i sat down today with reuben harpole from the helen bader foundation and asked him some questions. we had a good time, and he put some knowledge on me.
me: ok, i made a list of things i wanted to ask you about. the first thing i wanted to ask you is how you got into non-profits.
reuben: i was asked. i had worked at the university of wisconsin for 31 years, actually maybe a little bit longer and after i stopped, i retired and dan bader, president of the helen bader foundation came and asked me how would i like to keep on doing what i was doing, which was working with children and youth. he said, only i’ll pay you and give you a budget. it was a no-brainer.
m: so it was kind of a transitional thing?
r: yes, just because dan saw something in me that of course i didn’t see in myself and he pulled me over.
m: what does the helen bader organization do, or foundation, rather?
r: the foundation itself got started because dan and david bader’s mother had passed and she left $150 million and they decided to put into a foundation and help the community based on what she dreamed. her dreams were music; alzheimer’s, because she worked at the jewish center so she cared about the elderly and the struggles they were having; and then she cared about low-income people like us. so they fashioned or molded her foundations around her principles and ideas, the things she believed in and loved. so that’s what we have; i work with children and youth and low-income people... we have something called community initiative and the community initiative is something that we don’t have a program area for. we have something called program-related investments where we help groups that are trying to get started but they don’t have enough collateral and so we’ll help them get started. then we have something called economic development…
m: economic development for individuals or for businesses or what is that?
r: all of that. they’ve taken north avenue all the way from 60th street all the way down to 4th street; all that development you see around 35th street, that new frozen custard place you see that’s going up, and the philips station, all that. and the university. over 11 years they’ve given $12 million to the university of wisconsin. since helen received her master’s degree in social welfare, the foundation gave in her honor $5 million to the school of social welfare and it’s named after her now; the helen bader school for social welfare. then they gave a million dollars to the institute for non-profit, helen bader institute for non-profit.
m: i’m looking into those for non-profit management certification…
r:If you wanted to get into that, that is where you would go and get your master’s.
m:i have to get my bachelor’s first, i’ve been looking into it at alverno. it’s tough, you know.
r: let me give you that right now www.blackexcel.org . it’s 200 websites for you, they say black students aren’t applying.
m: aren’t applying?
r: are not applying, including the bill and melinda gates foundation which is strictly for black students. 335 million for black students.
m: i would love to apply, that’s kind of why i am in this program. it helps you obviously with the experience, experience learning, and hands-on seeing what i want to do. then, getting the education benefit at the end is really nice. some of the local universities have fellowships with americorps and other service fellowships where you can go and get your master’s degree afterwards. marquette university is one of them, the trinity fellows program.
r: that’s fantastic, i didn’t know about the trinity fellows.
m: something that i am having a problem with in this job, and these kinds of jobs, is that i always feel like i’m stuck in a rut. like i’m not doing anything, not doing enough. what could you recommend or suggest?
r: i’d love to have you work with me. in terms of volunteering, there’s something we’ve got called “homework first” where you would adopt a school, take maybe the third grade class in that school and stop by at least once a month, but if you have time once a week, and check the kids in the room. whichever room you take, check to see that the kids are doing their homework. the teacher will have a board up in the room; if they missed their homework, there will be a black spot.
so if you catch a kid not doing their homework, you pull them aside and talk to them out in the hallway. say, “hey, what’s wrong with you? why aren’t you doing your work?” and they’ll come up with all kinds of stories. then you tell them, “look, are you smart or are you dumb?” no one wants to be dumb so, they’ll say “no, no, i’m smart.” “so if you’re smart, do your homework. what do you want to become when you grow up? whatever it is that you want to become when you grow up, you’re still gonna have to do your homework.” you just urge them on to be the best that they can become, because we need them.
there are a lot of other places where you can organize too, there’s a place called “pearls for girls” and they work with about 500 young ladies over on the corner of clarke and palmer. that’s denae gordon. or on the southside there’s another great one called…. well, i forgot the name of it but it will come back to me.
