The Cathedral Within, page 9
In the ten years following its founding, Alan devoted himself to City Year. Working out of an abandoned warehouse, the group began with a fifty-member corps in Boston, and eventually expanded to three hundred corps members, and then to nine other cities. Alan would fight for the national legislation that created President Clinton’s AmeriCorps program and help shape it. He would position his own organization to reap more than $8 million a year in federal funding. But the road through the inner city, where City Year works, is not an easy one. Early in its history, City Year saw a Boston corps member shot and killed. More recently, another in Chicago committed suicide. The at-risk youths who make up much of the corps need extensive support to succeed. Funds to grow the program are always scarce. Talent is in short supply. Alan’s ambition for the organization could not be realized without assuming risks that scared many. There were times when both staff and board resisted. He never wavered.
II
“All successful human endeavors—from breakthrough inventions like the telephone to great social leaps forward like the civil rights movement—begin with the assumption that change is possible. Cynicism is the enemy of positive change because it discourages creative thinking and destroys both the belief that change is possible and the will to act. The first step toward putting idealism to work is to reject cynicism and embrace idealism.”
This is the first of more than 160 specific tips and techniques cataloged in the City Year handbook for putting idealism to work. It derives from a worldview that cofounders Alan Khazei and Michael Brown share. As Michael Brown explained to students at John Carroll University in 1994: “When I was in college—just a little over a decade ago—our entire society was still organized around one defining struggle: the struggle between capitalism and communism, between the United States and the Soviet Union. The Cold War shaped our economy, our educational priorities, certainly our military priorities—and perhaps most of all, our sense of what was possible. . . . Today, the Cold War has given way to a new battle, the battle between idealism and cynicism, which will be the defining struggle of our society for years to come.”
Brown believes that the most effective way to defeat cynicism is through national service. He can envision a time when instead of college students being asked “What do you plan to do after you graduate?” the question will be “How are you going to spend your service year?”
Imagine that young people unite from all backgrounds and experiences: African Americans, Asian Americans, Caucasians, Latinos, kids from the suburbs, kids from the cities. They run an after-school program, a neighborhood recycling program, they build a community playground, they tutor and mentor inner-city school students. . . . This is the extraordinary promise of voluntary national service. . . . It would be a catalyst for the common good. It would help the country move forward—breaking through apathy, disaffection, misunderstanding, and special interest. It would shatter social barriers by uniting rich and poor, and black and white—Simi Valley and South Central Los Angeles. Long-term, it could help make our democracy more responsive, more effective, more thoughtful, and more just.
One of the things that makes City Year unique is an obsessive insistence on infusing everything with meaning, which has led to the development of a strong organizational culture. Mike Brown recalls when their dilapidated first headquarters was burglarized, and an alarm company came to put in an alarm. “When the guy finished installing it, he asked us to come up with a five-digit code to get in, and we decided it would be 19682, which meant that in 1968 the country lost both Dr. King and Robert Kennedy. It was important to us that when we opened the place up in the morning and shut it at night we would do something that gave everything a little meaning. I guess it was almost like a little prayer. I can hardly remember my own home phone number on any given day, but I will never forget the code to the old City Year headquarters.”
In a talk he gave once at his synagogue, Brown explained the deeply personal roots from which this philosophy emanates:
From my mother’s Judaism, and her mother’s, I received a love for ritual and community. Every Friday night my mother lit the Sabbath candles and wished us a good Shabbat. Every Passover the home was cleansed of chamatz. Every night of Hanukkah we lit the candles and thought of the bravery of the Macabees. And every day, our home was kosher, which always made our home special and spiritual. At Jewish summer camp, I learned to love the beauty of the havdala candles lit on the waterfront each Saturday night. . . .
Fundamentally, the way in which I have been developing our national service model at City Year is rooted in ritual that builds community, imparts meaning, and makes effective collective action possible. In fact, it was not until I had been working at City Year for several years, and developing scores of retreats, service projects, and techniques for reflection and learning, that I realized that the Passover Seder—with its universal theme of righteous exodus and its many rituals, beginning with the youngest child asking, “Why is this night different from all other nights?”—is perhaps the greatest example of “meaningful programming”—to use nonprofit jargon—that has ever been produced. It is so powerful that it has existed as a decentralized, home-centered annual event for more than two thousand years.
Brown argues that because City Year unites so many different young people, the need to create a new, inclusive culture is of primary importance. So all corps members wear uniforms and start each day with synchronized calisthenics, to physically demonstrate unity, spirit, and purpose. Each meeting at City Year begins with the sharing of “ripples”—stories from their work that give hope and inspiration.
At his synagogue, Brown quoted Tevye in Fiddler on the Roof: “Without our traditions, our lives would be as shaky as a fiddler on the roof!”
