"I've always been a dark horse," says Alan Khazei, a candidate for Ted Kennedy's Senate seat in Massachusetts. A Nov. 23 Rasmussen Reports poll found Khazei trailing two well-known political veterans. Yet in the past two months, Khazei has raised over $2 million, been named the "rightful heir" to Kennedy's seat by Newsweek, received The Boston Globe's endorsement, and enlisted hundreds of young volunteers to knock on doors across the state. For Khazei, this groundswell is both method and message: His is a campaign of civic activism.
Khazei was born to an Iranian immigrant doctor and an Italian American nurse and grew up in Bedford, New Hampshire. Straight out of Harvard Law School he co-founded City Year, a service organization that inspired Bill Clinton's AmeriCorps. Twenty years later, Khazei started Be the Change, a nonprofit that asked young people to do exactly that and embraced the immodest goal of building a national movement of citizen activists. Its first major campaign, ServiceNation, brought together presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain at a forum at Columbia University -- their only joint appearance outside of debates -- and helped make service a campaign priority. Khazei went on to help draft the Edward M. Kennedy Serve America Act to expand AmeriCorps, and worked to secure its passage in April. Only months later, Kennedy entered the hospital for brain surgery; when he emerged, he wore his red City Year jacket. In a race where succession is front and center, Khazei hopes his own record in public service will qualify him to carry the Kennedy mantle.
"We need to move past the tired debate of Big Government vs. Big Business and embrace Big Citizenship," Khazei wrote in an op-ed in The Boston Globe. He has made his record of championing public service a key part of his candidacy. Indeed, he professes to be the only entrepreneur in the race. This may come as news to private equity investor and Boston Celtics owner Stephen Pagliuca, who is running neck and neck with Khazei on a largely self-financed campaign. The difference, Khazei says, is that he is a social entrepreneur. Just what this means, and why it distinguishes him for the Senate, is something Khazei intends to make clear to voters before the race-determining Dec. 8 primary.
Khazei's City Year became the standard for the growing idealist industry -- Harvard Business School has published three case studies about the organization. In 1988, Khazei and then-roommate Michael Brown dreamed up a program that would enlist young people in Boston to work in community service. The City Year model was simple but effective: In exchange for a modest stipend, corps members could choose from a range of service activities. Under Khazei's leadership, City Year expanded from an organization with 50 corps members and a $200,000 budget to a $46 million enterprise, leading more than 1,000 corps members across 16 American cities and Johannesburg. The impact is substantial: 1 million children tutored and mentored. Over two decades, City Year has enabled thousands of young people to give 20 million work hours of service. This is community organizing writ large.
City Year's real advantage was its scalability -- Khazei's efficient operating models can be broadly replicated. When Clinton visited City Year in 1993 he saw the potential for a national service corps, and with the help of Khazei and others, created AmeriCorps that year. In addition to City Year, AmeriCorps would go on to support social enterprises like Jumpstart and Teach for America, taking them from one-city pilots to national programs.
In 2003, when AmeriCorps experienced federal budget cuts of nearly 80 percent, Khazei led a "Save AmeriCorps" coalition of nonprofits and citizen activists and successfully rallied Congress to restore its funding. This experience in national grassroots organizing is what led Khazei in 2006 to create Be the Change. Although Khazei has never held elected office like Massachusetts Attorney General Martha Coakley or Rep. Michael Capuano, he contends that his efforts around national service were an important legislative training ground. He worked closely with Sens. Ted Kennedy and Orrin Hatch to craft the Serve America Act. The $6 billion bill triples the number of AmeriCorps positions and creates several new domestic and international volunteer "corps" for people of all ages: It is the most significant expansion of civilian service since Franklin Delano Roosevelt's Civilian Conservation Corps.
Khazei and his fellow social entrepreneurs have also influenced how the Obama administration approaches social policy. The White House Office of Social Innovation, profiled by the Prospect in our November print issue, was created to administer this Social Innovation Fund -- an entity that might not exist in its current form were it not for Khazei's wife, Vanessa Kirsch. Kirsch founded America Forward, the coalition that proposed the office. Previously, she ran the City Year-like Public Allies, where she hired Michelle Obama to oversee the Chicago office. Barack Obama would later serve on the Public Allies board. In Khazei's Senate run, Kirsch has played a range of roles, from campaign strategist to policy adviser, fundraiser, canvasser, and moral supporter in chief.
With only a week to go in the Massachusetts race, the extended social enterprise family is rallying behind Khazei. High-profile social entrepreneurs, like Teach for America head Wendy Kopp and Jumpstart founder Aaron Lieberman, are acting as campaign advisers. Meanwhile, City Year alumni are volunteering in droves across the state and using social media like Facebook and Twitter to spread word of "Alan for Senate." Khazei has refused PAC and lobbyist monies, preferring to enlist friends of the service movement to supplement "citizen" support. Last week, New York City Mayor Mike Bloomberg hosted a fundraiser for Khazei that included an all-star social enterprise lineup, including Kopp and Lieberman, and a number of their philanthropic patrons.
Khazei has made recent gains, winning over voters since a Nov. 18 Boston Globe poll showed him in fourth place. He still faces an uphill battle, but neither Khazei nor his supporters seem fazed. Three-quarters of likely voters remain undecided, according to the Globe -- figures that have only encouraged volunteers to canvass more. Khazei's underdog status also seems to have liberated him to take positions the other candidates have avoided. He opposes legalized gambling in Massachusetts, for example, and favors a number of education reform measures straight from the social-enterprise playbook -- extended hours for underperforming schools, increased teacher pay, and charter school experimentation. Khazei is also vocal on foreign policy. Recently, he lamented that "we have lost our way in Afghanistan"; he is the only candidate to call for a timetable for troop withdrawal from the region. Khazei insists he is not a long shot: "A dark horse," he told New England Cable News, "just means you haven't been on the track before, so you don't know the real potential."
