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INTERVIEW:
Billy Shore Extended Interview
July 5, 2002 Episode no. 544
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Read extended excerpts from Bob Abernethy's interview with social entrepreneur
Bill Shore:
On why people are hungry in America:
It's because of poverty, because
of a lack of a living wage that enables them to support their families. Many
people who are outdoors panhandling for money at a subway stop or in the park
have substance abuse problems, mental health problems. But that masks the real
issue: millions of Americans are in families where one person is employed but not
making enough to be able to pay the rent, support the transportation costs,
support the kids' schooling costs, and also feed the family.
On abolishing hunger:
Ending hunger is really a matter of political
will more than anything else. In some countries outside of America, it's a matter
of resources. They don't have the water; they don't have the food; they have a
drought. In America, of course, we've got an abundance of resources, which says
to me that it's a matter of political will. There have been times in the history
of our country (when we were at our best) when we have determined as a people
that a certain group should not live in poverty. We decided that about seniors 50
or 60 years ago when they were the poorest of the American population. Through
Social Security and other support systems, we changed that. Today, children are
the fastest growing segment of the population living under poverty, and we can do
the same thing for children that we did for seniors.
On the recent economic boom:
In some ways, ironically, prosperity
hides poverty. During the boom years of the late 1990s, it was almost
unimaginable for most people to really believe that there were Americans going
hungry and without homes, because wealth was being generated at such a fantastic
rate. It was actually a very difficult time for our organization to do business,
because people were distracted, and we had to really make the case that even
though the economy was growing fast, it wasn't reaching everybody. So, it did
create some distortions.
There is a network today of food banks and emergency feeding assistance programs
that simply didn't exist 25 years ago. There is a place for every hungry
American to go today to get food assistance. There are at least 185 large food
banks in the Second Harvest network, and we fund a considerable number of them.
They, in turn, supply 65,000 church basements and soup pantries and trucks that
deliver food to homeless men and women in the parks. So, there's a very
sophisticated system that just didn't exist 25 years ago.
Stage one of the battle has been won. Stage two of the battle is to make sure
that people are in a position where they don't have to apply for food assistance
in the first place, and we're still far from winning that one.
On what makes Taste of the Nation work:
The fundamental idea, I think,
is very spiritual -- that everybody has the strength to share. Everybody's been
given a gift of some type, and if we can tap into that, if we can create vehicles
in which people can contribute whatever their particular unique talent or gift
is, that can change the world.
When we thought about what group would most respond to giving of their strength
to fight hunger, chefs and restaurateurs were logical because they made their
livelihood from food. So we started to very methodically ask them to contribute
to the fight against hunger -- not by writing us a check, not even by donating
food (although a tremendous number of them do both), but by literally sharing
their strength, doing what they do best, which is to cook.
Our naive notion was that chefs and restaurateurs would want to write us checks
in return for our little logo on their window. We thought that if we sent out a
thousand letters, surely 900 of them would send back checks. It turns out that
none of them sent back checks. So, we sent out another thousand letters, and one
chef sent a check -- Alice Waters from Chez Panisse in Berkeley, California --
with a note saying, "What else can I do?" Our response to her was "You can write
the next letter, because nobody's answering ours." And she got a great response.
But some of the chefs suggested, "What we really want is to be involved. We want
to roll up our sleeves and do what we do," which is cook. We created vehicles for
people to do that. We realized that they loved it and that they were really
contributing in a way that represented their unique value added.
We structured food and wine events called Taste of the Nation. We started with
one small event in Denver 15 or 16 years ago. We thought the results were great.
The chefs had a great time; people came and contributed money. We decided to do
it in 25 cities the next year. The event grew almost in a geometric progression
for the first few years. In the first year that we did it in multiple cities, we
raised maybe $250,000. The next year we raised about $580,000, the next year $1.2
million. It raises about $4.5 million a year now, 100 percent of which is
donated.
