CH.ESC · Block № 0775 — Before We Require Service, Make It Worth Choosing

Picture a crew finishing something together. Someone measures, someone carries, someone notices the mistake before it becomes expensive. By lunchtime, a person who seemed unfamiliar in the morning has become the person you trust with the other end of the board.

There is something worth taking seriously in that small change.

Kevin Kelly proposes two compulsory years of service between 18 and 21, with military and civilian routes on equal footing. Disability would mean matching assignments to ability, not exemption. He estimates about nine million participants at $50,000 each, or $450 billion annually. He anticipates stronger civic bonds and educational benefits, while acknowledging competition with paid workers and a constitutional challenge for compulsory civilian service. His proposal is an invitation to think at an unusually large scale.

What working together might do

A shared assignment offers a different way of encountering people. You have something to discuss besides your differences. You can discover that a person whose politics annoy you is patient with a beginner, careful with equipment, or reliably there when needed.

There is evidence for parts of this intuition, though it deserves a careful reading. In a field experiment, researchers randomly assigned Norwegian conscripts to rooms during basic training. Contact with minority soldiers improved majority soldiers’ views of immigrants’ work ethic. Effects on broader views of immigration and support for unequal welfare benefits were small and statistically insignificant. The study offers a reason to investigate shared work, with modest expectations about what it can accomplish.

A military training setting also cannot tell us what would happen in every civilian placement across America. The supervisor, the task, and the treatment of participants would matter. A good crew might build trust. A badly run placement might teach people that public institutions waste their time.

Meaningful work requires someone to organize it well. That person needs time, training, and a budget too.

Two years belongs to somebody

The hardest question arrives when the invitation becomes an obligation.

Imagine three nineteen-year-olds: one whose parents can cover the rent, one already helping support a household, and one providing daily care for a relative. The same requirement would interrupt very different lives. Delaying a degree, an apprenticeship, or a steady job has a cost even when the service itself is valuable.

A serious proposal would have to explain how caregiving counts, how dependents are supported, and what happens when someone cannot safely participate. Matching a role to someone’s abilities could make service more accessible. It cannot substitute for listening to disabled people about their health, energy, support needs, and right to decline an unsuitable assignment.

There would also need to be a credible way to leave an abusive placement. Who hears a complaint? Who can order a transfer? Who protects the person reporting harassment or unsafe work? Compulsion makes those questions more urgent because the participant cannot simply quit.

The budget needs similar care. A per-person program cost is not the same thing as take-home pay. Housing, supervision, equipment, healthcare, accessibility, and administration all need funding. An evaluation should also count participants’ forgone earnings and education, rather than treating their time as free.

Useful to whom?

Communities should help decide what work they need and whether a service crew is the right way to do it. A short-term participant may be a welcome addition to a skilled team. They should not become an excuse to leave a permanent job unfilled.

There is already a relevant standard to build on. AmeriCorps’ 2026 guidance prohibits displacement of employees, including reductions in their hours, wages, or benefits. The program’s rules recognize a problem any expansion would need to monitor and enforce against.

Workers and local organizations should have a voice in that monitoring. Counting service hours would tell us very little if the result were fewer secure jobs or more work for an already stretched supervisor.

Start where people can say yes

A useful next step would be well-paid, voluntary local pilots, open to people who cannot afford an unpaid year. Offer flexible schedules, disability accommodations, childcare, and transport. Recruit beyond the usual college-bound applicants. Mix teams deliberately across neighborhoods and backgrounds, while letting residents define worthwhile projects.

Then measure what happened: completed work, participants’ financial wellbeing, workers displaced, skills gained, and relationships that last. Where places are oversubscribed, a fair lottery could also help researchers distinguish program effects from the advantages applicants brought with them.

Voluntary pilots would not settle whether compulsory service works. They could establish whether we can deliver an experience worth expanding.

The promising part is the chance to become useful alongside people you might never otherwise know. Before asking an entire generation to surrender two years, build something they have good reason to choose.

Read the local companion: A local service pilot for El Segundo and nearby communities. It is a proposal, not an existing program or an announcement of partners or funding.