Walk in Their Shoes by Jim Ziolkowski

Author:Jim Ziolkowski
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

CHAPTER 8

Rayia’s Smile

With the birth of Jack and my father’s long illness, I could no longer work sixty to seventy hours a week or travel across the globe for months at a time. I couldn’t devote as much time to the organization as I once did. My responsibilities as a father and son caused me to set different priorities.

At the same time our organization continued to grow. We had achieved a fundraising breakthrough in 2000 with the help of some familiar allies—executives at GE. Geoffrey Norman was a longtime executive at GE Asset Management who supported our organization early on and became a trusted friend, even flying to Michigan to attend my father’s funeral. Norman introduced me to John Myers, the president of GE Asset Management. At the time, we were still holding fundraising dinners in Stamford, raising several hundred thousand dollars in any one evening. But Myers had a lot of friends on Wall Street, so we decided to have a fundraiser that honored him, and we held it at the New York Hilton. Instead of a fancy dinner, we had the event in the morning and just served breakfast—attendees could be in and out before their day started, and our costs would be kept down. The event drew representatives from the city’s top investment firms, banks, and law firms, reaching a community well beyond our Stamford base, and we raised an astounding $1.3 million—more than three times what we had ever raised from a single fundraiser.

We now had a new donor base, which helped us expand nationally and grow all parts of the organization. By 2006, fifteen years had passed since its founding, and we had now built 194 schools abroad. We were also operating programs in ninety schools in the States and were stretched across the continent, from New York and Detroit to Oakland and San Francisco.

When my father became ill, I began expanding our leadership team, not merely to fill in any gaps when I wasn’t there but, more important, to make us stronger and to accelerate our growth. I thought we had people in our organization who could manage different aspects of our mission more effectively than I. They would also be able to invest 100 percent of their time in their area of responsibility, whereas I was stretched across the entire organization, and this would give others a chance to lead.

Running highly effective programs in American high schools was far more challenging than building schools abroad. When we went overseas, the villagers wanted us to be there and were united around the common goal of building that school. Though they suffered from extreme poverty, the communities were tight-knit and stable. But in the States, we often worked in communities beset by family disorder, violence, drugs, crime, and, in some schools, apathy among teachers and dysfunction among administrators. Many of the schools we chose were failing: we wanted to engage the kids that so many others had left behind. The students themselves have always loved what we do, but sometimes it takes great effort to make it work.

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