This year’s City Year Boston 2007-2008 class’ graduation, the full events of which will shortly be made available on City Year’s websiter, was a living reminder of the reciprocal benefits of national service programs. Not only were Boston children given a new lease on their education, but the graduates themselves were energized with the will to become the leaders of their generation. The people there, many of them fresh out of high school before joining City Year, demonstrated an inspiring commitment to leadership. People who wonder if our generation is just lazy and selfish need look no further than events like this one to have their fears laid to rest.

Last year I spent several weeks working at after school programs in downtown Syracuse, New York with a couple of friends. We worked on pretty much whatever was asked of us, anything from helping the kids with homework to playing basketball with them when it was clear they were too riled up to concentrate. There were never enough of us and we often just didn’t have enough training or energy after a long day of classes to handle everything that came our way.

That’s why you’ll understand when I say the City Year program and those like it immediately became so close to my heart.

The first thing that surprised me at the graduation ceremony was the sheer number of kids graduating: over a hundred and twenty, working just in inner-city Boston, plus mentions of hundreds of other temporary and part-time helpers who worked with the organization throughout the year. The guest speaker was world-famous Harvard business professor Rosabeth Moss Kanter and almost everyone who spoke there – prominent members of the business community all – were alumni of City Year. Mayor Menino himself, who had appeared at City Year events throughout the year, had to cancel at the last minute, but a member of his staff – also, of course, a City Year alum – cheerfully filled in for him.

Everyone present was friends. The program managers were loudly applauded by the graduates themselves, who of course competed with each other to cheer as loudly as possible for each other at every opportunity.

City Year is one of thousands of programs that works with AmeriCorps, receiving about one-fourth of its funding from there, and the rest from roughly even shares of donations from foundations, corporate sponsors, and individual donations. Those hundred-twenty students, over the course of ten months, put in over 200,000 hours of community service, saving the city of Boston untold millions of dollars and providing a new backbone to many otherwise strongly challenged communities like Mattapan and Roxbury.

Even though they had just finished what was surely the greatest challenge of their lives – as one of the graduates put it, anyone who didn’t think about quitting wasn’t working hard enough – no one there seemed tired, or ready to relax. They seemed ready to go to the next challenge. City Year, like all AmeriCorps programs, is about raising a generation of leaders. I can say with absolute certainty that City Year’s 2007-2008 Boston class has fulfilled that intent with gusto.

City Year, Boston, AmeriCorps (all tags)

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Youth, Education & National Service

Road Trip With a Mission: Expanding National Service. AmeriCorps alumni and ServeNext.org members, are traveling the country by bus for the National Service Express Tour, hitting 30 cities in 60 days.

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