m: i just feel like i can’t get enough done, or like what i’m doing is just not important enough.
r: so, what are you doing?
m: right now i work here in community disaster education, i go to schools and talk to kids about fire safety, community centers; i talk to families, elderly, talk to a lot of minorities and the latino community, spreading the message about things people take for granted as far as safety is concerned. i'm working with the 6th district of the milwaukee police department on 27th street and a few schools… cass street school, loyola academy, and franklin pierce elementary. wherever i can get my foot in the door.
r: what would make you happy?
m: working with the latino community. ideally, what i would like to do is work with low-income latino families and orientation into our culture but nt necessarily homogenization.
r: for instance, at kagel, ramon…
m: candelaria?
r: you know him? he’s working at kagel. just recently got an award too, so that’s fantastic. get a hold of him, and you can be my person there. or forest home. or both….
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right now on 1290, they’re talking about sexual abuse, there’s a nurse on there who’s been doing it for 27 years, counseling young people who get into that. there’s a need for… i made a recommendation for funding for a lady who’s going to go into the schools and talk with young people about sexuality and how to control yourself.
m: there’s an ally who works with FORGE who might be interested in that, do you have contact information?
r: 1290, call and ask for cassandra macsheppard at 444-1290. you can ask about the name of the nurse regarding sexual abuse.
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m: what type of skills do you think are necessary to be a community leader?
r: first of all, your heart’s got to be there. after that, then you should understand accounting. there’s a reason for that. a lot of folks are poor; not because they didn’t make money. they’re poor because they didn’t know how to handle it. so, financial literacy is very important. that’s what i want all these people in these schools and all these people who work with us, to work as coaches who work with children and their parents: teach them what money’s all about and how to really make money for themselves. to take a little bit of money and make it grow.
it’s a little bit more than investing, it’s planning, budgeting, putting some away. then, when you get enough, you do the investing.
m: what about those people who don’t have that at all?
r: one woman came up from new orleans, she was an educator. she came here because her sister was teaching at the lloyd street school and she grabbed a bunch of welfare mothers and said “look, how would you all like to own your own homes?” And they said, oh yeah. “how would you like to have some money?” oh, yeah. she said, “ do you think you could save a dollar a day? you think that would be difficult for you to save? if ten of you all did that, at the end of the year, how much would you have? $3,650. so you could take that and put it on the down-payment. then one person could have that home. then you could do it again, and pretty soon, that home would build equity, and you could get another home. pretty soon, you’d have ten homes.” and that’d be ten folks on their way to building wealth. real estate is how you can build wealth for yourself. you hear that? it only took one dollar a day. make it work for you.
m: what about the people who are interested in service, more hands-on?
r: guess what? service, you’ll do that. that’s a leader, to do service. when you do the service, you want to be able to make a contribution, right? so the person that you are giving service to will soon become you, and they can give service to somebody else. once you help develop the skills, say you want to develop skills for yourself, you develop knowledge so you can pass that on. it’s no good if you just keep it to yourself. life’s better if you are able to pass it on.
m: so where would you say somebody like me would start? i don't have a lot of education but i would like it; i want to be involved in the community.
r: that's your first objective: get an education. when you say education, what do you mean?
m: get a degree.
r: a degree in what?
m: i was looking into a degree in nonprofit management or teaching. i want to be a teacher.
r: first we gotta decide what you want to be, do you want to be a teacher or do you want to manage nonprofits? what's first?
m: teacher segueing into.
r: ok, first thing is you have to go into the school of education so you can get a teaching degree. what do you want to teach? third grade? fourth grade?
m: i would like to teach adults english.
r: ok, that's adult education, that's something completely different, a different track. adult literacy is fantastic. you know, right up the street from you here is the literacy place. you can get started right there. maybe volunteer one day a week, see what it's all about.
m: i've done that part. i taught english as a second language for a year, and that's how i decided "this is what i'm going to do."
