The Green Team, Pt 2
(Continued)
David Saltzman, who grew up in a prominent Upper East Side family, was also
wooed by Dubin (who was briefly married to Saltzman's sister Elizabeth,
Vanity Fair's fashion director). Yes, it's definitely small-world time:
Saltzman later helped recruit two school friends to the board, his Trinity
classmate Dirk Ziff, heir to the Ziff-Davis publishing fortune, and Brown
University pal Kennedy.
Robert Pittman, who invented MTV and is now the president of America Online,
said Paul Jones didn't have to do much arm-twisting to get him to sign on.
"I grew up in the civil-rights movement. Life's been good to me, and I felt
somewhat disconnected," says Pittman, the son of a Mississippi Methodist
minister. "I feel so darn lucky that I don't want to be a greedy pig."
Eager for real-world poverty expertise, the moneymen also made a point of
including Marian Wright Edelman, president of the Children's Defense Fund;
Maurice Chessa, director of the Bed-Stuy I Have a Dream Program; and later
grantee Geoffrey Canada, president of Harlem's Rheedlen Centers for Children
and Families. As Peter Kiernan puts it, "We didn't want to be a bunch of
white guys from Wall Street telling people how things were going to be. Our
board meetings are a riot. You have flaming liberals, ultraconservatives,
every point of the religious and political spectrum."
Four times a year, the board schleps out to see programs, a hands-on way to
emotionally connect to the people benefiting from its largesse. When you're
as connected as these boldface board members, there's a macho pleasure in
showing your stuff, in making things happen -- a one-upmanship much on
display at Robin Hood's April meeting, held at the offices of Binding
Together, a printing company near the Lincoln Tunnel that counsels, trains,
and employs former drug addicts and the homeless.
In a conference room at Binding Together, Harvey Weinstein and Diane Sawyer,
new board members, both leaned forward intently as account representative
Zina Battle, a 37-year-old former prostitute who spent five years in prison
for selling drugs, nervously described the physical agony of kicking heroin.
"I was vomiting, I had diarrhea, I had stuff coming out everywhere," she
said, breaking down in sobs. The room was utterly silent until Peter Kiernan
called out softly, "You're among friends." She rallied with a tearful smile,
giving a rousing endorsement to Binding Together, saying, "I didn't think I
could do it. I just want to tell everyone how this school helped me."
Touring the noisy loftlike printing operations, where workers were running
copiers and folding church flyers, board members seemed relieved to switch
from raw feelings to CEO mode, peppering Vince Poppiti, the director of
business services, with questions. Did he get a deal on the Xerox machines?
(No.) How long is the new lease for? (Ten years.) Where are people getting
jobs after training? (A bulletin board listed new employers.) Showing a
small classroom, Poppiti explained, "We teach life skills here. Some people
have never learned how to fill out a W-4." Weinstein, ever the class clown,
joked that he could use help, saying, "I'll come by."
But the mood turned serious as Poppiti mentioned plans to add a second shift
to expand the printing business and train more workers. "Would it help if we
could refer you clients?" asked Dubin. Weinstein immediately jumped in --
"Glenn just referred me" -- promising to send some Miramax printing business
over. Next, Dirk Ziff suggested that he and other board members use their
contacts to get new copiers donated. Scribbling machine brand names on a
notepad, Kiernan quickly conferred with Paul Jones: "Who should call [Xerox
chairman] Paul Allaire?"
"They have the ability to make one phone call and accomplish something that
would be impossible for anybody else," Sawyer said later. "What I love is
it's not about sanctimony. It's genuine excitement about seeing something
work."
After the board members filed back into the conference room for a
confidential discussion, the staff of Binding Together stood in a hallway,
looking stunned by this display of mogul clout. "To have these movers and
shakers come here is an enormous opportunity," said Philip Caldarella, an
ex-policeman who is the program's executive director. Added Ivan Braun, the
development director, "Just to get funding officers from foundations to
visit us is usually difficult, much less the board."
As Robin Hood and its founders mature into middle age, the "guerrilla"
charity has become much tougher about passing out grants. Eighty-five
percent of the programs it funded a decade ago have been dropped from the
portfolio, as the sadder-but-wiser board and staff bailed out of
organizations where money was mismanaged, activists burned out, projects
tanked, or results were disappointing. In recent years, Robin Hood's list of
grantees has become infinitely more stable (of the 98 programs funded in
1996, only 23 have since been dropped), as the foundation has become better
able to assess the risk-reward ratio of new projects.
"We funded God knows how many organizations and clearly some of our past
funding has not been successful," says Paul Tudor Jones, wincing as he
recalls "the worst failure": financing a Harlem man running a drug hot line
who turned out to have his own substance-abuse problems.
