There’s a story that Judge Royal Furgeson likes to tell, about a young boy whose brother was killed in an accident with an 18-wheeler. The parents spoke no English, so it fell to the boy to navigate the aftermath. He sought out a lawyer, who shepherded the family through the tragedy. Now, years later, the boy wants to help others in a similar way, so he applied to start law school this fall.
Not just any law school, but the newly established University of North Texas College of Law in downtown Dallas.
When Furgeson retired last year from his prestigious post on the federal bench to become founding dean of the UNT Dallas College of Law, he wasn’t interested in maintaining the status quo. He wanted his law school to subscribe to an unconventional ethos — to cultivate lawyers as public servants. The method? Eschew national rankings, deflate tuition, welcome the “rejects” and teach real skills. “We want to train lawyers that want to be lawyers for the right reasons,” Furgeson says.
Not an easy task in an era in which lawyers are loathed, and frivolous litigation seems like the great American pastime. But Furgeson says most applicants for this fall’s inaugural class have little interest in becoming lawyers in “tall buildings” or high-powered firms. They’re pursuing a different kind of career. “They’re coming to law school to make a difference somewhere in their communities,” he says. “They see lawyers as people who can go to bat for others, who won’t stand idly by while some injustice happens. They kind of see us as caped crusaders.”
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At 72, Furgeson, a former Texas Tech University basketball player who waxes philosophical in a syrupy West Texas drawl, has so much energy that he uses a standing desk in his Dallas office. The extra spunk will come in handy.
Launching a new law school presents plenty of obstacles, especially considering the droves of law graduates who face massive debt and dismal job prospects each year. It’s what drives the commonly accepted consensus that America has too many lawyers already. (See “Why Attending Law School Is the Worst Career Decision You’ll Ever Make” in Forbes or “No New Lawyers! Economy Can’t Handle Them” in The Fiscal Times.) Furgeson disagrees. “My view is, there needs to be more lawyers,” he says.
The legal industry has never been able to offer sufficient resources to the poor, he says, and neither has it properly served the middle class or small businesses. “The profession needs to come to grips with the fact that we’re not providing legal services to a vast majority of our people,” he says. “You think of how many people are struggling out there, how many people are working at the margins. Something bad happens to the wage earner and it immediately becomes a terrible problem, so there’s a massive need in our community for better and more access to legal services.”
Craig Smith, 31, will join UNT’s inaugural class for just this reason. After traveling throughout his 20s, Smith settled in Dallas and landed a job in the city’s Department of Code Compliance. He felt it was one of the most effective ways to transform people’s lives and the community around them, but he quickly encountered a troubling obstacle. “There’s quite a big disconnect between the person that’s writing the code for the community and the end user who might not even have a high school diploma,” he says.
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Smith is pursuing a law degree so he can make the legal structure more accessible, and empower people who are overlooked or marginalized. He isn’t aiming for a promotion; rather, he wants to better serve people through his current position. “I saw an opportunity to give back to my community,” he says.
The key to cultivating such lionhearted lawyers lies in UNT’s innovative approach, which begins with rock-bottom tuition. “Affordability has to be a core value,” says Ellen Pryor, who left an endowed professorship at the Southern Methodist University (SMU) Dedman School of Law in Dallas for the opportunity to launch a new movement at UNT. “We have to make this a thriving value. It’s essential to everything.”
Smith says he never considered applying elsewhere. “Being able to go to law school, continue working and not having to fear debt is unparalleled,” he says.
According to the American Bar Association, the average annual cost of attending a public law school skyrocketed from $2,006 in 1985 to $23,214 in 2012 — an increase of more than 1,000 percent in less than 20 years. (Private law school costs jumped from $7,526 to $40,634 over the same period.) Where does this leave students?
As a judge, Furgeson says he’s witnessed many young graduates abandoning public service after a year because their debt was overwhelming — often topping $200,000. “I was very concerned that earnest, sincere young people who really wanted to be lawyers were starting out with such crushing debt that they didn’t have a lot of alternatives,” he says.
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His aim is to limit students’ financial obligations, so they won’t feel the need to score a job at a big firm. “Our goal is to tell them there’s another way, to talk to them about other opportunities, about how rewarding law can be when you represent people in your community, neighbors and so forth,” he says.
