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Subject Person. End Date. Start Date. Subject Geog Full Text. Description Place Made. Provenance Gifter. Title Item Name. Source Full Text. Contributor Full Text. Subject Organization Full Text. Subject Person Full Text. A dear friend of ours just got it, Hubie Jones, who's an unbelievable leader here in Boston. I think things like that. I mean, the great thing about AmeriCorps, even though it gets branded by young people, it's actually open to people of all ages.
One of the things that we pushed to add now is an Encore Fellowship Program so that we can attract Baby Boomers. Again, I'm hearing more and more, there is that latent idealism of the Baby Boomer generation.
I can't tell you the number of people who've come up to me who are Baby Boomers and said, "Where's the City Year for me? How do I do City Year? There's Experience Corps, which is another great one.
So they're out there. But, again, I think that that generation needs to be called again. Because the thing about the Baby Boomers … Young people are extraordinary because they have energy and idealism, and they can work all day and they will never give up, and they can connect, especially with younger kids because they're close in age.
But Boomers have unbelievable skills. They've done things, and we need to tap those. Our country's hurting. There are so many people who are struggling now. The recession, the number of people in poverty. We have the highest poverty rate we've had in a generation. It was a one-page story on the front page The New York Times.
We just had a whole election and it was never discussed. There are a lot of people who have talents and skills that we need. The non-profit sector is the fastest-growing sector in our society and we need more help. So I think there's a huge opportunity there. I also know that …I don't think it's Greedy Geezers.
I think it's people who if, again, they're called, they're given the opportunity, the organizations are invented or grown or scaled, we need a whole …I'd love to see , Boomers in. AmeriCorps, just that group, and then grow from there.
But, again, it's unbelievable talent that's waiting to be tapped. It's interesting to me to be part of this. As you know, universities, when they were originally organized, were essentially to help people at the beginning of their careers. In the 20th century, the universities began working with people in mid-career, a lot of these executive education programs. At Harvard, we have recently launched a pioneering effort to try to work with people at the end of their first careers in something called Advance Leadership Initiative.
Nitin Nohria, who's the Dean of the Business School, has been very heavily involved. I'm one of the faculty representatives from the Kennedy School.
We have seven or eight different schools now represented, and we've got our third class just now arrived. People come in for a semester, on residence, and then they come back for a variety of things in the second semester.
Most of them are going from private sector careers to working in the non-profit sector, and they want to come in and learn about best practices. They want a bit of a sabbatical. But they mostly want to get their heads around what can I do, how can I make a difference.
We've got a conference a few weeks away that one of these people has done on technology in education. And in effect, it's the Encore program from Civic Ventures. It's the same idea. What's the encore for these 20 years? While this is expensive and small at this point, I think it has enormous potential in a lot of different schools, universities if you can get the cost down. And what's been striking to me is how much the faculty want to be involved with it.
They really like working with that generation. They enjoy it. And people I thought would never give up an hour of time give hours and hours and hours because they care about it. It's very encouraging. I think there is something, I think Alan's right, there's something to be tapped out there. And to go to his fundamental point, it's about calling people.
You've really got to sort of say "come do this, try it out. But thanks for the question. Did you have a follow-up? Civic Ventures is attracting people across SES. It's pretty amazing. There's an inverse proportion. The lower income people actually volunteer more of their time at the local level; they understand the needs. Yes, sir?
Thank you very much. It's a great program. My name is Shaw McDermott. I picked up a book by a high school contemporary of mine, Thurston Clarke, on President Kennedy's speech, entitled, as you know, Ask Not. And I haven't gotten more than two pages into it, so I can't comment on the book, but I was wondering why it was that President Kennedy, his brother Senator Robert Kennedy, and Martin Luther King, and Cesar Chavez were such great heroes of mine growing up.
I was thinking about the speech, and of course the great line that everybody knows is often. I think he deeply felt that — as with the others that I just indicated — an animating spirit in what they did was fundamentally religious in origin.
I think the question I have for you derives from surveys which show that while people are spiritual, they're not particularly denominationally religious these days, and in many ways don't even understand precepts of religion as it bears on the question of service. But what is it that you can learn from that past history that I think is correctly recited to try to pick out the thing that will in fact philosophically drive your quest for greater service?
That's my question to you. What is it, if the animating spirit is not profoundly religious, what is it in its stead or collaboratively will be matched to it?
