What is one of your earliest memories of the power of human connection?
My mother grew up in a very tight-knit Irish Catholic family. My grandparents bought a house on a lake in New Hampshire for the express purpose of bringing the family together, so I grew up spending my summers there. It was a sort of family compound where my cousins lived next door. Some of my earliest memories are of love, laughter, and music. We had a lot of birthdays in the summer, so it was a lot of celebration. My sister, her husband, my husband, and I now co-own that house. Our children are experiencing so much of what we experienced as kids. As a result, they have developed a tight bond with each other and with our cousins’ kids.
Unlike my mom’s big family, my dad was an only child. He had a set of best friends we called uncle, even though they weren’t related to us, and I always say that my dad taught me how to be a friend through those relationships.
When I was five, we moved to Turkey for my dad’s job. He worked for the U.S. government, and typically, people who worked in the agency would live on base with other American families. My parents very intentionally decided that they wanted us to live in community with Turks and with people from other countries. We had a flat in the middle of Ankara, and we were just part of the neighborhood. We played with the neighborhood kids. That taught me a lot about how important it is to live in community, to get to know your neighbors, and to understand people as human beings and not just as other folks.
What values guide your personal life and your work?
I try for my values to be in sync in both, so that I’m not one person at home and one person at work.
I’m going to borrow from my South African colleagues the spirit of Ubuntu, which is a word that means “I am because you are.” What it gets at is our shared humanity and that we are all interdependent. There’s no me without you. How do we lift each other up?
I try to think about that every day, even on those tough days when you may be facing challenges with somebody, just to think about their humanity and our shared humanity, and that when we lift each other up, we all rise.
The other value I think about a lot is service because it is my work and my passion. I think service is love in action. It’s not transactional just to get something done or achieve a mission. It’s about expressing love for other people, and I try to keep that front and center.
When did a person or experience change your mind about an idea or belief?
The most formative moment was when I was a Jesuit volunteer after I graduated from Holy Cross. I went to California and lived in community with six other volunteers, a few of whom I knew, but most I didn’t. Just coming out of my undergraduate studies, the experience was like being thrown off the deep end. I worked in an immigrant and refugee center in Southern California that served primarily Southeast Asian people who were being resettled.
I lived in Turkey as a kid, and I grew up in a suburb of Washington, D.C. Every day I would go to work and think to myself, I would not have hired me to do this. What were you thinking?
There wasn’t one single moment that changed me. It was a year of it. Living in community with other volunteers meant constant negotiation: who would take the car, how would we get the groceries, who would make dinner. Beyond the logistics, we would also stay up late into the night talking about our experiences and challenging each other. It was this crucible moment for me. I was challenged in a million different ways about the assumptions, beliefs, and blind spots that I had about people of different political persuasions and backgrounds.
As intense as the experience was, what I have learned is that service is the thing that can bring us together. Service is a vehicle through which a lot of us gain the power of seeing people as human beings and not as their sets of ideas and beliefs. That’s why I’m so passionate about my work.
What are you working on right now?
Right now, it’s about continuing the work that I started over 30 years ago to help people understand the power of service and the power of a year of service. It was so formative in my own life, and I really think the world would be a different place if every young person was given the opportunity to do a year of service, get out of their comfort zone, and live in community.
In this moment of AI, where there’s so much disruption in the workforce, service gives young people those durable, human-centered skills that employers are saying they want and need.
I’m working with my colleagues to ensure that people in Congress and decision-makers in Washington understand the power of AmeriCorps and why it matters. So far, we have been successful in keeping the program going and building support across party lines. People across the political spectrum have come to know AmeriCorps in their local communities, believe in it, and put power behind it.
What is giving you hope or what positive visions do you have for our future?
Hope is a word I think about every day, because I have a lot of hope.
It’s the young person who is spending a year in AmeriCorps or a service program in the UK or South Africa. Their commitment, passion, and belief in what’s possible just keeps me going. It is like rocket fuel.
We are also in the process of launching a global network on national service in Latin America, Greece, France, and the UK, and hearing from people across the world working on this idea has been incredibly inspiring. Different contexts, different political situations, different languages, different cultures, but everybody coalescing around what a year of service for young people could do for the young people themselves and for their communities.
That gives me tremendous hope.
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