WalkingElephant

Dropping in on City Year Boston

The first time we present a check to one of our Beneficiary-Nonprofits I like to deliver it personally. Usually this is my first face-time with someone in the organization, and for them with someone from our side. Good feelings abound. And the first tangible currency that is the product of all the hard work people representing both entities put in is finally exchanged. Yes, we give them money, oxygen to all nonprofits. But, they give me inspiration. To be honest, I think I get more than equal value!

It happens every time: I think I understand an organization, their mission, and how they work by reading about it and watching a few videos. Then I meet them, on their turf, and realize that I had no idea... Dropping off our check at City Year last Friday [$3,679.52 - our biggest so far!] did it to me again. 

The grand tour of City Year Boston's headquarters as it turns out includes a tour of City Year's national/global Headquarters [yes, global: City Year is active in the UK and South Africa now]. 

Pictured above, left to right: Renaldo Mili, Kayla Faust, Jenna Hadley, Matt Parks, me, Nicole Kfoury, Stephen Mondach, and Emily Hildreth

I don’t have any experience with City Year out on the streets of in the schools, but a visit to their offices on Columbus Avenue is the organizational version of a group hug.

Big Citizenship is the new book by Alan Khazei, City Year’s co-founder on the subject of what he calls “pragmatic idealism,” which he first made manifest through City Year. I’m glad I’m reading the book AFTER my September 24, 1010 City Year visit; I witnessed in 90 short minutes so many of the concepts, values and traditions implemented in the organization’s early days, and described in the book’s early chapters. No executive or development office hand-holding: Young, 20-something corps members gave me an amazing tour of the four-floor headquarters building, including national/international headquarters’ offices, the Boston offices, the workshops and a variety of meeting spaces with whiteboard-paint walls full of ad-hoc dry-erase bullet lists and mind-maps.

What followed was a sit-down in a conference room with two new second-year corps members and now team leaders who were so inspired by their first-year experience that they decided that there was nothing they’d rather do than re-up. – And there they were: the whole lot of them, every new first-year Boston City Year corps member – in their signature red jackets and Timberland boots– in the large meeting room taking part in a spirited Friday Leadership Development Day training session together just off the first floor lobby… just like it says in the book, just as theyve done sinve the earliest days in the late 1980s. Everyone, and I mean each and every person I saw looked genuinely happy to be there, and fully-engaged in what they were doing.  And what they are doing at City Year – fighting the epidemic school drop-out rate in our country – is critical to the future of America.

The corps members’ personal stories are uplifiting and highly-motivating for me.  Not that I needed incentive to continue developing The Benefit Restaurant™ Project, but when I am afforded an insider’s perspective on the amazing systems, traditions, and people that  our funding is supporting, my resolve to keep tuning and to figure out how to propagate the system we’ve implemented at our pilot restaurant, The Elephant Walk in Waltham, is refreshed and re-doubled.

So, this is a public thank you to City Year Boston – and specifically Elliot Haney who gave me the tour, [and took the picture in this post], Jenna Hadley and Nicole Kfoury the second-year corps members and team leaders who shared with me their personal stories, and Matt Parks, the Corporate Relations Manager who spent time with us and presented me with a copy of Mr. Khazei’s book [which I am half-way through and highly recommend!]. I am awed by your service and moved by your spirit.

Note: Alan Khazei will be speaking about his new book, Big Citizenship, at More Than Words, the Moody Street, Waltham bookstore-café [that – coincidentally, I promise! – is also one of our Beneficiaries] this Wednesday, October 6 at 7:00pm. I hope to see you there!

More Than [at a loss for] Words

Yesterday I went over to More Than Words on Moody Street in Waltham to present them with their $3,144.14 Benefit Restaurant Donation check as our July beneficiary. I'd been in as a customer a couple of times before, but this time I got the Royal Tour. It blew me away.

From the customer's viewpoint, More Than Words [MTW] is a casual, urban bookstore/café - complete with a full-service to-order beverage counter, a rich selection of used books and music for sale, comfy couches, and free wi-fi. Staffed by earnest, friendly young adult baristas and booksellers, the experience is akin to a compact, well-loved Barnes and Noble.

But my tour guide, the very impressive MTW Associate Marceline Josile [pictured below with the equally impressive MTW Founder and Executive Director Jodi Rosenbaum, and me], by ushering me down the back stairs, lifted the veil on the sophisticated and finely-tuned machine occupying the enormous basement below.

More Than Words' business is books. Made up of row-upon-row of bookcases loaded with painstakingly catalogued books for sale - some openly sorted, others in plastic bins - shelves packed with a hundred or more boxes of un-sorted fresh donations from individuals and businesses, and the enormous commercial laundry basket-fulls of rejects, the MTW "warehouse operation" is a model of data-driven efficiency.

Have you ever wondered what happens to a book you donate to a used book reseller? Well - after thanking you - the smart ones [like More Than Words] enter your books' ISBN numbers into a deep database of current statistics on the popularity and pricing of titles available from myriad online used book resellers.

Hey, it's nothing personal, but you can bet that a significant percentage of that beloved library you painstakingly collected and that you finally screwed up the courage to edit simply won't make the cut.  - More Than Words is a business. And one that's outgrowing its space. They simply can't accommodate dead inventory. So they are forced to cull, and they do so with ruthless precision.

But it's not just their organized workflow or their scientific methodology that impressed me. They post up-to-yesterday sales data parsed against sales-forecasts-by-profit-center [yup - they track seriously granular data] for the entire staff to see. They've got personal performance objectives quantified and posted for every co-worker to see. [Their level of transparency would - and should - embarrass the Obama Administration] Their level of operational efficiency and business savvy and acumen embarrassed me, quite frankly. I was so stunned and impressed by all Marceline and Jodi were showing me that it was easy to forget for a while that...

The REAL mission of More Than Words is to help shape and direct the precious lives of all the challenged young people they can. To quote from their excellent website, " Youth at MTW are in teh foster care system, court involved, homeless, or have dropped out of school. These subsets of the youth population face tremendous barriers to employment and there are few training programs that are designed to empower youth to develop the skills, experience and self-efficacy critical for a safe, meaningful and successful transition to adulthood."

I've seen it first-hand: More Than Words sells coffee and books to the public; but far more importantly, More Than Words delivers the goods to challenged young people when it comes to building self-respect, self-confidence and character, teaching real-world job skills, and an awareness of what it takes to make it in the working world. I met about a dozen of their current associates and graduates yesterday and have never been more impressed with the confidence, carriage, and professionalism of young people growing into their grown-up shoes.