Mass. Senate hopeful Khazei touts City Year legacy

BOSTON -- During the first half of 2003, Alan Khazei watched as his life's work skittered toward the edge of a fiscal cliff.

AmeriCorps, the national service program that grew out of the City Year experiment hatched by Khazei and his Harvard Law School roommate 15 years earlier, had been hobbled by management and money problems, in part by signing up more volunteers than its budget could handle.

A Republican led-House was reluctant to ride to the rescue.

"They violated a statute," then-Majority Leader Tom DeLay, R-Texas said at the time. "Should we give them $100 million for that?"

Khazei, who is running for the late Edward Kennedy's Senate seat based on his experience as City Year co-founder, said the crisis was a watershed moment.

Rather than face the gutting of the organization, Khazei said he tapped into the same energy he used to get City Year off the ground -- this time to help stave off deep cuts.

Inspired by the film "Mr. Smith Goes to Washington," Khazei and fellow AmeriCorps and City Year supporters descended on Capitol Hill to hold what he described as a 100-hour, round-the-clock "citizen's hearing" on the future of the program.

During the marathon session, past and present members of the program and dozens of lawmakers, including several Republicans, testified in support. The program was able to get enough funding to hang on until the next fiscal year, when it received a bigger than expected boost.

"That whole experience was a turning point to me," Khazei said. "I realized that service is good, but it's not enough. Politics matters and it matters a lot."

That realization, Khazei said, is at the heart of his Senate campaign.

Born in 1961, Khazei said he was inspired by some of the major political figures of that decade, including President John F. Kennedy and Martin Luther King Jr. Later he would work on Democratic presidential hopeful Gary Hart's 1984 campaign, in part because of Hart's call for universal service.

At Harvard Law School, Khazei teamed with roommate Michael Brown with the idea of creating an urban service program inspired by the Peace Corps. In exchange for a year of service, City Year members would receive a stipend and college scholarship.

After an initial skeptical reception, the two decided to launch the program themselves in 1988, using private funding and corporate contributions.

"We said let's just start a program that could be an 'action tank,"' Khazei said. "Think tanks produce papers. We would produce action."

One of those he first consulted with was Hubie Jones, then dean of the Boston University School of Social Work. Khazei made his City Year pitch to Jones during a meeting in 1987 and Jones said he was immediately struck by Khazei's mix of enthusiasm and pragmatism.

Over the years, Jones would become a mentor to Khazei.

"This is a guy who's not just a visionary and someone who's cause-oriented, this is a guy who knows how to get things done," said Jones, now a senior adviser at City Year.

The organization soon started drawing the attention of top political figures.

One of the first to throw his backing behind the program was Sen. Kennedy, who spoke to the first graduating class of 50 and pledged to take the idea to the national stage. Two years later Kennedy, working with the first President Bush, secured initial funding for a demonstration grant program based on the City Year model.

During the 1991 presidential campaign, then-Gov. Bill Clinton visited the program in Boston. Two years later he founded AmeriCorps, modeled in large part after City Year.

Through the years, Khazei worked to gain supporters from both parties for City Year and AmeriCorps. Top Republican backers included including former President George W. Bush, Sen. John McCain and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney.

Khazei points to that ability to form alliances across parties to as he vies against Attorney General Martha Coakley, U.S. Rep. Michael Capuano and Boston Celtics co-owner Stephen Pagliuca for the Democratic nomination for the Senate.

A background in the nonprofit world could be a useful political asset, particularly given lingering voter anger at Wall Street, according to Julian Zelizer, professor of history and public affairs at Princeton University.

"You can sell the nonprofit idea as someone who is committed to a set of goals" rather than a bottom line, Zelizer said, "There's no reason a nonprofit pitch can't work."

Khazei left City Year in 2006 to found the group Be The Change, designed in part to help use the power of the Internet to create a new citizen's movement.

In 2008, Khazei again worked with Kennedy on a bill which President Obama would later sign. The Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act is designed in part to expand AmeriCorps.

"I'll put my legislative record up against anyone else in this race," Khazei said. "I did that as a citizen."

(Copyright 2009 by The Associated Press. All Rights Reserved.)