by William C. Richardson, Ph.D.
Tuesday, October 21, 1997
Seminar on Youth and Philanthropy
Amway Grand Plaza Hotel, Grand Rapids, Michigan
President and chief executive officer of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation, Mr. Richardson is also a member of the Board of Trustees of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation and a trustee of the W. K. Kellogg Foundation Trust.
Dr. Richardson has been active with numerous foundations, nonprofit institutions, and the corporate and public sectors. He is a member of the Institute of Medicine of the National Academy of Sciences, and is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences and the American Public Health Association. He serves on the boards of the Council of Michigan Foundations and the Council on Foundations (trustee and chairman). He also serves on the boards of directors of CSX Corporation and The Bank of New York. He chairs of the Committee on Quality of Health Care in America for the Institute of Medicine, National Academy of Sciences.
Although I'm here today as a guest speaker, and head of the Kellogg Foundation, I could just as easily be a member of this audience.
A good portion of you are students, teachers, and scholars, and I've spent the majority of my professional life serving in these roles. They are immensely rewarding roles, and for teachers, increasingly challenging in terms of continuing education. What Richard Henry Dana said about teaching has never been more true, that "Who dares to teach, must never cease to learn."
In 1995, I left the world of teaching and higher education to take up my current position in philanthropy, another calling to which I am deeply committed. This was no easy choice. As I recently told my staff, serving as the Kellogg Foundation's president and CEO was the only job in the world, public or private, that could have convinced me to leave Johns Hopkins University.
I could do so because the Kellogg Foundation's values and mission are very much like my own. The Foundation was, after all, established by a man who once said, "Education offers the greatest opportunity for really improving one generation over another."
I would add that perhaps education about philanthropy offers yet another great opportunity for improving one generation over another. It is this very possibility that brought you together for this conference.
We are here, in part, because these ideas are not well understood in American society. As a people, we lack a firm grasp of our service tradition which, in my view, along with our Constitution, is one of our nation's greatest democratic legacies.
We may appreciate our volunteer soccer coaches, and scout leaders, and fire fighters, and blood donors. And we may notice, on snowy weekends, that someone has thoughtfully scattered rock salt on the steps of our house of worship. We don't always stop to think, though, how these things get done, or how much poorer our lives would be if they didn't. And few of us ever consider the organizing principles behind philanthropy and service. We do not realize that each of these selfless and seemingly random actions, committed for the common good, are of a whole cloth.
In truth, many of our volunteers may not realize these things either. Most likely they do not know that they're part of a huge, multibillion dollar industry often referred to as the "third sector." But that's probably OK.
I do believe, however, that someone needs to be minding the store, so to speak. Because the enormous value and virtues of philanthropy and service are too big a treasure to be left unguarded.
This afternoon, I'd like to discuss a few ways Learning to Give can help stop that from happening. And, I would like to explore a lesser-known aspect of philanthropy: its ability to help our nation restore its sense of civility and shared purpose.
But first, to put the current situation into perspective, let me borrow a term that many of you will recall from your studies of the Gilded Age of the 1870s. I refer to the term laissez-faire, which originally was applied to economics, but today can be used to draw a clear parallel with philanthropy and service.
In the 1870s, proponents of laissez-faire economics believed the nation's economy and private sector could take care of itself. There was no need for government to do more than keep the peace and protect property rights. What the laissez-faire proponents did not realize, however, was how complex and volatile America's economy had become. Historians now tell us that a lack of sound regulations on Wall Street - which the laissez-fairists then saw as unnecessary - contributed greatly to the stock market crash of 1873. The crash of '73 plunged the nation into its worst depression up to that time, and in the process, debunked a lot of popular notions about the benefits of a laissez-faire economy.
I use this example because there's a danger that laissez-faire thinking will today become a substitute for useful action in civic life - this time, not in an economic sense, but in a social sense. We live in an age of so many distractions, of two-wage earner families, and of overworked single parents. We don't believe we have the time or income to support service and philanthropy. We don't see the need to contribute beyond the bare minimum, because the nonprofit sector will somehow take care of itself.
