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Author Amanda Ripley readily admits that as an investigative reporter for Time, The Atlantic and other publications, she avoided covering education for years, considering it too “soft.” Fast forward six years and the author of The Smartest Kids in the World has become a leading voice on the American education system, its problems — and ways to fix them.
While covering Michelle Rhee, the controversial superintendent of schools in Washington, D.C., Ripley started to feel the urgency many teachers expressed.
She soon embarked on a year-long investigation, following three American exchange students to Poland, Finland and South Korea from 2010 to 2011. Each country has a different approach to education — from the pressure-cooker model to the utopian one — and all three have made marked progress in their students’ overall performance. NationSwell spoke with Ripley recently after she headlined a panel at the fifth annual Women in the World conference in New York City. Here are six things we learned about recharging our education system.
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Tag: Calls to Action
No Garden? No Farm? No Problem. Harvest Your Local Landscape
It has been a long, cold winter for much of the United States. But now, as green shoots begin to sprout and spring recipes start to fill the food blogs, some intrepid Americans are heading out the front door with basket and scissors in hand to harvest the burgeoning urban landscape. From public green spaces, roadsides and their own backyards, they snap up dandelion greens, lambʼs quarters (also known as pigweed) and wild mustard leaves. Foraging, say enthusiasts, is not only a great way to celebrate the season, but also a way to reconnect with neighbors after sheltering indoors through the winter.
Mark Vorderbruggen is a Houston research chemist with a passion for the outdoors. His frequent scribbling of notes and sketching of plants while out in the woods with friends prompted them to nickname him “Merriwether,” after the noted 19th-century explorer Merriwether Lewis. Under that nom de plume, he writes a popular blog called “Foraging Texas” and periodically teaches foraging classes at the Houston Arboretum & Nature Center. In the balmy climate of southeast Texas, foraging is a year-round affair for Merriwether, but spring brings new vitality to his neighborhood and he makes a point of taking daily walks with his two daughters through their suburban Houston-area neighborhood. Along the way, he takes note of what is edible and connects with neighbors.
It’s a skill he acquired from his own parents. “I grew up in central Minnesota,” he says. “I learned foraging from my parents, who were children of the Great Depression.” Now, his mother, for whom foraging was a necessity born of deprivation, is bemused by the large numbers of would-be urban foragers who take her sonʼs classes.
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For Merriwether, much of the enjoyment of the classes comes from exposing children to the wonders of nature, discoveries that he enjoyed in the woods and fields of his childhood. These days, he says, “kids are afraid of nature because their parents are afraid of nature.” It doesn’t help that popular media often paints nature in negative, frightening colors, he says, with animals as monsters living in wild, hostile environments. Simply showing a child what a wild berry tastes like is opening a door to the real world of nature, not some Technicolor version.
When Merriwether moved in March 1999 to his suburban neighborhood, near Houston, many of the trees had been cut down and the fields bulldozed to make way for a parade of homes. His was one of the first homes to be built, and he decided to add a front porch to the structure hoping it would encourage introductions with his future neighbors. Soon, as new people moved in and as the “weeds” came back, Merriwether found himself harvesting his own yard and teaching neighbors how to set aside parts of their landscape for wild plants. His daily walks with his two daughters led to more neighborly conversations and connections. “I became the guy like Cpl. Radar OʼReilly on that TV show, ‘M*A*S*H,’” he says.
He’s become the neighborhood fixer — he knows who needs to borrow a tool and who has one to lend. That social network proved invaluable when Hurricane Ike struck the area in 2008. Merriwether helped his neighbors organize clean-up teams and communal meals, which were supervised by a food-service manager who lived in the neighborhood.
If foraging has taken root in places like Texas, you can imagine how popular it’s gotten in other parts of the country — like, say, Boulder, Colo. Caleb Phillips, a research scientist and adjunct assistant professor of computer science at the University of Colorado at Boulder, and Ethan Welty, a photographer and geographer, are both foraging enthusiasts, who together created the website Fallingfruit.org. The site is a global map of the urban harvest; users can search for edible plants by location, and also report and post sites. Phillips was inspired to launch the mapping effort as he strolled the Boulder campus one day, and spotted a sour cherry tree, a familiar sight in his hometown of Portland, Ore. As he picked enough cherries for a pie, several students stopped to ask him: “What are you doing? What are those red berries?” The incident prompted him to use his computer programming skills to map Boulderʼs urban harvest.
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In March 2013, Phillips met Welty and they decided to take the mapping project global. Global hotspots for urban foraging have emerged, they say, in Poland, Israel and Madagascar (Merriwether notes that he also gets lots of emails from Poland and Israel about foraging); Japan is one of the least active spots. Phillips and Welty are now considering creating Spanish, Polish and Hebrew versions of their site as well as a Kickstarter campaign to fund a mobile app. “Itʼs a great way to explore new culinary horizons,” says Phillips, adding that, like Merriwether, foraging has eased introductions with his neighbors.
In San Francisco, where Phillips resides part of the year, Fallingfruit maps have yielded some surprising plants surviving in places far from their native environment. For example, some edible non-native plants that have been introduced in the Bay Area as garden ornamentals include carob pods, pink peppercorns and loquats. California also has those abundant native plants like citrus trees that can provide sustenance for more than just one family. “Itʼs a really neat way to meet your neighbors,” Phillips says. “They may have a grapefruit tree or lemon tree, and thereʼs no way they can eat all the fruit.”
Edible plants abound in urban areas, Merriwether notes. As the urban landscape changes — with new areas being torn up and old ones abandoned — nature has a way of stepping in to heal the damage. “Nature abhors a vacuum,” he says.
But while he encourages people to seek out what is edible in their environment, he also stresses the importance of remembering the fundamental tenets of foraging ethics: respect for the law, the land, the plant and yourself. First, foragers should find out what the local laws are; many states have strict foraging laws that allow plants to be harvested only if the landowner or appropriate government authority has given permission. As Merriwether points out, however, the mere act of asking a neighbor whether they’d be willing to share the abundance of a mustang grapevine or the fruit of a wild Texas persimmon tree helps make community connections. Second, be mindful of minimizing the impact of harvesting on the land and the individual plant itself. And, finally, be absolutely certain of a plantʼs identity — many are safe to eat, but many can be toxic — to safeguard your own health and safety. Novice foragers can familiarize themselves with the practice and their local landscape by taking a class.
Phillips and Welty echo the point about adhering to the forager’s ethical code. Lest you forget to ask permission before innocently picking a few berries, for instance, they’ll remind you of a story that recently made headlines in the foraging world: In Portland, last October, overaggressive foraging prompted one apartment complex manager to post a “No Trespassing” sign on the property, with an added handwritten warning: “Especially sous chefs!”
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Kari’s Law: Making It Easier to Dial 911
It has been just a little over four months since Kari Hunt Dunn, 31, was allegedly stabbed to death by her estranged husband in a Texas motel room. A murder trial is pending, three children have been left without a mother, and Kariʼs parents, sisters and family members are still grieving. But in that short space of time, the Hunt family has embraced a cause and recruited nearly half a million citizens in support of it: a federal mandate they have dubbed “Kariʼs Law,” which would require all telephone systems in hotel rooms across the country to allow callers to direct-dial 911.