It probably won’t require much convincing. Furgeson and his admissions staff are relying less on GPA and LSAT scores — the gold standard for most law school admissions because of the impact high scores have on schools’ national rankings — in favor of recommendations and life experience. They’re actively recruiting a different kind of student, those with meaningful life experiences that are ingrained in their communities. “We have to understand there are so many other traits that determine success in life than how you do on a test, and that’s what we’re trying to find,” Furgeson says. “When people don’t do well on a test, we’re not stopping there. We’re looking behind that. It’s important to me to see if we can give people a chance.”
When UNT’s maiden class arrives this fall, students will be indoctrinated with a unique approach to legal education, one that emphasizes practical skills over theoretical knowledge. The intent is to equip graduates to handle cases in high-need areas. To ensure that students are mastering objectives, teachers will also utilize frequent assessments, rather than giving a single exam at the conclusion of each course, as is common practice.
UNT is also forgoing endowed professorships and placing less emphasis on faculty research. The money that would typically go toward funding endowed faculty positions — which other schools use to attract stars in the field — will be funneled into need-based student scholarships instead. “We’re going after really good teachers that want to teach,” Furgeson says.
This philosophy is what drew Pryor to UNT after 25 years at SMU. There, she was teaching an upper-level course using a textbook she co-authored, but found herself asking, “Why are we teaching the same old way?”
Pryor has been instrumental in charting the path of the new endeavor at UNT — she’s the school’s new associate dean for academic affairs — but she’s quick to note that it’s a first step in a longer journey. “We didn’t set out to reform legal education. We just set out to start our own law school,” she says.
And while Furgeson stands strong behind the school’s philosophy, he’s not without a little trepidation. “People are giving us three years of their lives and we have got to do this well,” he says.
But, he confirms with a wink and a grin, “I actually think it’ll work.”
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Tag: Calls to Action
Watch: How Rock the Vote Is Reaching Millennials
Heather Smith, Rock the Vote board chairwoman, was doing what she does best at South By Southwest in Austin, Texas, this week: Donning a #TrendUrVoice T shirt, she stood in the rain on Thursday registering voters alongside both the famous (actress Rosario Dawson, chair of Voto Latino) and the newly converted (student volunteers). “Our strategy is just to go where the young people are,” she says of the Rock the Vote presence at the music and media conference.
That strategy has worked for the nonprofit since its inception. When Rock the Vote was founded in 1990, MTV was one of the surest ways to reach young people. In the last 23 years, however, dozens of new media outlets have hit the scene, while political campaigns drew major stars to political fundraisers and celebs started to take on their own causes.
Rock the Vote had to motivate and mobilize millennials, making them feel that voting, like music, is something that is a part of their identity. “We moved from LA to Washington, DC so we could be in the middle of all this and say, ‘Hey, pay attention to us. Start talking about these issues,’” she says. Rock the Vote has also branched out to launch new programs like Spin the Vote for electronic dance music fans. “The strength of our democracy really does depend on the participation of its citizens,” Smith said, emphasizing the importance of redefining citizenship in our country before heading back in the rain. “It’s showing up on election day and everyday in between.”
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The Average College Graduate Has a Whopping $30,000 in Debt. How One Startup Is Helping Them Pay It Back
Two years ago Rozlynd Awa left Pittsburgh for Kaneohe, armed with a master’s degree in public policy from Carnegie Mellon University. A staggering $140,000 in student loan debt also followed her to the Hawaiian city, where she’s now an analyst for an education nonprofit. For that amount of money, Awa could have purchased a Porsche 911 (with embellishments, no less), flown around the world (roughly 14 times) or bought a home (albeit a modest one). “It’s overwhelming,” she says when she stops to think about it.
The only daughter to a single father, Awa wasn’t immune to hard work: She took on two jobs to help pay for college and grad school. Yet Awa was surprised when she learned she could volunteer at a company that might serve as a launching pad to an engaging career and at the same time earn money to pay down the money she owed. The opportunity came from a small Pittsburgh nonprofit called SponsorChange, which enables college graduates to chip away at their loans through high-level, skills-based volunteer work at sponsoring corporations. SponsorChange’s mission isn’t far off from programs such as AmeriCorps, but its focus on the private sector sets it apart from similar government-sponsored initiatives.
“Nearly two-thirds of students graduate with debt, which at times prevents them from doing the civic work that they really want to pursue,” says Raymar Hampshire, who co-founded SponsorChange in 2009 with personal savings and support from the Sprout Fund, an organization that invests in community projects in Pittsburgh. SponsorChange serves as a bridge between students, dubbed “change agents,” and companies, matching qualified graduates to specific projects. The sponsor businesses, which range from local law firms to the Boys & Girls Club of America, pay $1,000 per project to alleviate each student’s loan debt. So far SponsorChange has matched about 35 students to various projects, from business consulting to web development, which are split into 40-hour stints. “We wanted to give them a way to pay off that pesky debt a bit while still being involved in their community and increasing their network.”