r: then you want to get a DWW, start talking to someone as soon as you are developing your schedule as to what you're going to take. reading is going to be in there, they teach reading because that's a skill. they've got a reading department in the school of education. and then you want to learn the philosophy of teachers. do you have all of your prerequisites out of the way? get that out of the way. there was a reason why i asked you to take accounting. foundations all over the world, the main thing they look at when they go into a nonprofit organization is, are they good stewards of their money? can they develop a budget? can they manage a budget? that's the bottom line of a foundation. that's why i told you about accounting. a lot of people don't hear me say that, they let it go over their heads because they think, oh accounting, it's just numbers. no, no, no. it's the way you look at something. there are a lot of crooks out here.
m: i guess people don't realize that you need the same skills you need in the business world in the nonprofit world.
r: what's the biggest thing to a schoolboard? budget. you heard them say there wasn't anyone out there when they were talking about raising %16. people thought they meant 16 pennies, but they were talking millions of dollars. so you need to understand that. that's why accounting is very important. and the biggest thing in the city government is budgets. biggest thing in the county, budget. biggest thing in the federal, budget. every year they're fighting over it. so, unless you know about it, you can't even understand what they're talking about. the next thing, of course, is after you do your research, you go out to uwm to the helen bader institute for nonprofit and talk to dr. john palmer smith. tell him that this is your goal. you want to learn about this. tell him that you want to be a teacher first, but you want to know all about non-profits, because you might have to raise money some day if you want to open your own school. and a place for you, a lady who used to be a lawyer... her parents bought her a school. she's on 12th and garfield the 2200 block of 12th. go by and take a look. say, i want to find out what you're doing out here. talk about energy, wow. she became a lawyer, but decided she didn't want to be a lawyer. she wanted to teach. she's now the principal of that school. they took over the old ymca. you remind me of her. see, you came into this world. with a purpose and reason for life, and you're now exploring because you're going to do it. i see kids coming into school who can't even tell time...
m: adults can't tell time.
r: that's true. you've got a lot of adults who had kids at ten years, eleven and twelve years old, so they were children when they had kids. so there are a lot of things we take for granted as adults, they didn't get.
m: would you say the skills you learn for nonprofit can lead you into other avenues?
r: definitely. working with the young people, what we're trying to get inside of them from the second grade through the fifth, are 5 values, these 5 values are what adults should have also. reading skills (how to read), study skills (how to study, how to go in and pull the main idea out), order, discipline ( oh, i don't want to do it... do it anyways because that's what you're supposed to do, and that's discipline), and responsibility (bringing it back to where you're supposed to). those are the five values necessary to be an adult in this world; if one of them is missing... when i say reading, what does that mean? comprehension, decoding, critically analyzing this the truths involved (where did they get the information from?) and implementation. what does it mean? people think just because they know t-h-e is 'the' that they know how to read. that's just decoding. now what does 'the' mean? it's an article. this is what we're trying to teach the kids. once they get to sixth grade, they better get serious about their education because from sixth through twelfth grade, that will shape them. and if they're not ready by the time they finish twelfth grade to go on to college, or a technical school, they're going to be behind forever.
m: i guess i want to ask this: how can we as young people, get into nonprofits and not be treated like kids?
