In this pre-reading from the 2006 Gathering, Michael Brown, President and Co-Founder of City Year, explores the action tank concept. Brown and his fellow co-founder Alan Khazei developed the phrase to describe City Year's unique position as a program and mobilization organization (action) and a developer of national service policy proposals (tank). Through narrating his experiences, Brown begins to sketch out theory and implications for the action tank model.

Brown also helps make sense of a situation that arises for so many social entrepreneurs who have great success in growing their models, but do so at the expense of leveraging their organization's results for field building, policymaking, and broad social change. Offering a framework and set of concepts for social entrepreneurs and other actors in the social sector to move beyond this trap, he maps out a way for social entrepreneurs with an action tanking model to help bring about a new progressive era.