It's a classic win-win-win situation. The chefs get good visibility and an
opportunity to be part of the community. People who come get great value for
their dollar. They get to sample all of the best chefs and restaurateurs. And our
sponsors underwrite the costs not only because they want to be good corporate
citizens, but also to build relationships with their customers, who are the
chefs.
On the desire to fight hunger:
A lot of it had to do with my parents
and the way they raised me. My father was active in community and public service.
He was the administrative assistant to a congressman in Pittsburgh. In those
days, members of Congress didn't come back to their districts very often, and so
my dad was almost like the surrogate congressman. Probably my most vivid memories
are walking three blocks to get a pizza with him and taking three hours, because
so many people would come up to him and say, "Mr. Shore, my Social Security check
didn't come in the mail. Can you do something about that?" Or, "My father needs
to get into the Veteran's Administration hospital. Can you help us do that?" My
father would make mental notes of all these things and go home and make some
calls, and that would all get fixed. He wasn't preachy about it. He never tried
to steer me in one direction. But my day-to-day observance gave me the sense that
the reason we're here is to help and serve others.
My mother reinforced that in a lot of ways. We grew up in a nonobservant
household, in religious terms, of the Jewish faith. I lived in a very Jewish
neighborhood and was not being bar mitzvahed, and that was borderline scandalous
at the time, at least in this particular neighborhood. There was a lot of stigma
attached to not being bar mitzvahed. My parents said to me, "We are going to
teach you to be a good neighbor and to serve others, and if you understand both
of those things -- how to really be good to the people around you -- you'll know
the major principles of every religion in the world." It didn't mean anything at
the time, but it did stick. And I thought about it a lot afterwards.
As I've gotten older, as is typical for lots of people, you tend to think more
about your faith and want to feel more connected to it. I've been on my own
personal learning curve that way. But fundamentally, I think being in touch with
yourself and what gifts you were given and trying to understand where they came
from and what opportunities you had to nurture them -- to me, that's a very
contemplative, spiritual, almost religious experience. Not in a formal religious
sense, but most religions have some teachings about the inside and the outside
person being one; some state of grace really exists when who you are to the world
is who you really are inside. Being in touch with your strengths and your gifts
gets you pretty close to that.
On the origins of Share Our Strength:
We have had a historical
connection to Ethiopia and the issue of famine. It was actually the catalyst for
starting Share Our Strength. I'd worked for government for a number of years
when, in 1984, I read on the front page of THE WASHINGTON POST a very small
headline that said, "200,0000 TO DIE THIS SUMMER IN ETHIOPIA." I was shocked by
that. It seemed to be an enormous number. I had just come off working on
presidential candidate Gary Hart's primary campaign, and when I read the headline
there was something about it that jolted me. I was sitting in a traffic jam
thinking, "I wish we could do something about it."
And then I started to have a more self-reflective thought: "I'm having some
thoughts of my own for the first time; I'm used to thinking about what Gary Hart
thinks." My first reactions, really, were, "Should I ask Gary Hart to give a
speech about this?" Or, "Can he introduce legislation about it?" And then I
started to think, "Well, wait a second. What about me? What would I do about
it?"
That was a real moment of discovery. I thought it was a very important impulse,
and I wanted to keep acting on it. We started Share Our Strength, really, based
on that, and then funded (along with a large number of other organizations)
relief efforts in Ethiopia.
Just two years ago, for the first time since 1984, another serious famine loomed
on the horizon. The difference between today and 1984 is that, because of
communications and the development of technology, most international
organizations were able to see it coming and say, "If we all did the right thing
at the right time, we could actually avert this famine."
In 1984, my assistant Chuck Scofield and I literally raced over to Ethiopia. We
caught a plane just a few days after reading the newspaper article and decided to
go see the situation first-hand, and it was devastating. The famine had taken
root for about two years. Babies and moms and dads were dying. The cattle were
all dead. There are 8 million nomads in Ethiopia, and they depend on their
animals for milk and meat. We could have walked 20 miles, and every step of the
way we had to step over dead cattle. It was really horrifying -- mostly just
skeletons. The people had nothing to eat. The relief effort sustained them. But
it was a matter of the ability of modern communications and technology to avert a
famine. We thought that was a very powerful idea, and we've continued to work
with the organizations that we met on that first trip.