Had such a system been in place on Dec. 1, 2013, Kariʼs 9-year-old daughter wouldn’t have been thwarted in her repeated attempts to dial 911 as her mother lay injured from multiple stab wounds. When the little girl’s father, Brad Allen Dunn, had allegedly trapped her mother in the bathroom and begun his attack, she ran to the phone and dialed 911. She tried four times to dial 911, just as she had been told to do by her mother in emergencies. But as with many hotel room phones, pressing “9” was required to get an outside line before 911 could be reached. “We see doubt in her face when we tell her she did what she was supposed to do,” says Hank Hunt, her grandfather. It has been difficult for the little girl to understand why her efforts didn’t work — her family has asked the media to respect her privacy and not reveal her name.
Kari Dunn had taken all three of her children, aged 9, 4 and 3, to the Baymont Inn & Suites, a hotel in Marshall, in east Texas, for a visitation with her husband from whom she had been newly separated. In November, on his Facebook page Brad Dunn had expressed regrets over his wifeʼs desire for a divorce and pledged to fight for his marriage. That fight became real on Dec. 1, ending with Kariʼs death and his briefly fleeing with their 4-year-old daughter. He was quickly found and is being held in jail on a $5 million bond.
Following Kariʼs death, friends set up a Facebook page in her memory and tributes flowed in. One person wrote that something should be done about the inaccessibility of 911 from hotel rooms. Friends then suggested to Hank Hunt that he launch a petition on Change.org, the social change platform, pressing for federal action. “I never, ever, ever thought we would reach half a million signatures,” Hunt says. “We have them from all around the world — Guam, Australia, Johannesburg, Germany, the Ukraine.”
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Thousands of Americans have also signed, including Michigan graphic artist and 911 dispatcher Ricardo Martinez, who designed a logo that hotels and motels can post at the front door to show they have direct 911 access.
The petition also attracted the attention of Federal Communications Commissioner Ajit Pai, who pressed the hospitality industry to review the issue. At his behest, the American Hotel and Lodging Association announced in January the formation of a task force to look into the issue. It promptly conducted a survey of the association’s member establishments and found that 45 percent of franchised hotels and motels had direct 911 access, and only 32 percent of independently owned hotels did. “These statistics are alarming. They show that the telephone systems at tens of thousands of lodging properties across this country could fail Americans when it counts,” Pai says. “My message to the hospitality industry has been straightforward: This is not acceptable.”
The commissioner has now begun a new round of surveys, this time to vendors of the multiline telephone systems (MLTS) used in hotels and workplaces, to see whether their products could easily be configured to allow dialers to reach 911 directly. Newer MLTS often can be reprogrammed to allow direct 911 dialing, while older systems need a more complex fix — perhaps switching to using 8 as the access number for an outside line, rather than the traditional 9. The newest systems, which are currently coming online, embrace technologies like GPS to fix the location of the 911 caller.
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Some hotel chains have been quick to respond, says Pai, including InterContinental, Marriott and Hilton, which are now working to change their dialing systems and educate their franchise owners about the need to do so. La Quinta is another, according to Hank Hunt.
It’s not just at hotels where the lack of direct-dial 911 has led to tragedy. In January, Pai notes, a customer named Randy Palmer suffered a heart attack in a Henderson Parts Pros auto parts store in Midvale, Utah. A store clerk immediately dialed 911, but the call was routed through the MLTS that served several Henderson stores, along with the corporate office in nearby Salt Lake City. Paramedics rushed to the corporate office, since the MLTS identified it as the location of the call. Help finally arrived at the correct store, but the delay is what likely cost Palmer his life, hospital officials said later. Direct access to 911 and accurate MLTS location information is vital, Pai says, at hotels, in stores and businesses.
Modernizing 911 access will cost money. Hunt urges citizens to press their state and federal lawmakers to use the 911 fees that appear on every telephone bill, both wireless and landline for either direct so-called E911 service (emergency 911) or for improvements to existing 911 services. “Total E911 fees/funds collected from the use of telephones in the United States was $2,322,983,616.36 in 2012,” Hunt states on his petition website. “Total amount spent for E911 or 911 enhancements in the United States was $97,367,543.46 leaving $2,225,616,072.90 unspent.”
Hunt says that some states, including Illinois, divert E911 funds to the general fund, and he says citizens should press their legislators to use the money to fix the 911 infrastructure instead.
Hunt is now taking his message and his campaign for Kariʼs Law across the country, speaking at several state conventions held by the American Public Communications Officials and the National Emergency Number Association. His message is simple: “When a 9-year-old dials 911, they should hear a voice that says ʻ911. Whatʼs your emergency?’”
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Kindergarten Cops: In Charleston, S.C., Some Hall Monitors Have Guns
Mark Rosborg beams as he bounds from classroom to classroom at the Mason Preparatory School in Charleston, S.C. A year ago, Rosborg was a narcotics officer working the nightshift, staking out dark corners on the city’s east side. Today, his beat involves patrolling hallways decorated with colorful finger paintings. He pauses to look at one of the drawings on the wall: a kid in a purple shirt with the word YOLO written across it — You Only Live Once. Putting armed guards in primary schools was virtually unheard of even a decade ago, but growing concern for kids’ safety led the city to make the controversial move.
Rosborg and his partner, Neil Sneath, are patrolling the school together. The officers notice an open door to a second-grade classroom and head over. The kids call out in unison, “Hi, Officer Mark!” as Rosborg approaches. One curious student observes Rosborg’s utility belt. “Do you have pepper spray — yes, you do — and a gun and a Taser?” the boy asks.
“All of the above,” says Rosborg.
Rosborg and Sneath are among the 19 armed and highly trained roving police officers on the Charleston Police Department’s (CPD) School Security Response Team, whose task is to safeguard the 35 elementary schools, both public and private, within the city limits. The new squad, formed in direct response to the 2012 shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary School in Newtown, Conn., which left 26 people dead, is the first of its kind in the nation specifically protecting elementary schools against gun violence — a pilot program for the country.
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Most schools in America have some kind of security guard or school resource officer who provides a pretense of safety. Schools in Baltimore, Los Angeles and Miami use armed officers; those in Boston and New York City schools have no weapons. Some smaller towns — like Saratoga Springs, N.Y., and Simpsonville, S.C. — simply let police officers use a spare desk at elementary schools to do their paperwork. It puts a cop in a school for a few hours a day at no cost to the city. Charleston’s program, which launched in September 2013, is much more radical. What really makes it unique is its randomness: At any given time, up to three specially trained officers may be at any school in the city, but you never know who or where.
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The tactic is modeled after that of the counterterrorism Hercules Teams in New York City — elite, heavily armed police details that descend unannounced on crowded hotspots around the city to intimidate bad guys and disrupt potential terrorist plots. Likewise, the Charleston squad is armed and expertly trained, and their movements are unplanned. The officers don’t decide ahead of time what order they’ll visit the schools. They might stay for 10 minutes or 45; they may visit the same school twice. The more unpredictable they are, the more they’ll interfere with a potential school shooter’s plans. If officers in any given school happen to encounter a person with a gun — which hasn’t happened yet — other officers on the school beat can arrive on the scene in under a minute, guns drawn and acting like members of a SWAT unit (because some of them were).
