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| THE CATHEDRAL WITHIN | |
 July 8, 1999 
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JIM LEHRER: Finally tonight, a Gergen dialogue. David Gergen talks with Bill Shore, founder and director of the nonprofit organization Share our Strength, author of "The Cathedral Within: Transforming Your Life by Giving Something Back." DAVID GERGEN: Bill, before we talk about the new road you think the country should take, let's talk for a moment about the road you've been on. You came to Washington right out of college, went up to Capitol Hill, and right into politics. BILL SHORE, Author, "The Cathedral Within:" Right. The day after I graduated from college, I drove down here, and I wanted to go to work for Gary Hart. He believed that ideas have power, which is a notion that still motivates me today. And I stayed on the doorstep until they gave me a job. And I ended up working for him for the next ten years and then for Senator Bob Kerrey after that. DAVID GERGEN: And during that process, helped to run three presidential campaigns; two for Hart and one for Kerrey. BILL SHORE: Yes. Didn't help win any, but I helped to run. DAVID GERGEN: I see. And then after 1992, you left politics altogether to do something that would count, as I think one of your friends, Mike McCurry, would put it. BILL SHORE: Right. Right. DAVID GERGEN: Tell us about that. BILL SHORE: Well, I had -- in 1984, I had started an organization called share our strength, essentially, an anti-hunger and antipoverty organization, and in 1992, I turned my attention to it full- time. And I guess what I really felt, David, was that in a way, politics was too limiting. I didn't leave disillusioned. I loved every minute that I spent in it. But it just felt too narrow and too limiting. And it seemed that there were so many people in this country who literally had a strength to share, who had something to give, some special talent that I thought if we could, in effect, start an organization that would tap into that, we could create longer term social change, social change that would have a more lasting impact. DAVID GERGEN: And Share our Strength, in that time period, has been attacking hunger, and you've gathered and spent some $60 million. BILL SHORE: Yes, we have. We've distributed almost $60 million around the United States, and in some cases, around the rest of the world, although about 90 percent of it is here; funding, front-line organizations who are fighting hunger and poverty, and they range from food banks to children's hospitals dealing with malnutrition to school breakfast programs, and have become increasingly convinced that we know how to solve these problems. DAVID GERGEN: You also had some innovative ways to raise money. BILL SHORE: Yes, mostly what we tried to do is we wanted to be a grant-maker to these some 200, 300 organizations we fund. We didn't want to be a re-granter, so we decided that we wouldn't go after foundation money or government money or any of those sources, although we welcome them if they come to us. What we really wanted to do was to not just redistribute wealth, but create new wealth, and so we ended up, first of all, asking people to contribute through what they do; asking chefs to cook, asking writers to write stories. We would turn those into dollars for us. But it also gave us a base and a foundation to develop corporate partnerships with American Express and Evian and Williams- Sonoma and Calphalon, companies that really wanted to engage in partnerships that would create new wealth. DAVID GERGEN: And it's this notion of creating wealth that comes to the heart of your book. Your argument, essentially, is that organizations that are out fighting poverty, fighting social illnesses are doing it on such a small scale that things have to change. We have to create a new architecture. BILL SHORE: We really do. I mean, just charitable intentions are not going to be enough. And given my politics, I could probably make a case for redistributing wealth. Redistributing wealth wouldn't be enough. It's going to take creating a new kind of wealth, what I call community wealth, because it goes directly back into the community, if we're going to really solve problems like hunger and illiteracy and teen pregnancy. DAVID GERGEN: How do you do that? What does this mean? Do you have a couple of examples of things you mean by that? BILL SHORE: What it means is really non- profits, in ways, getting into business for themselves. In some cases, it's cause- related marketing campaigns like one that we had with American Express, where every time you used your American Express card, a couple cents came to us. We raised $22 million. It was good for our business and good for theirs. There's an entrepreneurial organization in Seattle called Pioneer Human Services. DAVID GERGEN: Pioneer - BILL SHORE: Pioneer Human Services. And they work with ex-offenders and substance abusers. They were doing housing placement and then job training, and they decided to create a