On the limits of government:
After working in the Senate for 13 years
and then serving in three presidential campaigns -- because my passion was trying
to change public policy and create social change through government action -- I
started to get frustrated with how slow and detached government seemed to be. Not
that it was not important and not relevant; I didn't have any sense of cynicism
about it, just that government alone could not do the job -- that it really takes
all of us.
At Share Our Strength we have found that we can innovate in ways government
cannot. We have that kind of entrepreneurial freedom. We can be closer to the
people we serve. We and the organizations we fund are face to face, day to day,
with Americans who are hungry and living in poverty. Government employees
typically are not. That said, once we've innovated, once we've served, once we've
built a better mousetrap, the odds are that we can't get it to scale without some
type of public support. So, for me the balance is to have individuals who work in
the private sector and contribute in the private sector and government at its
best, when it has identified programs that work.
Take Head Start for an example, which has great bipartisan support. People said,
"You know what? This deserves to be everywhere." Both Democrats and Republicans
could agree that however Head Start was innovated originally, it deserves to be
everywhere. President Clinton did the same thing with AmeriCorps. He looked at
community service programs like City Year and said, "This deserves to be
everywhere." And the Congress approved President Bush's increase in the National
Community Service Bill. So, there are evolutions over time where bipartisan
support develops for ideas that came from the private sector.
On getting to scale:
One of the most frustrating challenges facing the
nonprofit sector is many people think we don't know what the solutions are to the
problems we work on. They see hunger and homelessness. It's been around forever.
My son is 16, and he's never known an America without homeless people on the
streets, so he thinks we don't know what the solution is. In fact, just the
opposite is the case. I can take you to very effective programs that have dealt
with homelessness and job training and teen pregnancy -- whatever the issue is.
It's really not a matter of not discovering the solutions, but how do we take the
solutions that we have and make them affordable, sustainable, replicable? How do
we get them to scale?
On the role of civil society:
There is a tremendous amount that people
in the civic sector, through their churches and community organizations, can give
back to society. I really don't think that we can solve these problems without
them. The problems are just too large. Although I'm a supporter of spending for a
lot of federal programs that I think lead to very important interventions, money
alone is not enough. It takes mentoring, it takes working with people, it takes
coaching. It takes that type of personal exchange to really turn someone's life
around.
If somebody is hungry in America today, I could make you a pretty good bet that's
not the only problem they've got. They've got lots of other issues going on in
their lives. They probably don't have the right job. They probably don't have the
right educational opportunity. They probably don't have the best health care.
You're never hungry in isolation from a lot of other problems, and money alone
can't solve them. People need other people in their lives to help them reach
their full potential.
On finding time to serve:
Not everybody can serve at every stage of
life. People go through different passages in life and different transitions that
create more opportunities for them or less. So, it's not for everybody all the
time. But if you can find ways for people to literally share their strength, to
do something that is so innate to them that it is not that far of a reach -- in
fact, it comes naturally -- that creates a whole range of other opportunities for
them.
For example, you or I or many of the chefs and restaurateurs we work with could
all go down to a soup kitchen on Saturday mornings and serve trays of food. That
needs to be done, and thank goodness for the volunteers who do it. But for many
of us, it's not the highest-leveraged use of our talents, and probably not one
that will fulfill us for very long. We've wanted to create opportunities for
others to get involved. It makes sense for a chef to cook. That's a no-brainer;
they get it right away. And they can do that in the normal course of their
business, so it's not a big departure. How do we create other opportunities for
people to do that? We've started to work with athletic coaches around the
country. We're asking them not to cook, not to serve at a soup kitchen, but to
coach families and kids in sports in ways that people will come and actually pay
for that, and then we can use those dollars to help fund the programs we fund.