Rosborg and Sneath stroll the perimeters of Mason Prep, surveying the nearby roads and alleyways. Two lines of children heading to recess march by, gawking at the two policemen, twice their height. Rosborg walks toward a pair of exit doors to check that they’re locked — a shooter could easily enter through unsecured doors or over a fence or through a window. He notes that most schools in Charleston have hurricane-ready glass, which isn’t bulletproof but is about as close as you can get. Older schools also have the benefit of walls made of cinder blocks, which are bulletproof; newer schools typically use drywall.
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But if a potential shooter were to scale an unguarded fence or enter a school another way undetected, the city’s nearly million-dollar plan could be ineffective. The school response team can’t be everywhere at once. Adam Lanza, the Sandy Hook shooter, killed 26 people in under five minutes, firing on average one shot every two seconds. However, the random, roving nature of Charleston’s squad is likely to deter a person with a gun from barging in in the first place, says David Keene, the former president of the National Rifle Association (NRA), which, in the wake of Sandy Hook, called for putting armed guards and teachers in American schools. “The problem with a nation of several hundred million people is there are evil and crazy people,” he says. “What you want to do is minimize that something like that can happen. And you can take reasonable steps to minimize it.”
At the outset, the idea of a school response team didn’t seem all that reasonable to some Charleston parents and school administrators. They opposed the plan, on the grounds that it would create a “police state” and instill more fear than safety. The city council eventually approved the program, but narrowly, in a 7 to 6 vote in February of last year — not least because of its expense: It cost $800,000 to hire 19 new officers to replace those selected for the team and to purchase new cars and equipment; along with the weapons on their belts, each officer on the schools beat drives a brand-new cruiser. When asked if he thought the police program was worth it, however, Brendan O’Shea, the headmaster of Mason Prep, reflects on the nation’s recent mass shootings and says, “Unfortunately, I’d say at this day and time, we had to do something.”
Fortunately, there hasn’t been any gun violence in Charleston schools since the program started. But emergencies do happen. One Friday late last summer, Rosborg was called to Memminger Elementary School, where an 8-year-old boy was threatening to stab his teacher with scissors. The staff called the officers’ cellphones — they don’t go through 911 — and the police arrived in under a minute, restrained the kid and waited until his mother showed up to take him home.
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Rosborg has never shot anyone. But other members of the team, two of whom are women, have seen a lot of action. Eight of the 19 officers came from the city’s SWAT team. A handful of others worked in special investigations and surveillance, and others in community action teams. “Having these officers that are used to being really tactically oriented, in high-risk type situations, keeps the level of intensity constantly moving forward,” says Gregory Mullen, chief of the CPD. “They bring a higher level of training that can be cross-pollinated.”
Since Columbine in 1999, more than 150 people have been killed in school shootings in the United States. A 16-year-old shot and killed five high school students, a teacher and a security guard in Minnesota in 2005, using his grandfather’s police pistols and shotgun. In 2007, Seung-Hui Cho used two semiautomatic handguns to murder 32 people at Virginia Tech (in 2011, two more students were shot and killed at the school). In 2008, a 27-year-old former student at Northern Illinois University murdered five people in a classroom with a shotgun. Last summer, a man with a semiautomatic rifle shot and killed five people at Santa Monica College before he was gunned down by the police.
After the Newtown shooting, in which Adam Lanza used a semiautomatic Bushmaster rifle, the country lurched into another gun-control debate. President Obama promised to lead the charge on changing gun laws but failed to overcome the gun lobby’s influence on Congress. The NRA called for more armed staff in American schools. In some Western and Southern states, hundreds of teachers lined up to be trained to handle firearms.
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Eventually the blaze died down and things returned to normal: a country mostly unprepared to prevent random shootings and unwilling to talk about the issue until another tragedy comes along (like the mass shooting at the Navy Yard in Washington, D.C., in September 2013). It’s clear that the fate of gun-control laws lies in the hands of local governments, especially city councils. The Charleston program does — initially — appear to thread the partisan needle smoothly. It puts an armed, professionally trained officer in hallways, but doesn’t cost as much as hiring a full-time officer for every school.
It’s impossible to gauge whether the program is working. Last February, before the program launched, a 28-year-old woman brought a gun to Ashley Hall, the city’s only prep school for girls, pointed it at the school’s director and another English teacher, and pulled the trigger. No bullets were fired — the gun was locked. The woman, Alice Boland, has a history of mental illness but was nonetheless allowed to buy a gun the week before (Boland had previously threatened to assassinate President George W. Bush). If she had known how to use the gun, the school’s perfectly manicured quad would have become a crime scene in a matter of seconds. Would the presence of a police officer on campus have deterred Boland? Has it deterred other would-be shooters? It’s hard to say.
What Police Chief Mullen can say is that his department’s plan is likely to function best in dense urban areas. In Charleston, a 150-square-mile area packed with 125,000 people, the elementary schools in each cluster are just a short drive away, in some cases as close as one block. The experimental program is meant to be a model for other cities, but Mullen says he wants to “make sure the bugs are worked out” before he has any conversations about bringing the program to a national level.
At the Buist Academy for Advanced Studies, a futuristic magnet school in Charleston with a second-floor gym court that “floats” on springs to silence the thuds of stomping feet, Rosborg stops in a spacious, glass-walled atrium to check in with the assistant principal, Brian Smith. The officers on the school response team catch up with the school staff at each visit; the police department promised to work closely with each school to meet their specific needs, and they assured school officials that they wouldn’t intrude beyond what they were comfortable with.
“Everything going well?” Rosborg asks.
“Yeah, yeah,” Smith says. “You guys see our fence going up?”
“Yeah,” Rosborg says, peering through the floor-to-ceiling windows. “You and Memminger putting up the same fences.” Those fences — thick, white walls about 8 feet tall — are new security measures. The bell rings, and students stream in from recess. “Whoa. Police,” one kid says, as Rosborg stares ahead stoically. Another student stops in his tracks and sizes up the officer. “Whooaaaa,” he says. “Nice.” As Rosborg enters the gym, a child shouts to his classmates: “Be good because the police is here!”
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When Vets Come Home: 5 Things You Should Say (and 5 Things You Shouldn’t)
If you’ve ever stopped or stuttered midsentence when talking to a vet recently home from war, you wouldn’t be alone. Not knowing what to say to returning soldiers is a common struggle says Mike Liguori, a former Marine who served during the Iraq War and is now director of community at Unite US, an online platform that connects current and former military members and their families.
Well-intentioned friends and family members may say something that actually increases stress or negative emotions: Post-traumatic stress disorder, or PTSD, affects up to 20 percent of veterans of the Iraq and Afghanistan wars, according to the Department of Veterans Affairs. With no official blueprint on how best to help military members ease back into civilian life, we surveyed a range of vets and experts to tell us what’s helpful — or hurtful — for vets to hear from loved ones.
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What Not to Say
1. Don’t ask if they’ve killed anyone.
“It’s a frighteningly difficult question to answer for a lot of reasons,” says Army veteran Nate Rawlings, 32, who served two tours in Iraq. “It perpetuates a stereotype that all combat is shooting at bad guys and blowing things up. The truth is that combat involves long periods of boredom, anxiety and anticipation, punctuated by bursts of action many people would rather not discuss with family and friends, let alone strangers. Most veterans, at least for me, and most of the ones I know and have talked to, aren’t prepared to answer that question when they come home. Give them a pass — if they want to tell you, they might do so, in their own good time.”
