Michael Brown

Biography

Michael Brown and his co-founders launched City Year in 1988 with the goals of uniting young adults from diverse backgrounds for a year of full-time community service, leadership development and civic engagement, and inspiring public policy that promoted national service opportunities for America’s young adults.

City Year, which now serves exclusively in public schools, has grown from 50 members in Boston to 3,000 City Year AmeriCorps members serving in 29 U.S. cities, with affiliate programs in South Africa and the U.K. Since its founding, City Year has generated 30,000 alumni nationwide, served more than 1.9 million children, and completed over 52 million hours of service. City Year’s alumni have been awarded more than $150 million in scholarships from the National Service Trust for their service in City Year. The organization’s annual budget is nearly $200 million.

Brown has been a leading advocate for the concept of voluntary national service, and City Year served as an inspiration for the federal national service program AmeriCorps, an innovative public-private partnership that has engaged more than one million Americans in service since 1994.