The intellectual design challenge here in sharing strength is to create vehicles
that really make sense for people, that are not such a stretch that you say,
"Gosh, there's not a place in my life where I can do this right now."
On fulfilling one's own needs:
When I created Share Our Strength, I
realized that, as public service oriented as it appeared to be, it was also
fulfilling a deep-seated need that I had to be involved in the community in ways
that are fulfilling. I resist the notion, I guess, that it's an altruistic thing
to do, because I know why I do it -- because it makes me feel good. And I don't
think there's anything wrong with that.
If you look at the folks in our own organization and many of the organizations
that we work in close partnership with, they're needy in certain ways. I think
they're needy in good ways, but they have a need to be involved. They find some
real emptiness, otherwise.
The economic boom years left a lot of people feeling empty. I know that because
we've had quite a few of them come to our organization and say, "I want to get
involved. I made a tremendous amount of money. I have three houses, I have four
cars, and I find that I'm not as fulfilled as I thought I'd be." You can't tell
that to somebody while they're climbing that ladder. They're just too busy
climbing to hear it. But once they get to the top, at least economically
speaking, they look around, and they usually find it lonely.
On social entrepreneurship:
There is a movement toward what I
would call "community wealth" or "social entrepreneurship" that's very powerful
right now. I'll tell you where it started in our case. Eighteen years ago, we
wanted to be a grant maker to all of the most effective anti-hunger and
anti-poverty organizations. And the only other thing we knew at the time was that
we did not want to be a re-granter; we didn't want to go to the community
foundation and ask for $30,000 so that we could give $28,000 to the food bank. We
felt there was no value added there. In fact, there was a little bit
subtracted.
So, we made this very unorthodox decision as a brand new organization back in
1984: we wouldn't have government money in the organization; we wouldn't apply to
foundations; we wouldn't have direct mail; we wouldn't have a high donor program.
We didn't just want to fight for our share of the charitable pie with our sharp
elbows vis-a-vis our brother and sister nonprofits. We wanted to make that pie
grow.
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One of the reasons we started to work with chefs and restaurateurs and so many
other businesses was that we saw an opportunity not just to redistribute wealth,
but actually to create it. If you deconstruct Share Our Strength's budget over
the years, you find that about two-thirds of our revenues come from cause-related
marketing, contracts, corporate partnerships (with American Express and Evian and
Tyson and a number of other companies like that), merchandise, and licensing
deals. It put us in a very advantageous position, because we ended up not
competing with brother and sister organizations. No one's ever applied to a
foundation for a grant and found out that it went to Share Our Strength instead.
That's just not the way we work, although we do now have some foundation
relationships.
There are no strings attached to the dollars that come into our organization,
which means that we can do not only what is popular (everybody wants us to feed
little children, which is important, and we do an awful lot of it), but sometimes
we also have to do what is not popular: support their parents, and support public
policy and advocacy efforts that don't have the same popular constituency that
giving a child some food has.
On creating wealth and developing assets:
This idea of creating wealth
became very important to us, and we realized that most nonprofit organizations --
not just anti-hunger organizations, but education organizations, religious
organizations, health care organizations -- have developed assets in the course
of executing their mission that can be leveraged into revenue generation. They
are worth more than they think they are.
A good example is the Compass School in Boston. It deals with special-needs kids
who have been adjudicated. It is state-of-the-art in the way it deals with really
tough kids who have been discharged from Boston public schools on weapons charges
or drugs. A lot of school districts get sued for the way they deal with these
kids. Sometimes the kids swing at the teacher and sometimes the teacher swings
back, and there's a lawsuit or an Office of Civil Rights violation.
The Compass School, because they're so good at it, has had school districts from
all around the country say, "Can you teach us how to comply with Office of Civil
Rights regulations so we don't have these expensive lawsuits?" This year the
school has revenues of $900,000 as a charter school, just from teaching other
school districts how to comply with civil rights. They use that $900,000 to serve
the kids they're educating on a K-12 basis. So, although it wasn't their mission,
they've created an asset in the course of it.