r: that's a perspective. that might not be true. for instance, if you walk into an office where there are a lot of older people, yes they are going to look at you as if you are much younger, and what they're thinking about is that they might not be around long enough to give you all the knowledge that they have. so they try to give as much as they can while they're here and it sounds like sometimes they're just preaching, or it sounds like they think you don't know anything. that's not it; they're not taking any chances. they can make an assumption and think you know and go away an not tell you anything, or, they can say, "well maybe you know, maybe you don't know, so i'll just share this with you." things that the older person might think is imortant for you to know and they feel that they don't have enough time, because they might get sick or they might die... that' what happens with a lot of older people who work with younger people; they want to give them as much as they can all at once, and a lot of time, i have to calm myself down and say "slow down, man." there's something called conceptualization where you can't see the whole picture. i can say something to you, like i can talk about accounting, and i'm thinking about all the meetings i've been into over the years, foundation board meetings, and i notice how they look at the budget. so you don't see that, but i've had nine years of doing that, so when you ask me, "what is the most important part of nonprofits," i say a budget because, down the road, somebody's gonna ask you, "what do you mean by this? how come you have x percent here and only y percent here? how come you don't have something over here?" i've heard the arguements. so, if i tell you that, and you think i don't know anything.... i might be telling you because i think you are smart and you can pick it up. so there are two ways of looking at the comment you just made. one, is that they think you're a kid, or a baby. the other is that they think you're smart and you can handle it. it's a different perspective. they're not trying to hurt you, they're trying to help you. i'll give you an example of that.one of my favorite ministers is out of chicago. he's awesome. he said one time, his mentor (who was much older than he was) loved to come to cities that had a lake. he loved coming to chicago because he had the great lakes there, lake michigan. so what he would do was get up early in the morning and concentrate. he would be quiet so he could listen to god. he'd walk the beach. one time he saw a goose playing with a fish. the wave would bring th fish in, and the bird would grab the fish with his bill, and when the water would recede he'd drop the fish down into the sand. the fish would be flapping, trying to get back into the water. he kept doing that. all of a sudden, he got tired of playing with the fish, decided to let the fish go ahead and swim back. then, when the bird tried to fly, he couldn't; the whole time he was playing with the fish, he was sinking into the sand, but didn't see it. he couldn't fly. so the old minister reached down to help the bird, but the bird snapped at him. he thought he was going to hurt him. the minister said i wish i knew how to speak the language of this bird, so i could tell him, i'm not trying to hurt you, i'm trying to help. the minister says, i've got husbands in my church i'm telling the same thing to. i've got them coming in with their wives and the husbands only think i'm trying to get them in to make money, so they don't listen. i'm trying to tell them i want to help them and not hurt them...
m: you said something about his mentor. how does one get a mentor or enter into a mentoring relationship with someone?
r: it happens sometimes by chance. or, if it's someone that you really admire, you go to them and say "hey, i'd really like to talk with you periodically." now, anyone who's ever done anything great has had a mentor. today's paper, there's an article on the superintendant of mequon. he's only the second african american superintendant in the state of wisconsin. demon means... he asked me and howard fuller if we'd mentor him. i said sure, but he never got back to me. i think he's ben talking to howard fuller, but now he's the superintendant of schools. his goal is to become the superintendant of mps. he's only 35 years old. a riverside grad. that's where dan bader and his brother graduated from. and i had a program over there at one time, with about 30 or 60 kids.
m: were you born here?
r: yes, i was born here at county hospital. it's gone now, but i was raised here.
m: do you remember when we were at the UCC and we were walking around and you told me about african names? you kind of started to tell me about it but then we had to finish the tour...
r: yes, did you find out what day you were born?
m: thursday.
r: oh, thursday. aba. yours would be "ya". the woman that was born on thursday in ghana is a hero. she helped lead them in a war against the british and won many battles. ya ashantiya.
m: my son was born on a thursday as well.
r: he's going to be political, strong. lyndon baines johnson was born on a thursday, so was michael mcgee. he's gonna be tough. once you get your mind on something. the tribes would look to him to bring about revolution, to bring about change.
m: what day were you born on? and what does it mean?
r: tuesday. fiery. risk-taker. dr. king was born on a tuesday, malcolm x was born on a tuesday, howard fuller. all born on tuesday.
m: so, i have one more question for you. if i were to stay here in milwaukee and try to find my way into the nonprofit world, what would you say is the path of least resistance?
r: you have to answer that question.
brilliant!
this is the essence of our talk. i enjoyed the one on one interaction. it was neat, good to talk to someone who's been around the block. everything didn't quite make it onto this page, but the good stuff is certianly here to be deciphered. learning to digest, take in these kinds of things is a part of all the training i'm supposed to be learning.
i guess this means it's starting to work.
that's all for now. in the meantime, happy thanks-taking.
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