Finally, if I just make the comment. I'm really grateful you mentioned military service. As it happens, my son is in Army ROTC and will be commissioned as a second lieutenant in a few months if he keeps his nose to the grindstone.
So thank you on that. I hope that wasn't too long a comment. There is a question there. I've worked with a lot of faith-based organizations and communities. And I think when people are … You can look at any faith and they talk about service in some capacity or the other. Martin Luther King is famous for saying everybody can be great because everybody can serve.
When you're in a deep service experience, especially if you're doing it full time and you're engaging and you're turning on your justice nerve because you are directly confronting injustice, there is a spiritual dimension -- whether it's religious or not -- because it taps something that is, I think, innate in human nature. I think innately we all.
We all want to feel like we're participating, contributing in some way, beyond just our own self-interests. I think that's why you've seen this. I saw it all over the world when I traveled with Vanessa. I think it's why, even without tremendous political support initially, this service movement keeps bubbling up. I think it's why there are so many people that participate. I think it is the right instinct and we have to figure out, well, how do we tap that?
The other thing that's interesting is, once people do it … I mean the thing that I'm excited about, we've done studies of our City Year alumni and after they spend a year in City Year, they continue to volunteer at much higher rates than their peers.
They vote at much higher rates than their peers. They lead others into service at much higher rates. They maintain and develop friendships of people who are fundamentally different at much higher rates than their peers. But I think it's a deep question you asked. I'm not sure exactly what's the right answer, except the instinct is absolutely on target, and we do have to figure out how do we feed that instinct and how do we tap it.
There are numerous faith-based groups, churches, synagogues, mosques, et cetera, that organize people doing service. And that is an instinct that helps drive people. Not everybody. Every faith has a social justice mission. So it's a resource that can be tapped. My name is Jeremy Murphy and it's great to be here. A big fan of Mr. Gergen …. And I was just wondering if there's any chance at all that we'll see you run for Senate again, or perhaps Governor in a few years. I hope you do.
Thank you. Thank you so much for that. I had an amazing experience running for office. One of the things that motivated a run is I had a chance to work in the trenches, work with incredible leaders like Senator Kennedy and others and saw the impact that you can have from that office.
But the reason I had such a great experience was that when you run for office, it's like having a passport or permission slip to talk to anyone, any time, about anything. You get an unbelievable education, and I had to learn. I learned if I was just polite and put a smile on my face and stuck out my hand and said, "Hi, I'm Alan Khazei, I'm running for the Senate," first they'd say, "Who are you? And I think especially because there are so many people who are hurting right now.
I got an unparalleled education as to what's going on. People share their hopes and dreams. They share their anxieties, their fears. They share their ideas. What so inspired me was, even with all the. Now, the spirit that this Library represents -- about people wanting to roll up their sleeves.
I met young people who had lost their college scholarships, people who had lost their homes, people who are professionals who were at risk of losing their homes.
But I also felt this sense of, "We can get out of this if we work together. I learned a lot. I still have a lot to learn, but what was also encouraging to me, the number of people who were interested in getting involved. Part of the reason I ran was I felt that we need to get more people involved. I did a grassroots campaign, even in 90 days, and was blown away by the number of people who would go door to door, talk to their friends, et cetera. So I appreciate what you said.
One of the things that President Kennedy, I think, championed so well is that politics is a very high form of public service. So I'm interested. I'm not ready to make any announcements tonight, but …. I think we're at a place now where most of us have to get off of the sidelines and get into the game, whether it's running for office or — again, it's a journey for me. I'm totally committed to the idea of national service.
But I've also realized it's necessary but not sufficient. It's not enough. Even if we had a million people, we do need to get more and more people engaged in politics. I think pushing candidates that you believe in, getting the big money out of the system, doing the grassroots work.
I think it's through politics and through government that we make our big decisions, that we decide what do we stand for, what's important, what are we going to push, what do we believe in, what our priorities are. I mean, again, I think that, as I said, I'd love to think everybody would feel like you're holding an office just by being a citizen.
But ultimately, I mean the decision for me was about, how do you make change and how do you have an impact. I've had a chance to work with just some extraordinary leaders closely and learn from them. I saw, well, it's a very unique office, because you can help support citizen movements and give energy to that. You can also help be part of a group to craft a new agenda and support new ideas. You can reach across the aisle and, in fact, you have to.