On investing in institution-building:
The reason community
entrepreneurship is growing rapidly is that many community-based organizations
that were always doing something important but supplemental to the role of
government now find themselves the principal provider of essential human
services. We work with an organization called Mary's Center, a maternal and child
health clinic in the Latino community in Washington's Adams-Morgan neighborhood.
They have dramatically reversed infant mortality statistics -- almost eliminated
infant mortality in the community in which they work, where it was a terrible
problem before. They've reversed the poor child health statistics. They have
become the principal provider of services that many people used to go to the
government for.
As their roles change, as nonprofits have much more responsibility thrust upon
their shoulders, they've got to think not only about, "How do I deliver services
effectively?" They have to think about, "How do we build our own institution? How
do we make sure that we're strong enough internally to do this so that we can be
sustainable and get to scale?"
The tragedy of the Mary's Centers of the world is not that they're not doing a
great job; they are. The tragedy is that they're not reaching everybody who
deserves and needs their services. I can guarantee you somebody right this minute
is sitting in Denver, or Seattle, or Atlanta, or Dallas trying to figure out,
"How do we get a maternal and child health clinic here in our community to serve
low-income populations?" They don't know that Mary's Center is here. In the
for-profit sector, if you build a better mousetrap, it's in every mall in America
-- Baby Gap, Ben and Jerry's, Bath & Body Works. There is the incentive and
investment structure to make that happen. The frustrating part of the nonprofit
sector is that you can build the best maternal and child health clinic in
America, or the best anti-hunger organization, and it won't necessarily turn up
in Dallas, or Denver, or Seattle unless you bring to bear some additional
resources.
So, when I talk about organizations not only having to be good at serving people
but also at institution building, that's what I mean. They've got to invest in
themselves, invest in sharing best practices, invest in going to conferences and
teaching others, invest in their replication. Ultimately, that's what creates
real scale.
On corporate wealth and moral questions:
I've got a colleague on the
West Coast who does this kind of work, and when he teaches or lectures nonprofits
on how to do this, he starts by saying, "Repeat after me: Profit is good." Not
everybody believes that. There is a certain pejorative impression that goes with
the idea of corporate wealth.
One of the questions that I get asked most often is: "Is there a danger that we
will lose our soul, or sell out on our values?" To most organizations, I say,
"Well, of course not." I mean, it's an appropriate concern, but your values are
who you are. They go with you where you go. And if you went to work in a
corporation tomorrow, you would bring your positive values to that workplace
rather than feel like you were going to be tainted by values you didn't agree
with.
That's a legitimate concern, but if you think you've invented a better way to
serve children to prevent infant mortality, you have a moral obligation to do
everything you can possibly do to make sure that those services reach desperately
needy kids.
Moral questions do come into play here. That's a legitimate issue to raise, and
the questions have to be judged against a set of principles you establish for
your organization. I grew up in an era when we boycotted grapes. We used economic
sanctions to penalize companies that were not doing the right thing. But I think
the converse is true. There are positive ways to use economic power to reward
companies. American Express decided to donate three cents to Share our Strength
every time the American Express card was used in 1993 and 1997. That brought
$22.5 million into our organization. Consumers who know that a company is doing
something like that should reward that company through their purchasing
decisions.
The tough part comes when we're asked what we need to do in return. Do we need to
build the brand of a company whose values we disagree with, or a company doing
other things in the community that aren't good? If a company wants to donate
money to Share Our Strength or any other end-to-hunger organization, I think
that's a good thing. If a company, in exchange, wants us to promote their brand,
that's when the moral questions come into play. We have to ask ourselves, "What
does their brand represent?" And there are plenty of potential corporate deals
that we've walked away from because we didn't feel comfortable.