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It’s a big problem to tackle. A mainstay topic in the debate about education reform, the average student loan debt has nearly tripled over the last 15 years, according to a study from the Pew Research Center, hurting recent graduates as they enter the workforce. In recent years, that growth has begun to set records: Outstanding loans soared past the $1 trillion mark in 2011, exceeding the nation’s total credit-card debt.
Awa’s $140,000 figure is no doubt exceptional, but the average debt for graduates of the class of 2012 was $29,400, up slightly from $26,600 in 2011, according to a report from the Institute for College Access and Success, a nonprofit research group. “Student loan debt is the biggest burden millennials carry into the economy, and it’s crippling their ability to be productive individuals in society who could be growing our economy,” says Joe Bute, president of Hollymead Capital Partners LLC, a consulting firm in Gibsonia, Pa., near Pittsburgh, where Awa completed her SponsorChange project. In fact, student loan debt has become so burdensome that some experts say it’s even hampering a recovering housing market.
Since the program offers only $1,000 per project and participants typically only complete one project, Hampshire, 31, says an equally important part of SponsorChange’s mission is to encourage a love for socially altruistic work among young adults. And students who have participated in the program, such as Awa, are quick to agree. At Hollymead Capital, Awa researched re-entry models and transitional programs for newly released prisoners. “I was less in it for the money, which was really negligible compared to the debt I carried,” says Awa, whose graduate degree focused on education policy. “For me, it was really about exploring a different side of public policy and seeing whether the experience might segue into something else.”
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It’s Hampshire’s greatest hope that SponsorChange can become an outlet for new graduates to pursue these kinds of civic-based explorations. Hampshire was motivated to found the organization because he lacked such an opportunity while working in the private sector, which included jobs at companies such as Merrill Lynch. “Yes, I was able to pay my student loans and live comfortably, but I wasn’t feeling 100 percent fulfilled,” he says of his corporate gig. “I wasn’t actually making an impact or contribution to my community. So I wanted other young people to not have to make that decision — to either pay off their student loans or pursue a job that fulfilled them.”
Hampshire says he’s received great enthusiasm from corporate sponsors as well, many of whom are eager to provide millennials a chance to pay off their debt in a productive way. “That’s what I like most about SponsorChange’s model — that they’re creating a scenario for students to engage with companies in a practical way,” says Bute. “It’s not just random work or students getting coffee. It’s very much project-focused. They get the job done. They see the results.”
Hampshire launched SponsorChange in Pittsburgh, though he’s hoping that recent national attention — including a Dewey Winburne Community Service Award in Austin, Texas, at the SXSW Interactive Festival — will help propel the nonprofit to expand further across the country. The nonprofit has plans for a program that can facilitate virtual volunteering, where students can do remote work such as web programming or research for companies in other locations. Hampshire is also planning an aggressive push to involve colleges and universities in recruitment. “We want to scale what we’ve done so far, which is mostly pairing Pittsburgh-based students with Pittsburgh-based companies,” he says. “Universities and colleges have a ton of talent that could be mobilized to do impact volunteering, and we want to be at the center of facilitating that process…and fundamentally changing the way we deal with student debt at a national level.”
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Fighting for the Women Who Fought for Their Country
Kori LaVonda met a military couple in high school, and made up her mind: She wanted to join the Air Force. “It just seemed like a cool life,” she remembers. At age 17, she crammed for the armed services aptitude test, and barely passed it. She drained her bank account to pay for a trainer, who helped her lose 40 pounds to make weight. And she kept the whole thing a secret from her parents — until the day she left Southern California for southern Nevada, and a job at Nellis Air Force Base.
“What attracted me was ‘Aim High,’” she says, referring to an Air Force recruiting slogan in use when she enlisted back in 1997. “It just really inspired me to go for whatever I wanted to go for.”
But once in the service, her dream became a nightmare. “I was raped when I was overseas,” she says abruptly, describing an incident during a six-month deployment to Prince Sultan Air Base in Saudi Arabia where, at 19 years old, she was sexually assaulted by her supervisor, who then told her he had AIDS.