Robin Hood's staff makes frequent advice-and-inspection visits, but seven
years ago the board took the unusual step of hiring an outside researcher to
analyze grantees and issue regular report cards. Robin Hood's goal is to
figure out which antipoverty programs are the most successful and why --
what does it take to help kids raise their test scores, or enable an
ex-addict to find and keep a job? "The board manages this charity as if it
were a stock portfolio," says Susan Philliber, whose eponymous research firm
evaluates grantees. Noting that Robin Hood boosts funding for good
"investments" and performs workouts on disappointments, she adds, "If you're
willing to learn and try to improve, they'll stay with you through bad
outcomes."
Not all board members, however, have been enthusiastic about the revised,
more pragmatic approach. Jann Wenner resigned from Robin Hood several years
ago, partly out of disappointment that the place had changed direction.
"There was always a tension between the commitment to do the odd, the
outrageous, the less acceptable stuff," says Wenner, "or to pitch in with
five other Establishment foundations and give money to this thing or that
thing. My love is finding the weird thing to do. When things get too
comfortable, I'm bored."
Wenner invented Robin Hood's annual December hero breakfast, which draws
such influential invited guests as Rudy Giuliani, Tom Brokaw, and ABC News
president David Westin. Last year, Caroline Kennedy Schlossberg gave a
moving tribute about her brother's passion for Robin Hood, and the latest
heroes -- a principal who's worked wonders at a Bronx public school, a
Queens social worker who counsels new moms to prevent child abuse, and a
former crack dealer who's heading to law school thanks to Friends of Island
Academy -- told their inspiring stories. "I go to cry," says Pittman. "If
you don't have a tear coming down your cheek, there's something wrong with
you.
But here's the thing: Being anointed a star by Robin Hood, with the video
camera rolling and journalists taking notes, is no guarantee of future
funding. The board, while it may get out its hankies once a year, is not a
sentimental group of people, and it's not embarrassed about turning off the
spigot if the heroes turn out to be well-meaning but inept. As Kenneth
Langone puts it, "I make a lot of investments that don't work out."
Rocky Robinson and Joe Perez were among Robin Hood's first heroes, honored
for starting the Bedford-Stuyvesant Volunteer Ambulance Corporation, in
response to the fact that it took forever to get ambulances to respond to
911 calls in their troubled neighborhood. Robin Hood staked the two to more
than $300,000 over several years to buy an ambulance and train staff in CPR
and other lifesaving techniques. But the foundation cut off their grant
three years ago because of bad bookkeeping.
"We were friends," says Saltzman, sounding positively pained by the
decision. "But we became concerned about their practices with money. They
couldn't do the simplest bookkeeping. We offered to pay for an accountant,
but it just never worked." Robinson, who freely admits that his bookkeeping
has been "a horrible mess," says he's grateful that the foundation backed
him for so long, but adds that the loss of funding has been devastating. "We
feel very bad about it," he says, describing laying off staff and cutting
back on ambulance calls. "Me and my partner are just barely keeping things
going." Wenner regrets that Robin Hood gave up on them. "I spent an
incredible amount of time fighting for Rocky and Joe," he says. "The fact
they can't observe middle-class business strictures goes along with the
territory."
The fate of another "hero," Willie Battle, hung in the balance at the recent
board meeting at Binding Together. This magnetic 44-year-old ex-junkie, who
now calls himself Brother Battle, started snorting heroin at age 12 and
spent four years in prison on drug-dealing charges. He was honored just
three years ago by Robin Hood for creating an after-school program in East
New York called Imani Altisimo Inc. But since then he has overextended,
adding a basketball league, a fitness-training program, conflict-resolution
classes, and more, to the point that the entire enterprise has become
financially shaky. "He grew too fast and lost his original mission with the
kids," says Lisa Smith, Robin Hood's deputy director. "He's not retaining
the kids." Battle sounded morose on the phone a few days before the board's
meeting. "Robin Hood has been our major funder," said Battle. "We're broke.
If they pull out, then our program collapses."
The closed-room board discussion got hot and heavy as members debated
whether this program could be saved. "They really went at it," Saltzman
reported later. "Nobody wants to throw good money after bad. But we didn't
want to just let the kids go into the abyss." The compromise solution: a
brief reprieve for Battle, with the board providing a three-month $60,000
grant and instructions to prepare to merge with another neighborhood-kids'
program or radically cut operations. He was immensely relieved to get a
second chance. "I appreciate their extending their hand to us one more
time," said Battle. "I'm glad they didn't walk away."