2. Don’t tread too gently around vets because you assume everyone has experienced trauma.
“There’s no need to coddle vets,” says Amber Barno, a former OH-58D Kiowa Warrior helicopter pilot who served in both Iraq and Afghanistan. “There’s this stigma that people need to watch what they say, and frankly, veterans get annoyed at over concern. Veterans come out with priceless skill sets, as well as experience — ask about that experience, what it was like to serve their country.”
Daniel Gade, 39, an active lieutenant colonel in the Army and a professor at the United States Military Academy, West Point, says it’s important not to assume that all returning service members have PTSD or emotional problems just because they’ve served, even if they’ve served in direct fire combat. “One of the problems in society is our mentality of extremes — that veterans are maimed and need to be treated with kid gloves or that they’re all heroes,” he says. “Most of them are neither heroes nor victims, so treating them as normal human beings would be very useful.”
3. Don’t ask them to put difficult experiences behind them.
Being impatient is never helpful, warns Edna Foa, a clinical psychology professor at the University of Pennsylvania. “Don’t say things like, ‘Well, you’re back here. Iraq or Afghanistan is behind you — there are no dangers here, so put that all behind you,’” she says. If the returning soldier has PTSD, it’s a disorder. “It’s not up to a patient’s will to get over it.”
4. Don’t snap — even if they snap.
“Don’t take things personally if they don’t want to talk about something,” says William Hansen, 46, who has served as a truck commander and squad leader in Saudi Arabia, Iraq and Egypt with the Army. “It’s not about you, or your relationship. It takes five to six months for a person back from combat to get their bearings about them. So act natural toward them, act human. Many vets are struggling with what to say, and a lot of times they’ll say the wrong things at the wrong time. If you snap, they’ll stop talking — and stop reaching out.”
5. Don’t describe their experience for them.
“Avoid judgmental comments, like, ‘What you had to do was awful,’” says Capt. Wanda Finch, a division chief and program manager at the Defense Centers of Excellence for Psychological Health and Traumatic Brain Injury. Finch is also a representative for the Real Warriors Campaign, a multimedia public awareness effort designed to encourage help-seeking behavior among service members, veterans and their families. “You might think it’s sympathetic, but we want to stay away from taglines like, ‘War is hell,’ or other clichés.”
What to Say
1. Ask before throwing a welcome-home party.
“When they’re ready, or even before they return, ask how they would feel about a small, welcome-home gathering of close friends,” says Jamie Lynn De Coster, 31, who deployed to the Arabian Gulf, South China Sea, Iraq and Afghanistan, among other places, with the U.S. Navy. “Family and friends often want to gather around the returning service member, celebrate their return and just want to be near them. But the truth is, we don’t want the Budweiser parade. Look at the soldier’s face in that commercial — my veteran friends and I interpreted that not as happy surprise, but as being totally overwhelmed.”
2. Give updates on fellow troops from a vet’s unit.
“Keep in mind that the majority of a veteran’s unit is still going to be in combat if he gets injured and sent home,” says Michael Schlitz, 37, a Purple Heart recipient who lost both hands and the vision in his left eye when a propane tank exploded during a road-clearing mission in southern Baghdad in 2007. The Army veteran spent six months in the intensive care unit and an additional four months in the burn ward while recovering from his injuries. “Vets are going to want to hear how their guys are doing. They still wish they could be with them. But because they’re not there, they’re going to want to make sure people are watching their backs, that they’re getting what they need.”
3. Dole out the tough love when necessary.
“If you happen to reach a point where a guy is laying in bed, seven days a week, not doing anything, someone’s got to step in, slap him upside the head and say, ‘You’re still alive, you go forward and live for the people who don’t have that opportunity,’” says Tommy Clack, 67, a triple amputee and Vietnam War veteran.
4. Ask detailed questions relating to that individual.
“I don’t like when people ask, ‘What was it like?’ as if there’s a single answer that one individual could give that would cover the experience of everyone,” says David Eisler, 29, an Iraq and Afghanistan veteran. “It’s not meant as a stupid question, but it feels like quite the burden to answer for every single vet, especially if you’re being approached by a stranger. Start with more general questions — what did you do? when did you serve? — when talking to veterans you don’t already know.”
5. Go beyond saying, “Thank you for your service.”
“I’ve heard some veterans don’t like when civilians tell them, ‘Thank you for your service,’” says Liguori of Unite US. “It’s not offensive to them, but it creates a barrier, like civilians can just say thank you and it’s enough. Many vets are leaving the service and coming home from overseas struggling with unemployment or just not knowing what they want to do after the uniform. It’s hard for a guy who shot a machine gun for 15 months to come back home and see how shooting a machine gun applies to digital marketing. Veterans are finding it challenging to really transition to civilian life. They would rather hear, ‘Thank you for your service. How can I help you?’ since that second part gives civilians a way to find out how they can help.”
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Two Keys to the Future: 3-D Printing and Employed Veterans
If you had a chance to use a 3-D printer, what would you print? Well, now you have your chance.
Garages, a high-tech, hands-on lab, is drawing visitors to its pop-up location in Washington, D.C. While there, people can try out 3-D printing and laser cutting technology, take part in open innovation, and learn more about these topics through a series of demos and classes. General Electric created Garages as part of its commitment to reinvigorate America’s interest in invention.
While printing out small bottle openers and colorful octopuses or writing on a giant white board about what the perfect refrigerator might feature, visitors can also learn about the way the latest tech innovations power GE products as well as career opportunities in American manufacturing.
“Manufacturing is really where the thought becomes the thing,” Jennifer McNelly, President of the Manufacturing Institute (a nonprofit affiliate of the National Association of Manufacturers) said at an event co-hosted by GE and VetsinTech in the Garages space. “Manufacturing is the opportunity to come home and serve on our nation’s economic frontline.”
One target audience for this experience bringing technology and manufacturing to life is current and former military members in the D.C. area who might be interested in joining the more than 10,000 veterans working at GE facilities.
“To me, hiring a veteran is a good thing to do for the country, sure, but it’s also a great thing to do for the company,” says Seth Bodnar, an executive in Global Locomotive Operations at GE Transportation who joined the company after a career in the U.S. Army commanding detachments of Green Berets in multiple deployments.
When describing Get Skills to Work, a coalition between GE and other industry leaders to train veterans for careers in manufacturing, Bodnar says this approach presents a creative solution to the dual challenges of a shortage of skilled workers in manufacturing and the need for veterans to find lasting careers.
Can’t Afford a Down Payment? Let Investors Help You Buy Your Home
During the buildup to the great housing bubble of the 2000s, I watched the dream of owning a home slip from my grasp. Prices were growing more unreasonable by the day, and I knew I’d collapse under the wacky mortgage plans available to a reporter, on a reporter’s salary, possessing neither the discipline nor the extra scratch to scrape together a down payment.
Thankfully, the bubble eventually burst, prices plummeted and I wriggled my way into the market. But there are millions of other aspiring homeowners in America who are still shackled to their landlords because they either don’t have the money for a down payment or can’t afford a mortgage in situations where the loan can represent up to 97 percent of the purchase price.
