Tag Archives: public service

04.03.09
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Your Service Networks Really Can Help with Your Career Transition

A story about how networking during Peace Corps reaped rewards after my service term ended.

I’d been back in Atlanta for six months, living off of my $5,075 Peace Corps readjustment allowance—at my parent’s house, of course—and also the pocket change I made working at an amphitheatre during the 1996 Olympics, and a very unpleasant week as a temp (who knew you needed office skills to work in an office?), before I scored my first job interview. It was for a Program Assistant position at an education non-profit in Atlanta.

I had never worked for a non-profit before and I would never have looked in that direction had it not been for connections I’d made while in Guinea.

I’d met Charles soon after arriving in Guinea two years earlier. He worked for USAID and lived in Conakry, Guinea’s capital city. A former Peace Corps Volunteer (PCV), he understood the travails of volunteer life, so he let PCVs house sit whenever his work took him elsewhere.

For two years, I’d lived in a small village roughly seven hours north of Conakry. Although my house was only 15 kilometers off the main road, it took an hour — via bush taxi or on my Trek mountain bike (that road was so bad, the mode of transportation Continue reading →

09.08.08
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Paul Light on what the president needs to do to strengthen national and public service

Just in time for the Service Nation Summit, Paul Light of the Wagner Graduate School of Public Serivce at NYU, just published this opinion piece in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, on what the next president needs to do in order to strengthen both national service and the public service sector.

On a side note, read the Wagner definition of public service, which I am a big fan of:

“The Wagner School sees public service as work that matters, work of public importance – wherever it happens. What does it mean for work to ‘matter?’ At one level, it means that the work of public service has an impact on others, that it touches issues of public concern, that it is motivated more by mission than by money. Public service work also ‘matters’ at another level: those of us who choose public service want our work to ‘matter’ in our lives. We choose public service careers because we want our work to reflect our values; we want careers that satisfy our need to be of service or to transform some part of the world.”

What do you think of Paul Light’s piece? What’s your definition of public service?