One that came up not too long ago was the opportunity to sell low-cost cookware
products on television with our chefs and restaurateurs. We could not satisfy
ourselves that those products were not being made with child labor or under
sweatshop conditions, and so we decided not to do it. Moral issues really only
come into play if you blindly adhere to one course or another.
On unfair competition between for-profit and not-for-profit companies:
We
counsel nonprofits not to do that. We counsel them to create their own for-profit
subsidiaries and compete fairly. This idea of nonprofits creating wealth for
themselves is absolutely vital to their long-term success and sustainability. But
it will only be advanced if they compete fairly.
At Share Our Strength, we own a for-profit consulting firm called Community
Wealth Ventures. We pay taxes on it. To compete with other consultants, we have
to follow the same economic, marketplace forces and disciplines that they
would.
On the Enron debacle:
I think it changes board governance everywhere.
I'm on a board of the for-profit Timberland Company and several nonprofit boards,
and I know the directors of all those boards really felt that Enron was a wake-up
call. Not that there was anything wrong in these organizations, but it was a good
reminder that boards have responsibilities to understand what's going on in an
organization and make sure that what they're being told is compatible with the
facts.
On the future of hunger:
I do think that we can eliminate hunger in
America. That will happen. We will develop the facilities, we will build the
capacity of effective organizations, and we will continue to create the political
will. That will happen. I'd like to think it will happen in my lifetime. I
certainly think it will happen in my children's.
Overseas, it's a lot harder. I've been to Ethiopia twice in the last two years,
one of the most drought-ravaged, famine-ravaged countries on the globe. You see
women walk ten hours a day for water, every day. Their entire existence is going
to bring back water for their animals, their crops, their families.
We put a $3,000 generator in place that brings water from the lake up into the
fields, so Ethiopians are growing crops where they've never grown anything
before. But Ethiopia is vast, and it would take a lot of $3,000 generators to
really cover the country.
On a global basis there's been great progress. There are fantastic organizations
in the field, like Oxfam and Save the Children and others that are building up
their infrastructures. Is the end going to be in the next ten or 20 years? No.
Can it be a hundred years from now, like polio? Yes, I think we can get
there.
On hunger as a political problem:
In the United States, ending hunger
really is a matter of creating the political will to do it. We certainly have the
resources; we certainly have the money. One of the things that we don't have,
frankly, is enough awareness. There are still not enough people demanding that we
end hunger, because there are not enough people who know that 33 million
Americans are at risk for hunger or are using the services of food banks.
When people contribute to Share Our Strength, they want us to feed people.
Advocacy has a bad name, but advocacy is tremendously valuable. It means
educating people, opening their eyes, creating a political constituency. Our
government responds to voters. It responds slowly, it responds imperfectly, but,
ultimately, it responds to voters. Part of what we've got to be about at Share
Our Strength is raising awareness, raising consciousness so that people want to
make a difference.
When people understand that there's hunger in America, they are outraged by it. I
took a friend of mine to a food bank in Florida where all of the migrant workers
collect every year and then work their way up the East Coast, following the
seasons and the crops. He was shocked -- there was a homeless shelter and a
feeding program -- and just could not believe that 45 minutes from Boca Raton and
the resorts of Florida this type of poverty existed. He's become an activist.
We've got to find ways to reach people not just one at a time, but on a large
scale.
On advocacy and controversy:
Political advocacy is controversial for
most organizations. We do very little of it ourselves, but we fund it, and we
support it, with the Children's Defense Fund or the Center on Budget and Policy
Priorities -- organizations that are really helping both the public and
policymakers to understand the consequences of their decisions. It is
important.
In our case, we wanted to keep it in balance with the direct feeding that we do.
Just like government by itself can't solve these problems, advocacy by itself or
feeding by itself can't solve the problems either. We need a comprehensive mix of
them.
We know how to end hunger: we feed people. We don't really know how to end
poverty. A lot of great minds on all points of the political spectrum have
wrestled with this issue. It's a complicated problem.