Enter PRIMARQ, the world’s first residential real-estate equity exchange — a soon-to-launch venture of San Francisco entrepreneur Steve Cinelli. Can’t afford a down payment? Let investors put together the capital you can’t, without relinquishing all your clout as a homeowner. By letting “co-owners” buy shares in your home, you’re able to put down a bigger down payment, which means you end up carrying less debt and can get a loan free of mortgage insurance, which is commonly tacked on for down payments of less than 20 percent. “I think the market is overly dependent on mortgage-debt financing,” Cinelli says. “The application of debt has gone way too far.”
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Investors can bet on housing without having to deal with the actual house. They’ll get their money back (plus profits if there are any), under one of several circumstances: when you sell your home, when you decide to buy back your shares, or when the investor sells his shares back to the PRIMARQ exchange itself, which offers a “liquidity guaranteed” 90 percent of their value. So, if an investor puts up $10,000, and then wants to cash out for any reason before you sell your home, they’ll walk away with no less than $9,000 (unless the home price drops) — and it doesn’t affect you either way.
Not all homebuyers and not all houses can qualify for PRIMARQ funding. If there’s a mortgage involved, the buyer has to meet strict credit-score criteria, and the home has to have a certain expected price appreciation — meaning it’s got to be a decent property in a good location. That doesn’t necessarily rule out homes in lower-income neighborhoods, but it does stand to reason that unless those neighborhoods are deemed “up-and-coming,” the homes there might not qualify for PRIMARQ.
But once those burdens are met, the company has designed a program that Cinelli says complies with existing regulations and is working to convince banks that more equity in the mix makes a better-quality loan — and that it’s not necessarily a risk for borrowers to invest less of their own money in their home. If mainstream lenders get on board, it should mean more people have greater access to the housing market, which has only in the past year or so begun to rebound from the Great Recession it helped cause.
So how does this work, exactly? Without getting too deep in the weeds, PRIMARQ has created investment units, or shares, known as “Q’s”; each one is valued at $10,000. Through a broker, you, the potential homeowner, would list shares for sale in your desired property. Investors then make bids for them (minimum $25,000), based on a variety of factors, including the amount of equity capital being sought versus ownership to be shared, and how much the property is expected to appreciate in value. Then, PRIMARQ works with you to apply those funds to your purchase, and provides quarterly portfolio management reports to the investors.
Q’s are bought and sold just like shares on the Nasdaq, so investors can trade them anytime during your ownership. Once you sell, you hand over your investors’ share of the profits and pocket the rest. Or, if you sell your home at a loss, investors take their share of the hit as well.
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Cinelli hopes this kind of “liquidity in a historically illiquid market” will not only beef up America’s less-than-impressive rate of home ownership (65 percent) but also help prevent the next crash, by deleveraging some of the many debt-crushed mortgages out there. Back before the New Deal in the 1930s, buyers put 50 percent down on a house and paid the rest of it in two years. But in a push to expand ownership to more Americans, President Franklin D. Roosevelt established the Federal Home Loan Bank System, government-backed banks that paved the way for the onslaught of home lending that commenced in the coming decades. This worked fine, until the frenzy that was the housing bubble of the 2000s came along. Global investors flooded the market with easy cash. Complicit lawmakers, mortgage brokers and real estate agents rammed exorbitant home loans down the throats of hapless (or irresponsible) Americans who by that time had grown so comfortable with borrowing up to their eyeballs that many didn’t stop to consider how they’d actually make the payments on a half-million-dollar house in the ’burbs. The crash was both inevitable and colossal. “We saw the result of the overleveraged problem, over the last handful of years,” Cinelli says. It got him thinking, “Why is housing devoid of [outside] equity?”
To be sure, the PRIMARQ model involves risks for both investors and homeowners — not the least of which is a gaming of the system by nefarious investors, says David Reiss, a professor of law at Brooklyn Law School in New York who researches and writes about the American housing-finance sector. While Reiss calls PRIMARQ a “supercool idea” for all the aforementioned reasons, he could imagine various ways for unsophisticated homeowners to get fleeced without proper consumer protection regulations (the program has not yet been reviewed by a government regulatory agency). Unscrupulous investors could demand fees or increased equity in exchange for agreeing to help fund a second mortgage, for example. By participating in PRIMARQ as a homeowner, “you are not the master of your own destiny,” Reiss says.
Indeed, PRIMARQ homeowners aren’t exactly as free as they would be on their own. For one thing, they’re generally not allowed to rent out their place. Certain kinds of refinancing would also require the sign-off of the investors. They also get some say in the choice of homeowner’s insurance, how the property is marketed for sale, and the final sales price that is accepted. Investors further have the right of first refusal for a home at market value, which may discourage a seller who thinks he or she can get more than that. (Homeowners, too, have rights of first refusal for the equity.) Beyond that, there are ample ways for the deal not to pan out for either party. The homeowner could trash the place or fail to fix the leaky roof, tanking the value of the property (which PRIMARQ’s contract would label a “default” of the agreement). Or the market could again take a dive, which means investors take a loss just as if they’d bought Facebook stock.
But the system also provides a way for investors to get in on what can be a hugely lucrative bet, without taking on the same level of risk involved in actually purchasing a home. Investors don’t have to pay insurance, property taxes, homeowner dues or repair costs. Instead, they’re “passively” partnering with the owner-occupant, who — in theory — has a vested interest in keeping the property in good shape.
At this point, PRIMARQ’s entry into the $17 trillion market is too small to make much of a dent. There are currently some 350 to 400 investors on the platform and about 30 transactions in progress about a month out from the company’s formal launch. If it grows substantially, Cinelli sees the equity-over-borrowing model becoming a stabilizing force, helping homeowners avoid getting sucked into big mortgages, making them less likely to wind up in foreclosure, should financial problems arise. “Our goal is to really change the overall paradigm of housing finance,” Cinelli says. “The fundamental problem is that with debt as the only third-party capital available, lenders overlend.”
There is inherent value in bringing outside capital into an arrangement now monopolized by the banking industry, Cinelli says. It spreads out the players and the risks and those with stakes in the game, which at least in principle should strengthen the whole system.
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Flying Veterans Wherever They Need to Go
Walt Fricke flew hundreds of combat missions during the Vietnam War before fortune turned against him. A misfire during landing preparations caused one of the rockets on his chopper to explode, riddling the Army pilot’s leg with shrapnel and sending him to a hospital more than 600 miles from his hometown in Michigan. He spent a year recuperating — a process he says would not have been possible without his parents and his fiancée scraping together the resources they needed to stay by his side.
Fricke recovered, and went on to have a successful career in financial services at what was then known as the General Motors Acceptance Corporation (now Ally Financial). But he never lost his love of flying, piloting his own private plane and suiting up aboard vintage T-28 warbirds for the Trojan Horsemen, a flight demonstration team that performs in airshows. Nor did he forget how much the presence of his loved ones had helped heal the wounds of war.
After retiring in 2006, Fricke began thinking about how he might give back — and help the soldiers returning from the battlefields of Afghanistan and Iraq. He decided to offer his own aircraft to fly wounded warriors home or to bring family members to them at local Veterans Affairs hospitals. A friend told Fricke this was too good an idea to keep to himself. He listened, and today Fricke is CEO and air boss of Veterans Airlift Command (VAC). Its motto is: “Combat Wounded. They’ve Got Heart. They Need Wings.” Thanks to his group, more than 2,300 aircraft owners and pilots have donated their time and skills to help some 8,500 wounded warriors and family members come together in their time of need.
