M

13

y new job made me nervous. I’d been hired to be the executive director
for the brand-new Chicago chapter of an organization called Public Allies, which
itself was basically brand-new. It was something like a start-up inside a start-up,
and in a field in which I had no professional experience to speak of. Public Allies
had been founded only a year earlier in Washington, D.C., and was the
brainchild of Vanessa Kirsch and Katrina Browne, who were both just out of
college and interested in helping more people find their way into careers in
public service and nonprofit work. Barack had met the two of them at a
conference and become a member of their board, eventually suggesting they get
in touch with me regarding the job.

The model was similar to what was being used at Teach for America, which
itself was relatively new at the time: Public Allies recruited talented young
people, gave them intensive training and committed mentorship, and placed them
in paid ten-month apprentice positions inside community organizations and
public agencies, the hope being that they’d flourish and contribute in meaningful
ways. The broader aim was that these opportunities would give the recruits—
Allies, we called them—both the experience and the drive to continue working
in the nonprofit or public sector for years to come, thereby helping to build a
new generation of community leaders.

For me, the idea resonated in a big way. I still remembered how during my
senior year at Princeton so many of us had marched into MCAT and LSAT
exams or suited up to interview for corporate training programs without once (at
least in my case) considering or maybe even realizing that a wealth of more civic-
minded job options existed. Public Allies was meant as a corrective to this, a