Building Democracy through Citizen Service

When Thomas Jefferson read the first draft of the United States constitution, he became alarmed. He wrote to the other Founding Fathers, “This constitution of yours worries me because it asks so little of its citizens. A democracy takes civic virtue and service above else to survive.” I think Jefferson had a point. He truly believed that without service, and without its goal of instilling civic virtue, social justice, and equity, we are at risk of losing everything that our founding fathers created and intended for generations to come.__Why is service the answer? Because service is the great equalizer--in the words of Dr. King, “anyone can be great because anyone can serve.” Service builds community among people, regardless of their race, gender, religion, or socio economic status. It allows us to participate in something bigger than ourselves and demonstrates that our commonalities as a people are greater than our individual differences. And those of us who have served know that in the act of transforming our communities for the better, we ended up transforming ourselves.__And now, more than ever, we need to expand opportunities for people to serve. Because we have serious issues to address: our education system is failing a significant percentage of our kids, hunger and homelessness run rampant in our communities, our parks, rivers, and open spaces need protection, and college has ceased to become affordable to most of us. Service can be a vehicle, to simultaneously address our most pressing unmet societal needs while providing money and access in a real way, to provide college education to the next generation.__National service, according to sociologist Charles Moskos is, “not a magic talisman, or a mystical means for transforming socially indifferent Americans into paragons of civic virtue.” No one would argue that it is the "magic bullet" that will solve all of our country's problems. But what service does do and can do when brought to scale, is set up long term and permanent structures in our society, which bring people together and instills the values of civics and service, while simultaneously addressing our unmet societal needs--and as an end result, truly rebuilding the democracy that our Founding Fathers envisioned.