If the prosperous times our country's been through didn't solve poverty, what
would? But the fact is we created an economy that left a lot of people behind. We
don't pretend to have all of the answers on this, but we know that hunger has to
be treated as a symptom of it, and we've got to be willing to dedicate resources,
to wage a long, long fight against poverty, to accept the fact that some of our
programs may not work, but not to allow that to discredit those that do.
On the faith-based initiative:
The faith-based initiative is in some
ways widely misunderstood, because there are a lot of faith-based organizations
that are performing at very high levels right now, many of which take government
funding. For me, the issue has less to do with the faith-based initiative than
how the public sector supports effective nonprofits. The test for me is not
whether they're faith-based, although the faith-based nature of some does make
them more effective -- certainly in drug rehab and those types of personal
renewal programs. But the real question ought to be how we take the most
effective programs and make sure they reach everybody who needs their services.
The faith-based initiative gets blurred in that question, and it's one of the
issues that has probably hindered its progress a little bit.
On cathedrals:
The cathedral metaphor became relevant for me when I
thought about what our work was about and what it's going to take to end hunger
in America. When you start an organization like Share Our Strength, you think,
"We're going to work our hearts out, and by the year 2000" -- that was the
fantasy in 1984 -- "there will be an end to hunger in America," or in the
world.
It's not that simple. This is work that goes on and on and on. We may never see
the end to world hunger, certainly in our lifetimes. It's that vast and
complicated a problem. So, how do you keep yourself going? How do you keep
motivated? How do you make what you're doing make sense?
I started to step back from our work and just by chance one day walked into the
Cathedral of St. John the Divine. I'd read an article about it in THE NEW YORK
TIMES on a day that I happened to be in New York, and I went up there and just
thought it was a remarkable building. I started to study cathedrals and realized
that they took hundreds and hundreds of years to build. I went to visit the
cathedral in Milan, which took 513 years to build; it was started in the 1300s
and finished in the 1800s. When I thought about that, I realized that tens of
thousands of people worked on the cathedral over that 500-year span, and almost
all of them could have known only one thing for sure -- that they wouldn't see
their work finished in their lifetime. And that didn't detract from their
commitment or their craftsmanship. It actually enhanced it. They knew that there
were people who had worked on it before them who had not seen it finished, and
there would be people who worked on it after them.
An issue like hunger is very much the same. As hard as we work, as many successes
as we have, we're not going to see the end to world hunger in our lifetime. But
we are, in effect, building a cathedral. We're building a foundation upon which
others can work. And we know that, whether we have the gratification of seeing
our work finished or not, we're making a difference every day. We're adding to
that cathedral. I think that's true of an awful lot of people who are involved in
their communities -- great people doing great things who, unfortunately, may not
see the satisfaction of the problem being completely eradicated. It's a massive
task, but doable.
I was in New York a couple days ago and went to see an exhibit at the Aperture
gallery by Sebastio Salgado, a Brazilian photojournalist, called "The End of
Polio." Polio has been a plague on the world, literally, for years. It doesn't
really exist in America anymore, but as recently as 1988, there were hundreds of
thousands of cases. In 2001, there were 480 cases. The World Health Organization
and the United Nations and others decided to do something. They vaccinated 575
million children last year. If you go down the Congo River in a canoe, you are
stopped. And if you have a child under five in the canoe, that child can't go any
further until he's vaccinated, or she's vaccinated. The point is you do have to
go to enormous, elaborate lengths to wipe out a scourge like polio or hunger, but
it can be done. It can be done.
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Books by Billy Shore:
THE CATHEDRAL WITHIN: TRANSFORMINGYOUR LIFE BY GIVING SOMETHING BACK (Includes a
20-page resource directory, for volunteers and social entrepreneurs, of
organizations across the country that exemplify Shore's "principles of cathedral
building.")
REVOLUTION OF THE HEART: A NEW STRATEGY FOR CREATING WEALTH AND MEANINGFUL CHANGE
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