Perhaps it's not surprising that there has occasionally been a culture gap
between Robin Hood's middle-class staff and the people they're trying to
help. En route to visit a job-training program in Sunset Park run by a nun,
Saltzman tells me, with a wry smile, that Sister Mary Franciscus threw out
the first Robin Hood program officer who came to check out the program seven
years ago. The problem: The woman's stylish but provocative clothes sent the
wrong message to the young adults, many of them school dropouts from welfare
families, about appropriate attire in corporate America. "I thought what
Sister Mary did was great," Saltzman says, adding that the chastened staffer
made a return trip in more conservative garb. "But it was gutsy, since we
were there trying to decide whether to give her money."
Sister Mary, a tall, wisecracking woman in a blue habit, teases the students
as she sticks her head into classrooms in the airy converted-Catholic-school
gymnasium, where African-American and Hispanic teenagers are studying for
their GEDs, rehearsing for job interviews, and learning word processing.
"Aren't you supposed to be wearing glasses?" she calls out to a girl
squinting at a computer. In the hallway, Sister Mary whispers, "I memorize
everyone's name. Most of them have never had much personal attention
before -- and if they did, it was the wrong kind."
Saltzman has come by today to discuss the possibility of expanding this
successful program, called Opportunities for a Better Tomorrow, to another
site. Robin Hood is only one of twenty funders of the job effort, kicking in
$250,000 of the $1.6 million budget. (A rival foundation official grumbles,
off the record, that Robin Hood is often a little too eager to grab credit
for good works.) But to give Robin Hood's merry band their due, they've
often been the first to contribute vital start-up cash to get new projects
rolling, as well as take the unusual step of arranging for top-notch (and
free) legal, accounting, and management advice. "I don't think we'd be
around without Robin Hood," says Sister Mary, noting that the foundation
came to her financial rescue after a government-funding cut several years
ago, as well as helping to organize its bookkeeping. "Robin Hood is like a
mentor: They give us goals. They push us to think about how we can do
better."
Meanwhile, up in Harlem on West 116th Street on a Wednesday afternoon,
people are lined up around the block waiting for free oxtail stew at the
newly renovated Community Kitchen, which looks more like a cozy restaurant
than it does a soup kitchen. The entire gut rehab was courtesy of Robin
Hood's Lonni Tanner, whose full-time job consists of badgering companies for
donations of everything from books and computers to architectural plans and
free electrical work; as she puts it, "I only deal in free." Kathy Goldman,
the executive director of the Community Food Resource Center, says, "Lonni
got us almost everything -- every tile on the floor, every pot and pan,
every chair, even the copper pipes that you can't see."
It's easy to measure the success of a soup kitchen by simply looking at
costs and counting up the number of people who get fed every week. But
trying to change people's behavior -- say, to stop teenage girls from
getting pregnant -- is an infinitely more complicated endeavor. Dr. Michael
Carrera, director of the Children's Aid Society' s National Adolescent
Sexuality Training Center, received his first $150,000 Robin Hood grant in
1991. The foundation is now backing Carrera to the tune of $700,000, in part
to run a controlled three-year social experiment with 600 New York City
teens. The goal: To see whether intensive tutoring, sex education, and
counseling can keep the kids on the straight and narrow. "The trader
mentality is not to take positions for a long time," says Carrera, "so it's
good to be supported in this way."
While this week's star-studded celebration represents a social and financial
milestone for the Robin Hood Foundation -- and it certainly raises its
glamour quotient to new heights -- in some fundamental way the spirit of the
core group hasn't changed all that much since the days of those early,
clubbier board meetings. Because they all see New York City as a laboratory
for social change, this opinionated group, a mixture of Democrats and
Republicans, still thrives on arguing and debating over how best to tackle
poverty on a block-by-block basis. The only difference between now and then,
Jones and his crew would argue, is that the checks they disperse are a lot
bigger.
Brushing off the inevitable failures, they take enormous pleasure in the
successes. At the foundation's most recent Tavern on the Green breakfast
honoring its "hero" community activists, Stan Druckenmiller presented an
award to Friends of Island Academy, the group that helps young Rikers Island
ex-inmates get educations and jobs. It was the first big Robin Hood event
since John F. Kennedy Jr.'s death (the breakfast was renamed in his honor),
and the normally low-key trader got downright emotional as he praised the
program for dramatically reducing prison recidivism rates, making New York
safer, and saving tax dollars -- as well as changing lives for the better.
"I don't care whether you're a bleeding-heart liberal like Paul Jones or a
coldhearted conservative like myself," Druckenmiller said, bringing a
knowing laugh from an audience filled with friends and colleagues. "There's
something in this for you." |
