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Video: Meet Rafael
Rafael is an immigrant and West Point grad who served in the Army for 26 years. As a Facilitator of Answering the Call, Rafael helps servant leaders continue their service career in politics.
Why Politics? - Finding your vocation
I’ve been interested in politics for a long time, through the dual lenses of both current events and history. I grew up in a household where the news was always on and where I was taught the importance of voting and being politically engaged. As a kid, I had a placemat of all the U.S. Presidents, and I became obsessed with it to the point where I could recite them in order. I started learning more about who these people were -- about the lives they led, the decisions they made, and how they shaped our country.
Our values & servant leadership - Excellence
Excellence is holding yourself to the highest standard as you work to execute your mission and use your resources. The way political leaders can practice excellence is by holding themselves accountable to living out the values of servant leadership. There’s a lot riding on political representatives, and practicing excellence in all they do is key in order for servant leaders to drive forward positive change in politics.
Why Politics? - Asking what's next
Politics is ordinary citizens demanding both excellence and accountability from their leaders. And, if and when those demands are disregarded, it’s answering the call to lead themselves. It’s about having the integrity of purpose to commit to causes that don’t affect you directly; to elevating the voices of the underserved and the underrepresented.
Politics matters whether we choose to engage with it or not. What lies ahead—for our friends and families, for our communities and our country—is wholly dependent on the degree to which each and every one of us is willing to make it matter.
Why Politics? - If our institutions seem broken, that’s more reason to try and fix them
Politics never seemed like an attractive calling when I was growing up. In fact, I can remember the exact moment when I was so frustrated that I thought I wanted nothing to do with it.
It came in the fall of 2013, my junior year of college. Checking the news one evening, I learned the federal government had just shut down because Congress failed to pass a law to keep it open. A senator was grandstanding about how proud he was of that fact. The contrast between the technological progress I saw in the world around me with the dysfunction among our nation’s leadership was enraging: that same night, I had ordered delivery for dinner using an app on my phone. In just a few short years, innovations like multi-touch display interfaces on connected devices that we keep in our pockets had become commonplace. Yet politicians in Washington had spent that time devolving so far into bickering that they could no longer even agree to keep the lights on.