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 half of what I’d been earning as a lawyer, that I literally couldn’t afford to say yes. Which led to a second revelation about certain nonprofits, especially young-person-driven start-ups like Public Allies, and many of the bighearted, tirelessly passionate people who work in them: Unlike me, it seemed they could actually afford to be there, their virtue discreetly underwritten by privilege, whether it was that they didn’t have student loans to pay off or perhaps had an inheritance to someday look forward to and thus weren’t worried about saving for the future.
It became clear that if I wanted to join the tribe, I’d have to negotiate my way in, asking for exactly what I needed in terms of salary, which was significantly more than Public Allies had expected to pay. This was simply my reality. I couldn’t be shy or embarrassed about my needs. I still had roughly $600 of student debt to pay off each month on top of my regular expenses, and I was married to a man with his own load of law school loans to cover. The organization’s leaders were almost disbelieving when I informed them how much I’d borrowed in order to get through school and what that translated to in terms of monthly debt, but they gamely went out and secured new funding that enabled me to come on board.
And with that, I was off and running, eager to make good on the opportunity I’d been handed. This was my first chance ever, really, to build something basically from the ground up: Success or failure would depend almost entirely on my efforts, not those of my boss or anyone else. I spent the spring of 1993 working furiously to set up an office and hire a small staff so that we could have a class of Allies in place by the fall. We’d found cheap office space in a building on Michigan Avenue and managed to get a load of donated secondhand chairs and tables from a corporate consulting firm that was redecorating its offices.
Meanwhile, I leveraged more or less every connection Barack and I’d ever made in Chicago, seeking donors and people who could help us secure longer-term foundation support, not to mention anyone in the public service field who’d be willing to host an Ally in their organization for the coming year. Valerie Jarrett helped me arrange placements in the mayor’s office and the city health department, where Allies would work on a neighborhood-based childhood immunization project. Barack activated his network of community organizers to connect us with legal aid, advocacy, and teaching opportunities. Various Sidley partners wrote checks and helped introduce me to key donors.
The most exciting part for me was finding the Allies themselves. With help from the national organization, we advertised for applicants on college campuses across the country while also looking for talent closer to home. My team and I visited community colleges and some of the big urban high schools around Chicago. We knocked on doors in the Cabrini-Green housing project, went to community meetings, and canvassed programs that worked with single mothers. We quizzed everyone we met, from pastors to professors to the manager of the neighborhood McDonald’s, asking them to identify the most interesting young people they knew. Who were the leaders? Who was ready for something bigger than what he or she had? These were the people we wanted to encourage to apply, urging them to forget for a minute whatever obstacles normally made such things impossible, promising that as an organization we’d do what we could—whether it was supplying a bus pass or a stipend for child care—to help cover their needs.
By fall, we had a cohort of twenty-seven Allies working all over Chicago, holding internships everywhere from city hall to a South Side community assistance agency to Latino Youth, an alternative high school in Pilsen. The Allies together were an eclectic, spirited group, loaded with idealism and aspirations and representing a broad swath of backgrounds. Among them we had a former gang member, a Latina woman who’d grown up in the southwest part of Chicago and had gone to Harvard, another woman in her early twenties who lived in the Robert Taylor Homes and was raising a child while also trying to save money for college, and a twenty-six-year-old from Grand Boulevard who’d left high school but had kept up his education with library books and later gone back to earn his diploma.
Each Friday, the whole group of Allies gathered at one of our host agency’s offices, taking a full day to debrief, connect, and go through a series of professional development workshops. I loved these days more than anything. I loved how the room got noisy as the Allies piled in, dumping their backpacks in the corner and peeling off layers of winter wear as they settled into a circle. I loved helping them sort through their issues, whether it was mastering Excel, figuring out how to dress for an office job, or finding the courage to voice their ideas in a roomful of better-educated, more confident people. I sometimes had to give an Ally less-than-pleasant feedback. If I’d heard reports of Allies being late to work or not taking their duties seriously, I was stern in letting them know that we expected better. When Allies grew frustrated with poorly organized community meetings or problematic clients at their agencies, I counseled them to keep perspective, reminding them of their own relative good fortune.
Above all, though, we celebrated each new bit of learning or progress. And there was lots of it. Not all the Allies would go on to work in the nonprofit or public sectors and not everyone would manage to overcome the hurdles of coming from a less privileged background, but I’ve been amazed over time to see how many of our recruits did, in fact, succeed and commit themselves long term to serving a larger public good. Some became Public Allies staff themselves; some are now even leaders in government agencies and inside national nonprofit organizations. Twenty-five years after its inception, Public Allies is still going strong, with chapters in Chicago and two dozen other cities and thousands of alumni around the country. To know that I played some small part in that, helping to create something that’s endured, is one of the most gratifying feelings I’ve had in my professional life.
I tended to Public Allies with the half-exhausted pride of a new parent. I went to sleep each night thinking about what still needed to be done and opened my eyes every morning with my mental checklists for the day, the week, and the month ahead already made. After graduating our first class of twenty-seven Allies in the spring, we welcomed a new set of forty in the fall and continued to grow from there. In hindsight, I think of it as the best job I ever had, for how wonderfully on the edge I felt while I was doing it and for how even a small victory—whether it was finding a good placement for a native Spanish speaker or sorting through someone’s fears about working in an unfamiliar neighborhood—had to be thoroughly earned.
For the first time in my life, really, I felt I was doing something immediately meaningful, directly impacting the lives of others while also staying connected to both my city and my culture. It gave me a better understanding, too, of how Barack had felt when he’d worked as an organizer or on Project VOTE!, caught up in the all-consuming primacy of an uphill battle—the only kind of battle Barack loved, the kind he would always love—knowing how it can drain you while at the same time giving you everything you’ll ever need.