factory so that they'd have a place to employ the individuals they've trained. Today, that factory is the sole supplier to Boeing Aircraft for their sheet metal cargo bay liners, and Pioneer has revenues from that alone of $12 million a year. DAVID GERGEN: And they're employing mostly ex-convicts and drug abusers. BILL SHORE: Yes, and people who have come from different types of institutional dependencies. So they've decided to kind of grow their way out of the problem, not just rely on donated money and charitable dollars, but to make their own. DAVID GERGEN: Start up a company then, in effect, which is out to make a profit and take the profits and plow them back into fighting the problems. BILL SHORE: That's exactly right. And there are now entrepreneurial organizations across the country that are trying to copy that, because I think they realize that against the scale of the problem that we're dealing with-- for example, Share our Strength distributes maybe $15 million or $16 million a year, in a good year. The federal government spends $35 billion on food assistance programs. So against the scale of the problem, we need to do more than rely on charitable money. DAVID GERGEN: You said that there was a group in Newark that was doing well with this. BILL SHORE: Yes, there's an amazing parish priest in Newark named Father Bill Linder. He runs a community development organization called New Community Corporation, and they own a Taco Bell. They own a Dunkin' Donuts franchise. They have a terrific restaurant that I've eaten at, and they use -- these are all for-profit activities, and they pay taxes just like anybody else would. But they use the after-tax profits to fund their objectives. DAVID GERGEN: You said something a moment ago which was -- I'd like to come back to, because it seems like such an important point, and that is that we have learned how to solve some of the social problems in recent years. And that's not the issue anymore. For many years, it seemed to be the issue. How could you ever get -- cure the problems of child poverty or drug abuse and the rest? BILL SHORE: Right, and in a way, there's kind of a misdiagnosis, because we know how to solve hunger. We know how to solve illiteracy. We know how to solve infant mortality. There's a clinic that Share our Strength has supported here in Washington called Mary Center, Maternal and Child Health Clinic that has dramatically reversed infant mortality rates. I can give you examples of this in every part of the country. We know what the solutions are. That doesn't mean that we know how to make the solutions affordable or sustainable or to get them to scale or to replicate them. But I think this new breed of social entrepreneurs around the country are shifting their focus from just starting pilot programs and starting a program, let's say, in their church basement or their kitchen to actually thinking, how do we apply business principles to ramp these programs up? How do we get these ideas to market? DAVID GERGEN: And that means to cover a much broader section of the population. So it goes beyond a neighborhood program. BILL SHORE: Yes, it really does, and there's way too few resources devoted to that. I always think about when Jonas Salk discovered the cure for polio. The response of our government and of our foundations was not to fund another 1,000 scientists to see if they could also discover their cure on their own. It was to get that idea and that product to everybody who needed it, really to get in to market it. And that requires a shift in the way resources were used, and I think, as I say, the entrepreneurial non-profits are starting to think of that as their next challenge. DAVID GERGEN: Final question: The cathedral notion -- you wanted to build a new architecture like building a new cathedral, but the cathedral has to be within before you can build it without. BILL SHORE: Oh, it does. I mean, the whole point of writing "The Cathedral Within," for me, was to think about this idea of what the cathedral builders did, which is they devoted their entire lives on something. The Cathedral of Milan took 513 years to build. So everybody who worked on it only knew one thing for sure, and that is that they would spend their entire life working on it, and they wouldn't see their work finished. And that did not detract from their craftsmanship or dedication. It actually enhanced it. That's not an ethic that's prevalent in our society today, but when you take that ethic inside yourself, and you say many of these social problems we have are not going to go away overnight. We can't eliminate poverty by the year 2000, but if we can dedicate our lives to this, understanding that we may not see our work finished, we'll not only build a real cathedral of social change that lasts and endures and gets to scale, we'll also build a cathedral within that I think is a real sanctuary and kind of a joyful place. DAVID GERGEN: Bill Shore, thank you. BILL SHORE: Thanks for having me. |
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