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VAC allows soldiers who were injured in the line of duty to travel across the country without the costs or complications of commercial flight — security lines and long layovers become infinitely more trying when prosthetics and wheelchairs are involved. The group also empowers pilots and private aircraft owners to make a real difference for veterans and their families. After filling out application forms and registering their aircraft, VAC volunteers answer blast emails requesting transportation or select from a long list of available missions on the VAC site, then take to the skies to serve those who serve us.
The program has been invaluable to veterans like Michael Schlitz, an Army Ranger who sustained severe burns and lost both of his lower arms in an explosion in Iraq. In 2007, when he still required around-the-clock medical supervision, a team of VAC volunteers helped lift him into a private plane so he could join his unit for their homecoming. Another VAC flight allowed Michael Blair, a Marine who became scuba-certified even after an explosion blew through his knees, the chance to take his wife on a diving trip, in part because he did not have to navigate an airport with his crutches and braces.
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Fricke says he has no problem recruiting pilots for his program; on the contrary, he sometimes referees a tug-of-war between volunteers eager to offer their help. “This is way bigger than giving people rides,” Fricke says, noting that VAC has helped foster bonds between pilots and passengers that long outlast takeoff and landing.
The organization is formalizing these bonds with a new program called Team-Up, which is designed to encourage mentoring and networking among pilots and aircraft owners, veterans and other community leaders. Retired Air Force pilot Andrew Lourake, who flew Air Force Two even after his leg was amputated above the knee following a motorcycle accident, directs the new initiative.
The secret to Fricke’s success may lie in tapping the very spirit that makes pilots want to climb into cockpits in the first place. “There is something about flying that is the ultimate form of freedom,” says Fricke, who then spoke of what “slipping the surly bonds of earth” does for the soul, a reference to a line from “High Flight,” the aviation poem memorized by United States Air Force Academy cadets and carved into headstones at Arlington National Cemetery. “Because pilots understand freedom in a unique way, they also have a profound appreciation for those who defend that freedom.”
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Ask the Experts: Why Should Americans Care About Income Inequality?
It was a focus of President Barack Obama’s State of the Union address in January. It’s consistently been a hot topic on political talk shows, in news magazines and at your dinner table. It’s a politically polarizing and passion-invoking topic of discussion. And it’s almost impossible to nail down.
It’s income inequality.
A commonly accepted view is that the United States has one of the highest levels of income inequality among the world’s industrialized nations. But is this true? Well, it depends on whom you ask or, more specifically, how you measure it. Judging from the Gini coefficient — a statistical measure of a country’s distribution of income — you might agree that, yes, the U.S. has seen a rise in income inequality over the past few decades.
However, economists like Richard Burkhauser of Cornell University have written extensively that the way we measure inequality is flat-out wrong. In a 2011 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, Burkhauser and co-authors Jeff Larrimore and Kosali Simon argued that income should be measured post-tax, size-adjusted for households, and after accounting for benefits such as health care. When those items are factored in, Burkhauser and his co-authors claimed, income inequality isn’t as big an issue in the U.S. after all.
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In this first installment of a new series for NationSwell in which we ask experts to weigh in on the major issues facing America, we asked our panel to contemplate this highly controversial topic. The main question we asked is: Why should (or shouldn’t) Americans care about income inequality? And, of course, what are the solutions to the problem?
The answers we got were surprisingly wide-ranging. Read on for the panel’s thought-provoking perspectives, and then join the conversation by leaving your own ideas in the comments box.
Dan Crawford
Spokesman for the Economic Policy Institute
NationSwell: Why should Americans care about income inequality?
Dan Crawford: Income inequality is far from an abstract issue. Since the 1970s, the productivity of the American economy has soared, but workers’ wages have stagnated. Inequality doesn’t just mean the rich are getting richer — it means the middle class isn’t sharing in the country’s overall prosperity. Americans should care about inequality because, since so much economic power is concentrated in the hands of the top 1 percent, the middle class keeps falling further behind. We’re not seeing the increases in living standards that should be emblematic of a healthy economy. For most Americans, inequality means they won’t see their incomes or living standards grow in any meaningful way.
NS: How do we fix it?
DC: There’s no easy fix to slowing or reversing the growth of inequality, but there are a number of steps that policymakers can take, such as making full employment a priority, raising the minimum wage, strengthening labor standards and protecting workers’ rights to bargain collectively.
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William McBride
Chief Economist at the Tax Foundation
NS: Why should Americans care about income inequality?
William McBride: First of all, I’m not sure they should. Income inequality is, in a general sense, a negative thing. You look around the world, there are certain places and times where it manifests itself as very problematic. For example, Brazil has such economic extremes, where the wealth and income is highly concentrated, and you have a real problem in terms of opportunity. You have a permanent “underclass” type of situation. Does that state of affairs exist in the U.S.? Well, it’s hard to get a handle on it.
I think a lot of researchers have tried to draw connections from income inequality to taxes. If we take from the rich and give to the poor through taxation, we can make our cultural problems better. That’s a very tenuous argument, and I think those who put it forth have yet to provide any evidence of it. [In fact,] the standard approach to economics tells a different story. It says that the economy works by different income groups cooperating, and employers hiring employees to produce wealth and income. Disrupting that process by redistribution from owners of assets to workers — or to retirees and nonworkers — that is a severe disruption to a basic economic process. We have very strong evidence that that destroys wealth — not just for the rich, but for the workers and future workers, as well.
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Additionally, the measurement of income inequality has been very flawed and politicized. To what degree do we have inequality? There are different ways to measure it. There’s IRS tax return-based measures and census survey data, and they come to totally different conclusions. The census-based data — which the CBO [Congressional Budget Office] uses that — that measure is more comprehensive, but it’s not the full story, either. When you add in what’s missing from that, you get a more complete picture of compensation, including fringe benefits. Then, you’ll find there’s been no change in inequality in 30 years, since the 1980s.
NS: Does it need to be fixed?
WM: There are policies that can and need to change to improve opportunity, not necessarily to improve inequality. Inequality is an outcome. But what we need to do is to change the inputs. In regards to education, it’s widely known we have a very poor K-12 system relative to other countries, and it’s only gotten worse over time. We have public schools in rich neighborhoods that are excellent, while low-income neighborhoods get very bad public schools. It’s very much tied to income. We know this is a very big driver of the low mobility problems we’re talking about here. So we need to fundamentally revolutionize K-12 public schooling, and to do so we can look around the world to see what’s worked and try some bold experiments.
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Branko Milanovic
Senior Scholar at the Luxembourg Income Study Center at the City University of New York
NS: Why should Americans care about income inequality?
Branko Milanovic: There are several reasons people should care. Studies show if we have high-income inequality — called inequality of outcome — then over time that can be transformed into inequality of opportunity. What happens is that if you have a very high income, you pass your money, privileges, connections and so on to your sons and daughters, and they start their lives with much greater advantages than others. Gradually, these advantages become cemented from generation to generation, which means that at the very beginning of one’s life, there’s already a disparity in opportunity. In other words, one can say that such a society would undermine the long-held American dream of equality of opportunity and upward mobility.