“For me,” Brown continued, “the very idea of national service’s enormous potential is rooted in the collective ritual of a nation’s youth uniting for a shared, generational adventure in idealism—a civic rite of passage that builds the national identity and, after decades of civic deconstruction and confusion, can help reestablish a usable, inclusive, national civic culture.”
City Year has not only developed rituals, it has studied its own history to extract learnings and captured those learnings with great discipline. Khazei summarizes the major ones this way:
– Remember that “every battle is won or lost before it is fought.” This piece of wisdom comes from Sun Tzu’s The Art of War. City Year translates it to mean “For better or worse, you always get the result you planned (or failed to plan) for.” The three steps to winning battles before they are fought are to visualize a result, think backward, and implement forward.
– Decide what your core principles, values, and ideas are. Narrate them through everything that you do.
– Figure out what is fundamental to your vision, and do not compromise on that, no matter what the pressures are to do so. Be flexible, however, on everything else that is not essential to the vision—extremely flexible.
– Set what you believe to be achievable, realistic goals when starting out, and make sure that you meet or exceed every single one. It is essential to establish a strong track record of results and successes early on.
– Make all decisions with your ultimate vision in mind, but do not be worried if you cannot answer every question when you are just starting out. If the vision is strong and coherent, the path, to a degree, reveals itself.
– Leverage everything. All resources have multiple uses.
– Learn from your own experience. The learningcurve in entrepreneurial organizations is steep, and your own experience can often be your best teacher.
– Remember the “Guardian Angel” axiom: If you are on the right path and are determined, you will have unexpected successes, unexpected good fortune, and “guardian angels” in the form of other people who will come out of the woodwork to help you.
The substance of each of these is less important than the fact that City Year has consciously studied and cataloged them.
III
City Year’s achievement cannot be understood without acknowledging a third driving force, and like the third leg of a stool, he is the essential stabilizing force at City Year. Jeff Swartz was not a cofounder of City Year, nor was he a roommate of Alan or Michael. As chief operating officer of Timberland, he was running a boot-and-clothing company that his grandfather had founded and his father owned, when someone at City Year called to ask for sixty pairs of boots. It was the beginning of an odyssey that resulted in Jeff investing millions of dollars and even more of his time, and ultimately agreeing to chair the City Year board.
At the age of thirty-six, Jeff Swartz has the business experience that every nonprofit organization craves. Before becoming chief operating officer of Timberland in 1991, he had also served as senior vice president of international sales and marketing, vice president of operations and manufacturing, and general manager of Timberland France and Timberland Europe. It was the kind of grooming that a CEO arranges for his heir apparent, which is exactly what Jeff was to Sidney Swartz, his father, himself the son of Nathan Swartz, the founder. Each has played a unique and complementary role. “My grandfather created a boot,” Jeffrey often says. “My father created a brand. My contribution is to create a belief that is integral to both.” When Jeff became CEO in 1998, Timberland had enjoyed seven consecutive quarters of improved earnings, was reporting revenues of $796.5 million, and had solidified its reputation as the reference brand for outdoor, rugged, high-quality footwear.
Business success has never been enough for Jeff. He told me once, privately, “I want so much, so badly, so urgently to live a life of value. . . . To repair the world, to put back together what we’ve brought apart, that is the work of heroic people.”
Ken Freitas, vice president of social enterprise at Timberland and a close colleague of Jeff’s, remembers how the relationship with City Year started with a request for sixty pairs of boots. After a series of meetings to explore working more closely together, they found: “We understand things about the power of service, about diversity, about leadership. Things that are very relevant to our business. For the first time they take us through trainings, workshops, about diversity, about workstyles. We understand things that are very relevant for our business about creating value.”
Freitas relayed another piece of the corporate history about how Swartz, early in his tenure as COO,
was wrestling with a certain problem and called on his relationship with a board member named Dr. Abraham Zeleznick. After dancing around the issue, trying to ask Zeleznick the question without officially asking him, Abe says, “Stop it. You’re a typical young person. You think there’s a right answer. There are no right answers, there are only beliefs. And what you have to do is you have to choose one. You have to choose well. And then you have to get behind it with everything you have. And then you have to get your organization to understand it, and get them behind it with everything that they have.”
The result is a company like almost no other. In addition to their substantial investment in City Year, Timberland employees are given the opportunity to spend up to forty hours of paid time per year participating in community-service activities. The company’s commitment to community building contributed to Timberland’s selection by Fortune magazine as one of the “100 Best Companies to Work For.” During the annual four-day meeting of sales reps in Marco Island, Florida, the day that was usually devoted to golf and “spa work” was spent instead in Immokolee, Florida, the migrant worker capital of the South, building Habitat for Humanity homes and playgrounds and reading to first graders in their public schools. At dinner that evening, Jeff remained in the background, but one employee after another came to the microphone to give witness to how the experience had been a revelation, and why they felt so strongly about working for Timberland.
