Why Politics? - We need more people in politics who put our country first
by Dr. Max Klau
As a kid growing up in Connecticut, there were some family stories that my siblings and I heard often. Dad and Mom would tell us how in the early years of the Great Depression, our grandmother Sadie was involved in a local effort to make sure all the children in the community had milk to drink. While the program was a big help for the children it reached, Sadie saw clearly that the need was far greater than what this individual program could ever meet. We also heard about how our grandfather, Joe, moved the family to DC in the 1930s to be a lawyer for Roosevelt’s Work Progress Administration, an organization that ultimately employed more than 8.5 million Americans through the depths of the depression. Together, these oft-repeated stories came to represent a philosophy of service that informed my upbringing in powerful ways: If you want to serve a few people, work for a local non-profit; if you want to serve a whole lot of people, you need to get involved in government.
As I grew up, my love of service deepened, while my attitude towards politics soured. I ended up going to school in DC at the George Washington University thanks to a generous scholarship, and loved the idealism and spirit of service in the city. But I spent my time volunteering with educational organizations and was one of the few students who never interned on the Hill. I enrolled in a Political Communications course and dropped it after two classes because my fellow students seemed eager to learn how to win elections while being notably uninterested in serving constituents. I remember being repulsed by the vibe at DC parties where the first question was “Where do you work?”. If this was politics, it was too self-involved, ego-driven, slick, and disconnected from serving others for my taste.
It’s not surprising, then, that I found my home in the world of service. After GW, I enrolled in a year-long service program in Israel, and found myself happier than I had ever been. I was tutoring kids in English, running after school programs, teaching guitar lessons and painting murals, and I loved every second of it. Here, there was no ego, no jockeying for status, no “messaging”--just the joy and challenge of serving others. While I was working on my doctorate of education, I chose to spend my summers leading international service trips to places like Ghana, Honduras, and Ukraine. I always felt that after the intensity of an academic year, those summers of service transformed me from a walking cerebellum back into a full human being, reconnected to my heart and my hands and not just my brain.
After completing my doctorate I landed a job at City Year, the AmeriCorps program that engages young adults in a year of full-time service focused on keeping students in high needs schools in school and on track to graduate. Although headquartered in Boston, the organization works in dozens of cities across the U.S., and integrates a focus on direct service with national advocacy to support government funding for all AmeriCorps programs. For the first time, I encountered an organization that blended the deep commitment to direct service with the recognition that it takes government support to work at the scale required to have an impact at the national level.
I loved the youth-focused mission and idealistic culture of City Year, and spent ten happy years there. But over time, I began to see the limits of the organization’s ability to have an impact. City Year was one of the biggest non-profits in the nation reaching tens of thousands of students every year, but there were still dozens of cities across the nation that we hadn’t reached. And there were years where more than 580,000 young adults applied to serve each year, while Congress had only allotted funding for about 80,000 AmeriCorps members annually. In just two years, AmeriCorps had to say no to more than one million young people who were ready to dedicate a year of their lives to serving others. Every time I think about how much good could have done by that many young people serving the nation for a year, my heart breaks. And this level of Congressional funding remained essentially unchanged despite solid research making it clear that every federal dollar invested in national service returns four dollars of value to communities.
I began to think more and more about those stories I heard about Sadie and Joe. AmeriCorps helped a whole lot of children and young adults...but AmeriCorps could help millions more if political leaders saw it’s value and made it a priority. And I had a harder and harder time living with the choice to avoid politics because it felt self-interested and toxic. After all, if everyone who feels called to serve others stays away from politics, then who ends up running? If the only people who step up are those who love the dehumanizing partisanship and are driven by self-serving hungers for power and adulation, then who do we have to vote for? And how can we get anything big and important done as a country?
Like so many other servant leaders, I’ve spent my life at the grass roots and the front lines, and that commitment to serving others has given me an invaluable perspective on the nature of our public challenges and how change happens at the community level. But I’ve also seen the connection between grassroots change and government policies, and know that we need more people in politics who are driven by a desire to serve others, solve problems, and put the needs of the country above the needs of their own ego.
That’s what led me to join the New Politics Leadership Academy just over four years ago. Having worked now with thousands of servant leaders considering the path of politics, I’m more convinced than ever that what our politics needs is more of these proven, tested servant leaders stepping into office. I believe that the servant leaders of this nation are a precious national resource, and we need more of them stepping into political power if we want to get big things done once again as a nation.
So why politics? Because my grandmother Sadie was right: if you want to serve a few people, work for a local non-profit; if you want to serve a whole lot of people, you need to get involved in government.