latter provides funding to schools so that they may build and maintain reading rooms.

Dr. Carson also helped establish Angels of