Jeff could not believe more strongly in the social responsibility of his company, but he also sees vital business needs being met: “Building community helps foster teamwork throughout the company, and helps to unify all Timberland employees toward a common, purposeful goal.”
City Year is so convinced of the positive business outcomes that corporations will enjoy from this type of work that it has created an initiative called Care Force to arrange service projects and offer them for a fee to corporations and other institutions. To date, Care Force has organized programs, team-building initiatives, and training for more than 2,500 corporate employees and students, and has generated more than $100,000 in gross revenues. Care Force “clients” have included Bain & Company; Goldman, Sachs & Co.; Inc. magazine; Babson College; and the American Society of Association Executives—just to name a few. Care Force holds the promise of becoming City Year’s premier revenue-generating activity while simultaneously furthering the mission by engaging the private sector in service.
Jeff Swartz brings his own deep sense of cathedral building to the work. In a letter I received from him in July 1997, he explained:
One of my favorite sections in the Bible comes from Deuteronomy 30: 11–15, as Moses is charging the nation with how they “mayest” live their lives. Moses is facing his imminent death; as the leader he is, his concern is not for his individual fate, but for The Work that remains to be done after his death.
To a nation accustomed to and in many ways dependent upon a leader who regularly and passionately intervened with G-d, who was the nation’s link to Answers, Moses’ wisdom is crucially important. He tells the nation that “this commandment that I command to you this day [the entire body of Torah law] is not remote from you. It is not in heaven so that you should say, ‘Who shall go up to heaven and bring it to us.’ Further, it is not over the sea so that you should say, ‘Who will cross the sea and get it for us.’ Rather it is something very close to you. It is in your . . . heart. See—today I have set before you a choice, between life and good, and death and evil.” Moses’ whole charge to the people is to recognize that only when individuals commit themselves to each other, only when each individual accepts his or her responsibility as a human, only then is humanity capable of transcendence.
IV
In 1991, presidential candidate Bill Clinton toured City Year’s Boston headquarters for the first time and talked with corps members about their service. At the end of that day, he declared, “I don’t know if I’m going to be president, but if I am president I know this is something I’m going to do.” From that day on, whenever candidate Clinton pulled up to a rally in Boston or New Hampshire, red-jacketed City Year corps members were there to greet him with smiles and signs. When CYZYGY was held in Providence, Rhode Island, last year, First Lady Hillary Rodham Clinton was persuaded to come. When Eli Segal went to meet the president to debrief him on the Welfare to Work initiative, he brought with him five letters from the five hundred that corps members had written. Segal was Harris Wofford’s predecessor running the Corporation for National Service, and he remembers Clinton telling him upon his appointment to the post in 1992, “I want you to deliver for the rest of the United States what City Year has done for Boston.”
And so it was impressive, but not surprising, that at the last hour the president of the United States overruled his staff, and left behind the Oval Office, nuclear testing in India and Pakistan, the peace process in Northern Ireland, and the running battle with tobacco companies to board Air Force One to fly to Cleveland, where he would be met by Alan Khazei.
The president’s schedule called for a stop at Steve Howell Elementary School before arriving at CYZYGY. Because of last-minute meetings with congressional leaders in Washington, he was already running late. City Year corps members kept the audience entertained with songs and stories. They competed to outcheer one another. They did their trademark calisthenics. The gym rocked with their energy. More than thirty national and local television news crews on risers at the back of the auditorium adjusted their cameras. Finally, to the strains of “Hail to the Chief,” across the stage came Alan Khazei and President Bill Clinton.
The president was introduced by Leslie Frye, a nineteen-year-old corps member who serves people with AIDS at food pantries throughout Chicago. One of the five letters delivered by Eli Segal that had persuaded Clinton to come to Cleveland was handwritten by Leslie. She read it now as her way of introducing the president. She explained how her service had included work in an HIV/AIDS clinic, how she had seen people die and learned how people live. What she had written weeks before and read that afternoon embodied the idealism of every corps member in that room: “Mr. President, I hope that you are the person who is reading these next words. I hope that you see them with your own eyes and internalize them and realize what tremendous impact your decisions have on the lives of young people in America. Know, Mr. President, that because of your support there is a corps of sixty individuals in Chicago alone who will serve the community of humanity for life.
“Thank you, Mr. President, for believing in me,” Leslie continued, as her voice began to break. It was as if she had unexpectedly become aware of something vital about herself. “Thank you for having the courage to stand up for who I am and the vision to see that I need you.” She choked back a sob and paused, but only for a moment.
A young woman’s breaking voice can be more contagious than a yawn. Don Baer, who until recently had been head speech writer for Clinton, was standing in the bleachers. He had heard the president introduced in every way imaginable; I would have thought him immune to sentiment. Tears pooled at the corners of his eyes and rolled down both cheeks. One bench above him stood Alan Khazei’s wife, Vanessa. The distance between her and the president’s podium held a decade of memories. She wept, too.