The problem with laissez-faire philanthropy is that our great tradition of giving and service -habits of the heart that have sustained our nation - do not reside in the human genome. These civic traditions are learned behaviors that can be unlearned within the span of a generation or two.
Who then should teach our children lessons about service and giving? In honesty, they should first be taught in families, neighborhoods, and places of worship. They are, above all, best taught by the example of a caring parent or adult, who shows a child that volunteering one's time and money for the public good is a fundamental part of life. Ideally, parents and loved ones should always be a child's first and best teacher.
Having said that, we also must face the realities of 21st century life. In recent decades, the bonds of families, neighborhoods, and churches have all weakened. For thousands of children, positive adult role models are sadly absent. We know, too, that for many children, our schools provide the only safe, healthy environment for learning that they know. And, in a very positive sense, we also recognize the great influence on character development that teachers play in the lives of children.
Teachers, then, are an excellent choice for instructing young people about the value of giving.
As someone who still thinks of himself as a teacher, now comes what I see as the exciting part. That is, how to teach young people about the value and meaning of giving. It's exciting because there are so many tools at one's disposal.
Two examples are history and current events. Michigan, for instance, has a rich history of giving. I didn't know how rich until I reviewed a draft of the new book For the Benefit of All: A History of Philanthropy in Michigan, which was published by the Kellogg Foundation in cooperation with the Council of Michigan Foundations, and will be released in early November. I mention this not only to promote the book - which is a fascinating and useful resource - but to illustrate how philanthropy can blend so easily with existing subjects.
Consider the story of Roberta Griffith, an advocate for the blind who was Michigan's counterpart to Helen Keller. Griffith, who was left sightless by a childhood illness, won a scholarship to Western Resewe University (now Case Western Reserve University) in Cleveland.
She was admitted on a one-week trial, because her professors doubted her academic ability. Yet she not only graduated with high honors, but to help fund her education, worked as a newspaper reporter and music teacher.
Back in Grand Rapids, while working as a real estate agent and magazine writer in the early l900s, Roberta Griffith led the city's first-ever census of blind residents. In 1913, she authored a piece of state legislation that mandated the use of nitrate of silver in the eyes of newborn infants - a procedure that has saved thousands of children from blindness.
In her spare time, Ms. Griffith compiled a six-volume dictionary for the blind, developed a single Braille print system for the United States, and even wrote a romance novel.
Then there are modern heroes of philanthropy who our children deserve to hear about. People like New York Yankees' shortstop Derek Jeter, a graduate of Kalamazoo Central High School. In 1996, in addition to being named American League Rookie of the Year and helping the Yankees win the World Series, he established the Turn 2 Foundation. This new philanthropy will help young people who are at-risk from drug and alcohol problems. Needless to say, Derek Jeter is a great role model, not just for kids, but for other professional athletes.
And, we don't have to look far to find everyday people who are good role models. Just a few weeks ago, there was a newspaper story about Dr. Laurent Pierre-Philippe, a physician who runs an inner-city clinic in Baltimore that serves the poor. It seems Dr. Pierre-Philippe also plays Lotto, and he recently won a $10 million-dollar jackpot. He used his first payment to meet the pressing needs of the clinic he operates. And instead of retiring, he'll use most of his future installments to support education and job creation in his native country of Haiti. Yet this isn't the type of person, nor the type of behavior, that receives much attention in popular culture.
Such stories of everyday people, whose lives have found great purpose by serving others, make philanthropy seem accessible to young people. And that's essential, because frankly, the term philanthropy does not roll easily off the tongue. It sounds vaguely Greek, and to many Americans, has the musty odor of old money about it. It certainly doesn't sound like something 6th graders can do on a Saturday morning.
Yet if there's one thing we want to accomplish with this initiative, it's to make giving and philanthropy more inclusive. Service and philanthropy are more than a pastime for the retired couple down the street. The needs are so great, and our nonprofit sector so diverse, that service opportunities exist all around us, for people of nearly every ability.