Secondly, there are arguments that inequality might actually slow the rate of economic growth. We can argue that very rich people are saving and investing and so on, but if middle-class income doesn’t grow fast enough, then there’s no healthy demand provided by the bulk of the population. Again, we have seen this in the hollowing out of the middle class over the last 30 years, and possibly even in the run-up to the crisis, where the middle class basically compensated for the lack of growth by borrowing to unsustainable levels.
Lastly, in the long run, inequality has the tendency to undermine democracy. We have seen this, as well. Rich people try to buy legislation that is good for them. The political system gives them an unfair advantage over the others, which in turn makes them even richer. That’s how crony capitalism is born.
NS: How do we fix this problem?
BM: First, we can increase spending for education. Educated people are more productive. They participate in globalization, which is good for growth. And having more educated people in the country reduces the premium on university educations and reduces wage disparities, simply because the supply of highly educated people increases. Education is one of few instruments that we have which is a win-win strategy: It increases growth and reduces inequality. On top of that, basically everybody agrees that education is good in itself and for the entire nation.
Secondly, we can increase minimum wage to be in line with inflation. This would increase income for people at the bottom. But then of course, economists raise the issue of whether this could reduce demand for labor. So, one has to factor in this possibility too. Lastly, we can expand social spending and make it more generous — food stamps, Temporary Assistance for Needy Families (TANF), Medicaid, earned income tax credit. They will decrease inequality, even if it means increased taxation. But all these ideas have as their objective not only to reduce inequality but more importantly poverty, which has been extremely stubborn in the U.S. for about 40 years.
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If our experts’ responses are any indication, the issue of income inequality has no simple explanation or answer. But notice that everyone did agree on one thing: To increase equality, we need to invest in education. Hear that, Congress?
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The Opera Singer’s Third Set of Lungs
On Oct. 17, 30-year-old opera singer Charity Sunshine Tillemann-Dick stood onstage at Chicago’s opulent Cadillac Palace Theatre and in a big, dexterous voice sang “Je Veux Vivre,” the famous waltz from the opera “Roméo et Juliette.” She was singing with her third pair of lungs.
“I’ve spent many a night in death’s guest house, its wind rattling the windows, wondering when I was going to move into the main residence,” the coloratura soprano told the rapt audience of 1,500, a radiant smile never far from her lips. “Right now, my life is a very literal continuation of the premature end of two other lives.”
That’s why she was at the theater, invited there as part of the Chicago Ideas Week innovation conference. She was there to speak about her success story — and why in the United States there aren’t more stories like it. While 90 percent of Americans approve of organ donation, only 42.7 percent have signed up to do so. Because of the discrepancy, nearly 7,000 Americans die waiting for organs each year, roughly 18 per day.
All attempts to solve the problem through politics or advocacy campaigns have failed. That’s why to revolutionize organ donation, Tillemann-Dick is relying on simpler tools, ones that might prove more powerful: her voice, and her tale of life and death.
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“You have to stop singing.” That’s what the lung specialist told Tillemann-Dick. It was June 2004, and recently, after trouble breathing and fainting spells, she’d been diagnosed with pulmonary hypertension. The rare condition, affecting one in 100,000 to 1 million people, and mostly women in their 30s, was causing the arteries in her lungs to thicken, forcing her heart to work overtime to push through the blood. Eventually, her heart would give out.
The dire diagnosis didn’t fit such a vivacious young woman. Her name, Charity Sunshine, after all, was fitting. “She always had a radiance about her,” says her mother, Annette — a zest for life that seemed unquenchable. But according to doctors, Tillemann-Dick was already at Stage 4 of the disease. That meant she likely had two to five years to live.
Her death could come sooner, the specialist told her, if she sang. The effort would be too much on her lungs.
For Tillemann-Dick, however, singing was everything. Growing up the fifth of eleven children in a large, Mormon household in Denver, she’d attended the opera “Hansel and Gretel” at age 4 and had fallen in love. The musical pyrotechnics, the grand themes, the way the performers laid bare their emotions through song — “I just thought it was miraculous,” she says. So she joined the Colorado Children’s Chorale and eventually took private voice lessons. She had planned to pursue public advocacy, a family tradition. Her mother’s father was celebrated Democratic U.S. Rep. Tom Lantos of California and her father’s mother was former Democratic Lt. Gov. Nancy Dick of Colorado. Instead, Tillemann-Dick stuck with singing, eventually enrolling at Budapest’s Liszt Academy of Music.
Her diagnosis cut short her Liszt Academy tenure, but she wouldn’t let it silence her. “As air came up through my lungs and through my vocal chords and passed my lips as sound, it was the closest thing I had to transcendence,” she says. She acquiesced to her doctors’ other recommendations, like avoiding Denver with its medically problematic high altitude, moving instead to Washington, D.C., close to medical specialists. And she took Flolan, a medication pumped through a tube into her heart, which was painful.
But she never stopped singing.
She continued her musical studies, this time at the Peabody Institute of the Johns Hopkins University, and performed at venues like the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, and Severance Hall in Cleveland — all with her Flolan pump strapped surreptitiously to her leg. When word spread about her condition and U.S. singing opportunities seemed to evaporate, she got a fellowship in Florence, Italy, and continued her voice lessons there. Meanwhile, after she became a spokeswoman for the Pulmonary Hypertension Association in the spring of 2006, she lobbied at U.S. congressional hearings for increased funding and expanded stem-cell research to help find a cure for her condition. But thanks to typical congressional dysfunction and political paralysis over stem cells, her efforts seemed to do nothing other than leave her feeling alone. “It is so much worse than cancer or AIDS, where there is some hope of survival,” she says of pulmonary hypertension. “And people still don’t seem to care.”
In 2008, everything fell apart. Tom Lantos, her grandfather, passed away, then her father, Timber, died following a car crash. The toll seemed too much for Tillemann-Dick. Her health deteriorated, and by September 2009, there were no options left. She needed a double lung transplant, a procedure she’d been desperate to avoid. “I wasn’t ready for that final option,” she says, noting that lungs, because of the delicate tissues involved, entail some of the lowest survival rates of all transplants, with the median survival rate for double lung transplant recipients just 6.6 years. Ready or not, a day after being listed on the transplant waiting list, she scored a match — an unexpected development, considering the median wait time for new lungs is 141 days. (Asked why she was able to get her transplant so quickly, Tillemann-Dick attributed it to “my age, the severity of my illness, and chance.”) She was flown to the Cleveland Clinic in Ohio and prepped for surgery. There wasn’t time to wait for her mother to arrive so she could say goodbye.
The last thing she said to her surgeon before the anesthesia kicked in was, “Please try to save my voice.”
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The surgery was worse than anyone expected. During the 13-hour operation, Tillemann-Dick flat-lined twice and had 40 quarts of blood pumped into her body. Her surgeon later told her mother it was among the most difficult transplants he’d ever performed.
When it was over, Tillemann-Dick lay in a coma. While her family waited in the hospital to see if she’d awaken, they witnessed firsthand the harsh reality of the nation’s organ deficit. “We saw all these other people waiting in hospital beds for organ donations and dying when they didn’t arrive,” says her younger sister Glorianna, then 16.
There are more people waiting all the time. According to U.S. Department of Health and Human Services, in 2009 there were 105,567 Americans on the organ waiting list, up from 71,628 in 2000. Someone new appears on the list every 10 minutes.