One of the extraordinary things about Senator Kennedy, he passed like pieces of legislation. On almost all of them, and all of the big ones, he always had a Republican partner, even though he was the world's standard bearer and stuck to his principles. You've got to be more bipartisan. So it's a very unique office. For me, the decision was, how do you have an impact. I felt that is a particularly unique office that I felt my skill set aligned with. I think Big Citizenship is also running for office, because there is an element of sacrifice and your family and everything else.
I admire, especially having done it now -- I always did -- but I admire anyone, whatever their party is, who puts themselves forward for any elected office, especially in today's climate because you just put yourself out there. We have , elected positions in this country, from town meeting to school committee to mayor, governor, Congress, et cetera, , It's an extraordinarily robust democracy.
Too many of those, especially at the local level, there's never any competition. I mean, I go vote and you look down, it's like, okay, there are four people. So I think we've got to get more people. It's extraordinary, , So I do think it's an act of Big Citizenship if you decide to run for office, whatever the level is. Thanks for speaking, first of all. My name is Matt Wilding. I was thinking about what you guys were saying about in the Greatest Generation era you had people doing things.
And then when John F. Kennedy spoke in his Inauguration he said "ask not what you can do for your country. Even with the current administration, we talk about big sacrifices but we don't actually talk about what those specific sacrifices are.
So what I wanted to know is what you guys thought are the specifics of how responsible the government is for telling people what we need to do and how we can do those things. David, I'd love to hear what you think. I think we are in a period where we do have to renew that spirit that President Kennedy called.
We are facing very serious challenges across the board. Our history has always been that when we call on our people, we always come out of these times stronger.
We always do. But there is an element of sacrifice, of collective effort, of understanding we're all in this together. Look, we're in a fiscal train wreck. Train wreck. There is going to be some painful cuts, taxes are going to have to be raised. We're going to have to make some really hard.
We have to deal with the issue of climate change. We have to reform our public schools. We have to deal with the issue of poverty. There are so many things. Taking on the greatest empire of the world with these citizen soldiers? Ending slavery, the Civil War was much harder than what we have to deal with today. We're in serious times, but the Depression was much harder. And if you look at each of those periods, it's when we call on the collective spirit of our people and got everybody engaged.
Yes, there's going to be an element of sacrifice, but also there is a generational thing. I'm a father, I have two kids. I know, I talk to any parent or grandparent, you want to make sure that this country is at least as good or better for them. We have to tap that spirit. We're being irresponsible to leave this level of debt to our kids. I think people can respond to that, and we're going to need it. We've got to be honest with people about where we are.
We just can't keep kicking the can down the road. I'm part of this Greedy Geezers Baby Boom, people born in the s and s generation. And we're raising the first generation of kids who are going to be worse off than their parents. Not just materially, but educationally and just all sorts of other ways.
I think that's immoral. I think it's basically irresponsible. I was pleased to hear President Obama call for sacrifice in his State of the Union message. I didn't hear many specifics about what kind of sacrifice is involved. And my own view is that we have to have shared sacrifice. Those of us who are fortunate enough. I'm perfectly prepared to pay a lot more for a lot of things, but I don't want to see it done in a way that in fact leaves a lot of waste in government and just pays for a lot of other things that we really ought to be reconsidering, too.
We should, that's appropriate. But I also think that it's important that the whole country realize we're doing a lot of things, living well beyond our means. Our generation needs to pull in our belt if the next generation is going to have any hope at all of leading better lives.
From my point of view, the country has reached what might be called a strategic inflection point. That is, if we continue to do business as usual, we're going to go down as a country. Kennedy, around mid-day, on January 20, , in Washington, D. The occasion was his presidential inauguration, and came as he was concluding his inaugural address.
Those words were positively electrifying. No president had ever challenged citizens, in peacetime, to sacrifice or commit to a larger vision. With that single sentence, Kennedy inspired people to new possibilities. He raised their expectations of themselves, and of their nation. The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will light our country and all who serve it—and the glow from that fire can truly light the world.
And so, my fellow Americans: ask not what your country can do for you—ask what you can do for your country. My fellow citizens of the world: ask not what America will do for you, but what together we can do for the freedom of man. Excerpts John F.
This much we pledge—and more. A full transcript is available here as a pdf.
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