“I was interested in seeing how this experience would challenge and change me.” ~ Mikel Herrington

In his 1961 inaugural address, President John F. Kennedy asked the country to consider its place in the world. He anchored it with a question — in curiosity — about how we might want to show up.

So when the very programs inspired by his call to action were besieged in recent months, I couldn’t help feeling curiosity was under attack as well.

Mikel Herrington devoted his career to just this kind of civil service. His work has taken him from his native South Carolina, to Washington DC, China, Bulgaria, Cambodia and Viet Nam – with time in both AmeriCorps and Peace Corps. 

We explore curiosity as the underpinning that brings people into civil service; reciprocal curiosity across cultural and experiential divides; humility; humor; how service allows room for listening; and why someone might carry a pecan for years…

Without curiosity, it is possible to live with someone for an extended period of time and never truly understand what is going on.

Listen to Ep. #288: Celebrating Civil Service & Curiosity, with Mikel Herrington

Listen to John Kennedy’s inaugural address on Wikipedia. Clip thanks to WikiMedia Commons, a collection of nearly 120M freely usable media files to which anyone can contribute.

Learn more about Peace Corps through the A Towering Task documentary; a video Mikel commissioned about Peace Corps during his tenure in Bulgaria; and the Peace Corps website.

Read about the creation of AmeriCorps, and check out the data on the impact of AmeriCorps.

Check out participatory appraisal, a curiosity-based process that regards recipients as the experts in assessing what’s working — or not.

Try cultivating these six habits of highly emphatic people — beginning with curiosity.

For more conversations with people in public service, check out these C2BC Classics: Curiosity in Work, Life, Politics…& Sports, with Matt Rogers; Be an Askable Adult, with Ashley Blowe, Siobhan Grayson & Scotney Young; Why Count: Curiosity & the 2020 Census, with Elizabeth Hardy; and Science, with Kelly Faulkner.

Theme music by Sean Balick; “Home, Home at Last” by Warmbody, via Blue Dot Sessions.

You can subscribe to Choose to Be Curious on Apple Podcasts and Spotify, or wherever you get your podcasts.