Growing up in Cabrini-Green, Liz Thompson never felt deprived or disadvantaged. But in 1975 she enrolled at Lane Tech and discovered the world was larger and more complicated than she ever realized. “I took an honors biology class my first year, and I was hopeless,” says Thompson. “There were Japanese kids, Jewish kids, and white kids, and they seemed smarter. I came home in tears, ’cause I didn’t think I’d make it.”
City Year was started in Boston six years ago by Alan Khazei and Michael Brown, a couple of idealistic and well-connected young Harvard grads. “They got the early notion for the program during the summer they spent as congressional interns,” says Michael Alter, a real estate developer who roomed with Brown and Khazei at Harvard. “There was a lot of debate in Washington at the time about national service programs. It was bipartisan, with people like William Buckley and Ted Kennedy on the same side. That inspired Alan and Michael.”
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After graduation, Brown and Khazei went on to law school, while refining their idea for a youth service corps. They decided it would have to be privately funded, at least in part, in order to avoid government red tape. It would need a certain amount of glitz to draw young people and donors. And it would have to be racially and economically integrated. A publicly funded service corps in New York City “had a pronounced lack of socioeconomic diversity and as a result, the participants tended to view the program more as an income source than as a vehicle for citizenship,” wrote Scott Shuger in a Los Angeles Times article on City Year. “Service, thought Brown, shouldn’t be seen as the duty of only the disadvantaged.”
President Clinton cited City Year as the model for his national service legislation. And most importantly, the program achieved its goal of diversity. In 1993 roughly 45 percent of its participants were white, 35 percent black, 11 percent Latino, and 8 percent Asian American. Fifty-four percent came from families earning less than $35,000; 27 percent were high school dropouts and 23 percent were either enrolled in or had graduated from college. This year more than 1,000 people applied for 300 spots in the Boston program, and branches were opened in Providence, Rhode Island, and Columbia, South Carolina.
It was at Lane that she learned to deal with people from different backgrounds. “The band was a mixed group, but some of the other groups were not,” says Thompson. “I wondered why I was the only black on the debate team or in an honors class. It bothered me. There were black kids smarter than me who should have been there too. I remember this Japanese guy in my history class asking me if I was Jamaican. I said no. He said, ‘Are you African?’ I said, ‘Not in this lifetime.’ People were always trying to put me in a different land because they couldn’t equate being black with being smart.
“We’re off to a good start. Michael has introduced me to a lot of corporate leaders. We met with one man who said, ‘Give me the two-minute version of your life story.’ Needless to say I couldn’t get into the finer details; the Japanese boyfriend went unmentioned. He must have liked what he heard about me and the program ’cause he agreed to a substantial donation. Most people really want this to work.”
