The Accidental Public Servant

For most of her adult life, Laura Rog has been circling one core idea: ordinary people have more power than they realize to shape their communities—and their own futures—through service.

As New York City’s Chief Service Officer, she leads NYC Service, the division of the Mayor’s Office tasked with inspiring a culture of service across the five boroughs. Her team places AmeriCorps members at nonprofits and city agencies, helps organizations build volunteer programs, and connects thousands of New Yorkers each year to meaningful ways to help their neighbors.

She sat down for an interview on Tutors, Mentors, and the City, a conversation series run by Kevin “Dotcom” Brown through The City Tutors, to talk about growing up working class, being the “untapped potential” kid in AP classes, why she’s so open about going to therapy, and what she wants young people to know as they move from high school into college and careers.

“We all get more than one shot at figuring out our path,” Rog says. “You don’t have to have it all decided right now.”

Her own path is proof.

From Western New York to City Hall

Rog calls herself a Western New Yorker at heart. After a childhood spent moving from state to state as her father chased work, her family finally settled in Jamestown, a small city about ninety minutes from Buffalo.

Her parents, both from big, close-knit families, made stability the priority once their daughters reached school age. “My mom is the youngest of five, my dad is the second of four,” Rog says. “I grew up surrounded by cousins, aunts, uncles, grandparents. There was always family around.”

Money was tight. Her parents worked hard to keep the house safe and well kept, and to make sure she and her sister had what they needed. Rog understood, even as a teenager, that this stability came with sacrifice.

After community college, she transferred to SUNY Geneseo, part of New York’s public system, expecting to become a teacher. Midway through her senior year, she realized the classroom wasn’t her path. She switched majors, stayed an extra year, and graduated with a degree in English—exciting for her, terrifying for her mother.

“To my mom, teaching meant pension, health insurance, a clear job,” Rog says. “When I changed course, she later told me she got off the phone and cried. From her perspective, I’d walked away from safety.”

Rog wasn’t running from stability. She was moving toward something she couldn’t yet name. That “something” turned out to be service.

The “Untapped Potential” Kid and the Power of Team Sports

Looking back on high school, Rog describes herself as “untapped potential.”

She was in the AP track but came from a working-class family, sitting in classrooms largely filled with wealthier students. The gap between those worlds fed a lingering sense of impostor syndrome. “I spent a lot of time hoping no one would guess certain things about my background,” she says. “I did enough to do well, but I didn’t always push myself. Part of me was convinced I wasn’t supposed to be there in the first place.”

The other defining piece of her high school years was soccer. As a freshman, she joined the very first girls’ varsity team in Jamestown. The team was new, usually outmatched by big Buffalo-area schools, and lost more games than it won. She loved it anyway.

“There’s something about those nights where it’s sleeting and you’re sliding all over the place, laughing, just trying to get through it together,” she says. “It taught me perseverance. It taught me what happens when a group of girls and women really trust and support each other.”

That early experience of collective effort—of being stronger as a team than as individuals—would later shape how she thinks about leadership and community work.

Service Learning and a Different Kind of Teaching

When she graduated from Geneseo, Rog knew two things: she didn’t want to be an English teacher and she didn’t want to be a writer. “So the question was, now what?” she says.

The answer arrived through AmeriCorps, the federal national service program. Rog joined a New York State Education Department program and was placed at Albion Central School, working out of the superintendent’s office.

Her job was to help teachers bring “service learning” into their classrooms—blending academic goals with real community projects. A writing assignment might become interviews with seniors at a local center. A social studies unit might culminate in a neighborhood project instead of a test.

She coordinated grants, trained teachers, and spent her days stitching together curriculum and community. After her AmeriCorps year, the district hired her, and she stayed on.

“I found my way back to youth development,” she says. “I still loved learning and education, but I realized my role wasn’t going to be at the front of a classroom.”

Studying How People Become Who They Are

Rog went on to earn a master’s degree in Teaching and Curriculum, deliberately choosing not to pursue teacher certification. Instead, she focused her research on adolescent development and identity—how young people come to understand who they are in relation to their families, communities, and institutions.

She worked directly with youth as part of her research, exploring the psychological and sociological forces that shape their sense of self.

“That lens stays with me,” she says. “I’m always asking, ‘What experiences are we creating for young people? Are we helping them see themselves as capable, as belonging, as having choices?’”

That question now sits underneath much of her work at NYC Service.

Therapy, Leadership, and Making Space to Feel

Rog talks about therapy the way some leaders talk about executive coaching: as an essential tool, not a last resort.

She began working with her current therapist a few months before she was offered the Chief Service Officer position. The timing, she says, changed everything.

“Having an hour every week that’s just for me—to talk about how I’m feeling, to process work, family, friendships—has been one of the single biggest supports in doing this job,” she says. “Someone helps me see patterns, other perspectives, and it keeps me from carrying everything alone.”

She’s frank about something many students and young professionals sense but rarely hear leaders admit: nearly everyone experiences trauma, loss, and major transitions. Therapy doesn’t erase that. It gives you space to make sense of it.

“It’s not that something is ‘wrong’ with you,” she says. “It’s that you’re human. And you deserve the time and support to process what you’ve lived through so you don’t have to keep repeating the same patterns.”

Building a Culture of Service in a Working-Class City Kid Way

When Rog talks about city employment, she sounds less like a bureaucrat and more like a daughter of working-class parents who understands what stability means.

At NYC Service, she and her team are full-time city staff with pensions and health care—benefits she freely and enthusiastically sells to AmeriCorps members and interns considering public work. “Forty or fifty years ago, people understood how powerful that kind of stability can be,” she says. “We talk about it less now, but it still matters.”

Her role is part strategy, part listening tour. The office supports volunteer programs across agencies, helps businesses engage their employees in service, and responds to the thousands of New Yorkers who find their way to nyc.gov/service each year looking for ways to help.

Her leadership style mirrors her academic training in participatory action research: ask communities what they see, what they need, and what they want to build—then design programs with them, not for them.

“I don’t believe in coming in as the all-knowing expert,” she says. “Our job is to listen, take what people are telling us seriously, and use our position in government to help their ideas become real.”

What She Wants Young People to Know

Asked what she most wants students and young people to hear as they move from high school into college or from college into graduate school or work, Rog doesn’t talk about résumés or networking. She talks about choice.

“You don’t need to have it all figured out right now,” she says. “College, and even high school, is a place to test things out. Take different classes. Notice which subjects you actually like talking about, which conversations you want to keep having after class, which topics stick with you.”

Life, she says, is a series of steps. At each step, you have options.

“You get to choose what you want for your life,” she says. “Not what your parents want, not what your friends think you should do. You. And the mentors and professors and tutors around you—they’re there to help you figure that out and get to the next step, not to lock you into one path forever.”

Her own journey—from “untapped potential” in a small Western New York city to leading a team at the center of service in the largest city in the country—illustrates the point. It is not a straight line. It is a series of choices, experiments, course corrections, and risks taken with care.

If there is a through line, it is this: you do not have to know the entire route to take the next right step.