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DAVID GARFINKEL |
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Welfare and Entrepreneurship  Mayor David Cicillini of Providence, R.I., introduces students from a local classroom who have benefitted from public contributions through the Donors Choose program. |
Helping the poor while
retaining their dignity
for TheColumnists.com
I’m having lunch at Rose’s Café on San Francisco’s trendy Union Street. The guy at the table next to me is wearing an expensive suit. He’s pitching a project to another guy sitting across the table from him, relaxed and attentive and down home in his polo shirt.
The first guy compares the project he’s
pitching to something called Donors Choose. I’ve heard of
Donors Choose--it’s a new-wave charity that allows small-scale
philanthropists (How small? Try $50) to donate money directly
to schoolteachers who have requested it.
I’ve talked to teachers who’ve used it. They think
it’s great.
My curiosity overtakes my table manners. I turn to my left and interrupt. At first the guy in the suit is annoyed, but when he realizes I’m interested in his organization, he warms up a little and gives me his card. His name is Gerald Chertavian, and he’s from Boston.
Once I’m back home, I look him up on the Web. It turns out he was a Harvard MBA who pursued a high-powered career on Wall Street. Next, he built a company, Conduit Communications, Ltd. And in 1999, International Integration, Inc. of Cambridge, Mass., acquired Conduit for just under $60 million.
Since then, “Gerald turned his full attention to opportunities for others,” according to the Web site for the non-profit he founded in 2000, and now leads. It’s called Year Up, and it’s what he was pitching to the guy in the polo shirt at the restaurant.
Year Up helps underprivileged young people get job training and career paths. The program is set up to be very attractive for large corporate employers who can’t find enough entry-level workers to fill job openings.
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volunteers offer expert training to disadvantaged young urban men and women, financed by donations. |
There’s something fundamentally different about Year Up that I really like. Year Up doesn’t look at the people it’s helping as pathetic, weakling victims who carry the baggage of decades of institutionalized oppression. It doesn’t posture itself as the Great, Kind, Fortunate One sprinkling crumbs of kindness on the miserable needy as an admirable act of noblesse oblige.
No, Chertavian’s organization shows respect by being demanding. It holds the people it helps accountable. They sign a contract and have responsibilities to fulfill if they want to stay in the program.
It treats them as capable adults and in this way, Year Up sends an unmistakable, if unspoken, message to those it helps:
You are a worthwhile person who may not yet have the skills or connections you need to make it in life. That’s a shame, but that can change. You deserve an opportunity and the right to earn your way up to more fortunate circumstances.
Tough love, perhaps. But a refreshing expression of dignity that departs sharply from innuendos of programs that have, for decades, encouraged generations of poor people to feel helpless and exploited-and led children and grandchildren born into welfare families to become fixtures of the welfare subculture in America.
I see Year Up as part of a movement, and it gives me hope for a world that definitely needs some new solutions for the poor and socially disadvantaged. This new wave of charities is variously called “venture philanthropy” and “social capitalism.” I’d call it the love child of welfare and entrepreneurship.
Earlier this year I found out about another organization, Unitus, based in Redmond, Wash. It makes “micro” loans to financially strapped entrepreneurs in developing countries. How “micro” are these loans? Try $35.
I was deeply moved by the story I saw in a video on Unitus’ Web site. A woman in an unidentified country borrowed $35, to be repaid with interest, to buy a special thermometer.
It turned out she had a goat, and she could get twice the price in the local market for her goat’s milk cheese, if it was pasteurized. She needed the thermometer to pasteurize the cheese. But she never had the money, and she didn’t know anywhere she could borrow the money.
She took a loan from Unitas and bought the thermometer. She repaid the loan. Once she was getting more money for her cheese, she was able to buy a second goat and make still more money. That allowed her to send her daughter to school for the first time.
The slogan of Unitus: “A hand up, not a handout.” A fitting motto for the whole new wave movement.
Warren Buffet, the second-richest American, likes to joke that he owes a good deal of his success to his membership in “the lucky sperm club.” That is, being born in the right place at the right time-and, presented with the right opportunities.
The big question in my mind for years has been: How can those of us who are, to some degree, also members of this club, help those who aren’t-in a way that’s truly respectful, as well as effective? It looks like a handful of pioneers are blazing a trail that will provide an answer.
©2007 by David Garfinkel. The photos are courtesy of Donors Choose and Year Up. We recognize the help of staff columnist Michael Johnson in arranging this column. This column first posted on Dec. 17, 2007.
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ABOUT THE AUTHOR David Garfinkel is a former San Francisco Bureau Chief of McGraw-Hill World News. Currently he is completing a Masters degree in education and is scheduled to start a Ph.D. program next year. David is author of Advertising Headlines That Make You Rich and is well known among Internet marketing entrepreneurs as a teacher of copywriting. He publishes the World Copywriting Blog, available at http://world-copywriting-institute.com/blog |
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