Once Tillemann-Dick awoke after 34 days in a coma, her sisters Glorianna and Mercina, 17, decided to do something about changing organ donation. It didn’t matter that they were so young; their opera-singer sister was far from the only one in the family who wowed and amazed at a young age. Home-schooled by their mother, the 11-child clan had enrolled in universities like Yale and Johns Hopkins when each was about 15. Tillemann-Dick’s oldest brother, Tomicah, was a speechwriter for former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton, and several other siblings have worked for various federal agencies. Revolutionizing organ donations? For the Tillemann-Dicks, it was all in a day’s work.
And Glorianna and Mercina knew how to go about it.
In 2003, psychologists Eric Johnson and Dan Goldstein, of the Center for Decision Sciences at Columbia University, scrutinized organ donation rates for various European countries, comparing the rates for opt-in systems (meaning no one is an organ donor unless registered to become one) with those for opt-out systems (meaning everyone is automatically a donor unless registered not to be). “We were very surprised by the results,” says Goldstein: Countries with opt-in systems, like Germany and the United Kingdom, all had rates below 30 percent. Opt-out countries, however, all had rates above 85 percent. In one opt-out country, Austria, 99.98 percent of people were donors.
“It was an early demonstration that simple behavioral interventions might have a big effect on actual behavior,” says Goldstein. “Some things we avoid thinking about because they are unpleasant, and the default choice might help us reach an opinion about the myriad things we have to make our mind up about in modern life.”
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In each U.S. state, the default is you’re not an organ donor unless you opt in. In Colorado, Glorianna and Mercina decided to try to change that. In 2010, they took a year off from school to craft opt-out, or “presumed consent” state legislation. The resulting bill included safeguards to ensure no one would end up a donor who didn’t want to be. “It was a very soft opt-out,” says Glorianna. They lined up co-sponsors for the bill and had bipartisan support. Then the legislation hit the news.
One article called the bill “organ harvesting.” Another labeled it “organ conscription.” There was hardly any mention of the young girls who proposed it, or their opera-singer sister who had inspired it. Local organ-donation organizations came out against the measure, fearing backlash would inspire current donors to change their minds. Amid the controversy, lawmakers pulled the bill. “It was really demoralizing,” says Glorianna. “I think we were focused so much on the politicians, we didn’t realize they were beholden to their constituents. And when the constituents heard ‘presumed consent’ or ‘opt-out,’ they got upset very quickly, and that’s where we failed.”
All attempts to create state opt-out organ programs have met with failure, says Joel Newman, assistant communications director for the United Network for Organ Sharing (UNOS), a nonprofit group that oversees the nation’s organ transplant system. He believes that’s largely due to the country’s emphasis on individual rights. “If someone does not want to think about it or not make a decision, people think that’s okay,” says Newman. “Many don’t want a mechanism that forces them to decide.” It’s one of the reasons Obamacare’s plan to have everyone make decisions about their health care has met fierce opposition. Compared with that, a government plan to make everyone consider their own death seems like a nonstarter.
Then how do you get people to become organ donors? Unlike other good deeds, e.g., donating money, there are no encouraging results for your generosity, no one to thank you for your charity, until after you’re gone. “Is the answer to force someone to do it? Is the answer to guilt people into it?” asks Newman. “It’s a different sort of appeal and that’s what makes it a lot more difficult. It’s not something you do to save or enhance your own life.”
It’s why some people are creating incentives for organ donations, such as LifeSharers, a nonprofit network of donors who pledge to give fellow members first dibs on their organs when they die. “I would love nothing more than for UNOS to bring in what we’re doing and put us out of business,” says David Undis, founder and executive director of LifeSharers.
Such a move has precedent. Israel, which had extremely low organ donation rates, recently started giving donors priority if they needed an organ themselves. The plan seems to be working: In 2012, the country had 717,300 registered organ donors, up from 516,055 donors in 2009, before the law went into effect.
But it’s unclear whether LifeSharers will have such an impact. Since the network launched in 2002, none of the 15,486 people who’ve become members have died and therefore had the chance to donate their organs.
While her sisters were facing organ-donation policy head-on, Tillemann-Dick was dealing with her own ups and downs. After her coma, she had to relearn to breathe, talk and walk — but the surgeons had remembered her request: They’d saved her voice.
Eight months after her operation, she proved it by performing a concert at the Cleveland Clinic, an event that generated news nationwide. But shortly thereafter, she could tell something was wrong. Her lungs were failing.
In July 2011, Tillemann-Dick was relisted on the organ waiting list for a second double lung transplant, a new and very rare procedure. This time, there was no immediate match. While she waited, on Sept. 21, 2011 she gave what she calls “the greatest performance of my life, on the world’s greatest stage”: She sang “Sempre Libera” from “La Traviata” at the Rose Theater at New York’s Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts. That weekend, she married Yonatan Doron, a staffer at a nonprofit think tank who had been with her since 2006. Throughout it all, she could barely breathe.
“There were all these beautiful, wonderful things in my life, and I was dying,” she says. Eventually she could no longer walk. “It was just so difficult to breathe, I couldn’t think of anything else,” she says. “Night after night after night, I didn’t think I could survive another day of this.”
Finally, six months after she had been relisted for a transplant, while she was in the hospital and hovering near death, she scored a match: a 48-year-old woman who had loved to sing.
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Tillemann-Dick’s second double-lung transplant was easier than her first. Within a week, she was breathing on her own, and a few months later, she was singing publicly. Now she does so with an ambitious purpose: to change how America deals with organ donation. “It’s my duty to help change this,” she says.
Now when she sings all over the world, she doesn’t hide her medical struggles, she makes it part of her story. She tells her audiences how her voice would have been silenced if not for the deaths of two others. She performs and speaks at conferences and galas and health care summits. She’s become a staple of TED talks around the country, videos of which have become YouTube hits. She’s releasing a collection of hymns on CD called “American Grace” and is composing a song cycle based on the writings of Katie Enos, a 14-year-old whose organs went to four recipients when she was hit by a car in 2010.
If the government can’t convince people to donate their organs, maybe Tillemann-Dick can do so through her voice. “This is our responsibility as artists: We need to speak up,” she says. She’s taking a page from “The Laramie Project,” a play about the murder of gay student Matthew Shepard that’s performed at schools nationwide to combat homophobia, using art to confront subjects otherwise off limits. Yes, she says, she’s not crafting legislation affecting millions of people, but up onstage, “I can control my message.”
That message, more than anything else, is that we are all going to die. That’s what her sisters’ failed opt-out bill taught her: “Before we can expect Americans to accept changes to the organ-donor structure, we need to start a meaningful dialogue about death,” she says. That’s why she recounts her repeated dances with her own mortality, not as a warning, but as a celebration. It helps that she’s an opera singer, trained in triumphant elegies and magnificent dramatic demises. “Our ability to be at peace with death allows us to accomplish things,” she says. “We are here to create a legacy. And what more beautiful legacy can you leave than life and love and charity and selflessness?”
And this is why, while she knows her new lungs might still fail at some point, she sees her own death, whenever it comes, not as a limitation, but as inspiration. “Isn’t that the point, to live and die in a way where we have peace, where we share the best of what and who we are — whether it be wisdom or a kidney?” asks Tillemann-Dick. “Regardless of your beliefs, that is immortality. In some way, that’s what we all are seeking.”
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