means of widening the horizon for young people thinking about careers. But
what I especially liked was that its founders were focused less on parachuting Ivy
Leaguers into urban communities and more on finding and cultivating talent that
was already there. You didn’t need a college degree to become an Ally. You
needed only a high school diploma or GED, to be older than seventeen and
younger than thirty, and to have shown some leadership capability, even if thus
far in life it had gone largely untapped.
Public Allies was all about promise—finding it, nurturing it, and putting it to
use. It was a mandate to seek out young people whose best qualities might
otherwise be overlooked and to give them a chance to do something meaningful.
To me, the job felt almost like destiny. For every moment I’d spent looking
wistfully at the South Side from my forty-seventh-floor window at Sidley, here
was an invitation, finally, to use what I knew. I had a sense of how much latent
promise sat undiscovered in neighborhoods like my own, and I was pretty sure
I’d know how to find it.
As I contemplated the new job, my mind often traveled back to childhood,
and in particular to the month or so I’d spent in the pencil-flying pandemonium
of that second-grade class at Bryn Mawr Elementary, before my mother had the
wherewithal to have me plucked out. In the moment, I’d felt nothing but
relieved by my own good fortune. But as my luck in life seemed only to snowball
from there, I thought more about the twenty or so kids who’d been marooned in
that classroom, stuck with an uncaring and unmotivated teacher. I knew I was no
smarter than any of them. I just had the advantage of an advocate. I thought
about this more often now that I was an adult, especially when people applauded
me for my achievements, as if there weren’t a strange and cruel randomness to it
all. Through no fault of their own, those second graders had lost a year of
learning. I’d seen enough at this point to understand how quickly even small
deficits can snowball, too.
Back in Washington, D.C., the Public Allies founders had mustered a
fledgling class of fifteen Allies who were working in various organizations around
the city. They’d also raised enough money to launch a new chapter in Chicago,
becoming one of the first organizations to receive federal funding through the
AmeriCorps service program created under President Clinton. Which is where I
came into the picture, thrilled and anxious in equal parts. Negotiating the terms
of the job, though, I’d had what maybe should have been an obvious revelation
about nonprofit work: It doesn’t pay. I was initially offered a salary so small, so far
below what I was making working for the city of Chicago, which was already