Philanthropy, as defined by Indiana University's Bob Payton, is simply "voluntary action for the public good." One could almost make this definition the credo of Learning to Give. We believe a kid who plants flowers in a nursing home window box is just as much a philanthropist as someone who contributes $200 to the United Way.
This leads us to another valuable tool for teaching philanthropy: service learning. I realize service learning is an optional activity for participants in Learning to Give. We should also realize that, in some communities, there's been opposition to mandatory service learning requirements.
However, for those schools and communities that choose to offer voluntary service programs, we know that service learning benefits young people in a variety of ways. As individuals, service learning improves self-esteem and self-confidence and reduces involvement in risky behavior. As citizens, service learning gives young people an increased sense of civic responsibility and a commitment to community involvement. As students, service learning helps improve school performance and academic engagement. Again, service learning can be woven into a curriculum, and used as yet another tool for modern education. For instance, it allows teachers to accommodate young people who relate best to hands-on, or experiential learning.
Frankly, service learning programs also can be a boost to a school's reputation. Kids are naturally good will ambassadors; when they visit nursing homes, or clean up parks, or read to preschoolers, it sends a message, and that message is this: kids are not a source of problems, but a source for solutions.
I mentioned earlier a larger purpose of philanthropy that I'd like to return to for a moment. And that is the ability for service to help heal society; to help us rethink the way we view our neighbors and the circumstances that often divide us. Because when we give selflessly, whether of our time or personal income, we do develop a vested interest in the well-being of others. An interest, I might add, that can transcend the differences of politics, culture, and income levels.
This is something we need to do as individuals, and as families, and as communities if we hope to rebuild a civil society. Seventeen-year-old LeAlan Jones from Chicago writes about this need in a book released earlier this year titled, Our America. He speaks as an African-American youth who has come of age near one of our nation's poorest, most crime-ridden public housing projects. In the preface of Our America, LeAlan Jones writes: "We live in a second America, where the laws of the land don't apply and the laws of the street do. You must learn our America as we must learn your America, so that maybe, someday, we can become one."
I believe service, as taught by schools and families, can help make us one. And I'm happy to say that LeAlan Jones has benefited from his association with the No Dope Express Foundation, a Kellogg Foundation-funded organization that operates on Chicago's South Side.
Yet what this young man so eloquently suggests we must do cannot be accomplished through laissez-faire philanthropy. We may live in a wired world, but there's no such thing as virtual philanthropy, no replacement for flesh and blood involvement with the lives of people. In our democracy, service and philanthropy have always helped cushion the rough edges of society, where government intervention would be ineffective or inappropriate. But again, these traditions will not survive unless we keep them alive.
We're asking our schools, then, to instill in our children a new level of civic competency. Hugh Price, president of the National Urban League, has challenged American education to "equip every child to play by America's rules." Mr. Price seems to suggest that if we want kids to become good citizens, we've got to provide the skills and knowledge to help them do so. In a similar way, we should equip our children with the knowledge that they need to follow what's always been a great unwritten rule in American society: the responsibility to help one's neighbor. Schools can provide an appreciation for service that's too often lacking in modem culture.
I'd like to close with a frank and thought-provoking comment that recently appeared in the newspaper. It was made by an eighth grader, who had just learned about the meager number of possessions left behind by Mother Teresa. "Boy," the student said, "it would sure stink to live a life like hers."
Well, I guess that depends on how we help our children define living and accomplishment. Certainly, few of us are inclined to take a vow of poverty. But Mother Teresa established a global enterprise devoted to serving the poor, won a Nobel Peace Prize, and had the respect of world leaders and millions of citizens, of all faiths and nationalities. To me, one illustrated the true power of service, a power that does not oppress, but liberates - a power that we're asking you to share with our children.
As Winston Churchill once suggested, teachers "... have powers at their disposal with which prime ministers have never yet been invested." And when it comes to service we can all be teachers. Each of you - whether teachers, scholars, students, or practitioners - have a rare opportunity to use your powers in a new, exciting way as you establish a new vision of K-12 education in philanthropy. What you create will become a new benchmark for education, and we look forward to sharing your work with our schools, communities, and nation. Thank you.
