The Next Generation of National Service

Ed. note: This essay was produced as part of New America’s annual conference, Exploring New America: What Drives Innovation Around the Country, held in Washington, D.C. on April 23 and 24.

“Our country is a better and stronger force for good in the world because more and more we are a people that serve.” So said President Obama in July 2013 when he announced the formation of a new task force on national service.

President Obama joins a growing list of chief executives who sought to make national service a presidential priority. “My call tonight is for every American to commit at least 2 years and four thousand hours over the rest of your lifetime for the service of your neighbors and your nation,” said President George W. Bush during his State of the Union address in 2002.

But a presidential priority isn’t all it’s cracked up to be — the results when it comes to national service are decidedly lackluster. Quick calculations show that Americans average less than half of President Bush’s goal of 4,000 hours of community service over a lifetime. Even though national service has the relatively rare distinction of having support of Presidents from both parties it remains a a non-starter, politically and culturally.

“We are like a deer caught in the deadlights. We look at every problem now and say: it’s too high, it’s too dark, too wide, too expensive,” said Stanley McChrystal, the former commander of military forces in Afghanistan, at New America’s annual conference. “We need to ask a binary question: has citizenship deteriorated in America? I think the question is yes. Would national service improve that? I, of course, think yes.”

For McChrystal, who joined Representative Tulsi Gabbard (D-HI 2nd District), Newyorker.com editor Nicholas Thompson, and AmericaCorps VISTA director Paul Monteiro in conversation, the kind of citizenship he’s looking for isn’t cookie-cutter. Young people don’t have to go all the way to Helmand province to serve their country — although he’d support that as well. McChrystal, as chairman of the the leadership council of the Franklin Project on national service at the Aspen Institute, envisions something that almost all young people can do: a year of national public service. The Franklin Project’s first goal is getting one million Americans to commit to one year of public service, doing things like conservation, teaching, and community organizing.

As simultaneously bold and practical as McChrystal’s proposal sounds, it also raises a big question: what does “service” actually mean? He and his fellow panelists had trouble nailing down an answer.

For Monteiro, service is “adding value to your community — whether it’s your own or another one.” But as Thompson pointed out, the boundaries of what is “not service” can shift. So where do we draw the line? “There really are no boundaries,” observed Representative Gabbard. Defining what service is (and is not) “does go to the motivation” to “making — ultimately — a positive impact.”

Thompson responded with a hypothetical example: if a 21-year-old environmentalist loved whales so much that he went out to sink whaling ships. Is that public service?

“No,” said Gabbard to a room full of chuckles, because he’s not just outside protecting the whales and protecting the environment, but is also causing harm to people.

It’s an extreme example, but Thompson’s point — that not everything that adds value to society is service — resonated with the panelists. Monteiro, whose own original definition of service was under discussion, agreed with Gabbard: the key distinction between service and public service, he said, has to do with motivation. When the main purpose is something than other than bolstering the community, then it’s not service. But the important takeaway is that service can be achieved in many settings — volunteering in your neighborhood school, cleaning the park you run in, or organizing in your local community. You don’t have to serve as part of an official program like Americorps or the Peace Corps.

Gabbard, Monteiro, and McChrystal each took a different path to the crux of the discussion, but all agreed on the upshot: service is a lifestyle, a way of being in the world.

“The work that they do will be of value, but the real payoff is the change you make in the people who do it,” said McChrystal. “What we are really trying to do is create citizens who are going to vote at a higher rate, have a habit of service for the rest of their lives, who are going to feel as though they have a responsibility not to some inanimate thing of a nation, but to other citizens.”

Two of the panelists’ biggest targets as potential vehicles for this transformation are schools and big corporations — although both are presenting program leaders like Monteiro with unique challenges.

Monteiro said that the VISTA program isn’t recruiting on campus any more due to budget cuts. When he went back to his own high school, his guidance counselors had never heard of AmeriCorps. This low profile and lack of support is a shame, because as Monteiro pointed out, VISTA can be a “school for social entrepreneurs.”

But the challenge of attracting more employees from big companies is less funding problem than a culture problem. As McChrystal put it, we live in a culture where young Americans who join big corporations are in a hurry to start their careers, and not all of them see service as a key step on that path.

“There is this implied pressure to get into the workforce, not to fall a step behind a job offer from a prestigious company might not be there next year,” he said. “[Young people face] cultural expectations to get in the race and hurry and not fall behind.”

It’s clear why Presidents make national service a priority, but for those priorities to translate into real action, multiple kinds of change are necessary. To truly increase national service, Gabbard observed on Twitter, we need greater investment — as well as cultural change.

McChrystal proposed one very pragmatic way to bolster national service among young people: make signing up for it a one-stop shopping experience. Why not have joint recruiting sites for all types and branches of service in one place — military, civilian, and education?

In McChrystal’s words, “Service is contagious.”

Can you help to spread it?