She left the service badly damaged by the experience, escaping the pain by turning to “alcohol and drugs and bad men.” The booze “made me blossom,” she says. “You know, it gave me courage, the strength to deal.” But before long, she was dating a meth addict. Her mother had LaVonda’s two young children taken away. Eventually, she found herself on the streets.
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The Kleenex falls to pieces as LaVonda tearfully recalls her journey. She is perched atop a planter in Admiral Kidd Park in Long Beach, Calif., near the Villages at Cabrillo transitional housing and counseling facility. Next to LaVonda sits Melissa Tyner, senior staff attorney at the Inner City Law Center (ICLC), and Anequa Campbell, a recent Georgetown Law School graduate based at the ICLC as an attorney with the Equal Justice Works AmeriCorps Legal Fellowship program. They smile as LaVonda describes what a relief it is to have the support of these women — who gather materials for her claim for benefits from the Department of Veterans Affairs (VA), appear in court on her behalf and generally look out for her.
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The ICLC has a broad mandate to end homelessness. Its staffers work to combat slum housing, create safe and affordable housing, and develop strategies to prevent families from being forced into the streets in the first place. But the ICLC also has a more targeted goal: It is the first legal-services organization in the United States to focus on problems specific to homeless female veterans, like LaVonda.
The group has been a godsend to LaVonda and countless others who have fallen on hard times after fighting for their country. “ICLC’s mission is to serve the poorest and most vulnerable in Los Angeles,” Tyner says. “Here we are with the shameful title of not only being the homeless capital of the nation but also the homeless veterans’ capital of the nation.”
From 2006 to 2010, the number of homeless female veterans rose more than 140 percent in the U.S. even as the national rate of homelessness decreased. And in LA, the problem is magnified. The city’s Homeless Services Authority estimates that of the more than 12,000 chronically homeless people on the streets, 8,000 are veterans and 1,000 of those are women. That number is expected to rise both on the local and national level as women, who make up nearly 15 percent of the armed forces, return from service.
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The attorneys at ICLC help their veteran clients access health care, compensation and other benefits from the VA. They specialize in psychological trauma claims, particularly military sexual trauma, which has been reported by 21 percent of female troops returning from Iraq and Afghanistan — a figure that is widely believed to be underreported. Part of what makes the ICLC’s approach unique is that it appoints female attorneys to represent female veterans. “A lot of the existing advocates who do this work are men, and if you are a survivor of sexual trauma, it’s going to be particularly challenging for you to go to someone and say, ‘You know, this is what happened to me,’” says Tyner at ICLC’s LA office, located in a converted produce warehouse in Skid Row.
Tyner, whose success at a high-school public speaking competition sponsored by the Veterans of Foreign Wars earned her a college scholarship, views her work with veterans not only as a way to serve those who serve our country, but also as a way to give back to a community that made her education possible. Since graduating from law school in 2009, and building up the Homeless Veterans Project at ICLC that same year, she has kept in mind something a veteran told her just after she won the competition: While veterans may be the most in need of your representation, they may also be the least likely to ask for your help. Based on her experience, Tyner says this seems especially true for female veterans.
The ICLC serves more than 400 veterans annually, according to Tyner. She adds that in 2012, the VA denied only 8 percent of ICLC benefits cases. The poignant thing about the organization’s 92 percent success rate is that it could so easily be replicated for many more veterans. Studies show the positive difference that simple representation can make. “When an attorney gets involved in a vet’s benefits case, especially more complicated cases involving mental health, their likelihood of success goes up exponentially,” she says.
For many female veterans who have experienced sexual assault, an attorney’s help could mean the difference between life and death. Many of these women suffer silently and alone, finding other ways to cope that can lead them to the streets. “They self-medicate through drugs or alcohol, and their lives usually go on a downward spiral after that,” says Campbell, her voice cracking.
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Campbell helps the ICLC team of attorneys conduct monthly legal clinics at six area homeless shelters. Lawyers also donate considerable time to each client’s individual case. Because homeless vets must focus on finding food, shelter and other essentials, it is nearly impossible for them to navigate “this paperwork jungle that is the VA,” Tyner says. “We’re combing through thousands and thousands of pages to pull out pertinent evidence that is used in a legal brief arguing why this person should be entitled to these benefits,” Tyner says, explaining that the process can take between 40 and 200 hours per veteran, all done free of charge.
It’s a slow pipeline. LaVonda first filed a claim for service-connected post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD) in 2007. She received her first denial from the VA in 2008; the department argued that there was insufficient evidence of a link between her time in the Air Force and her PTSD. LaVonda appealed the decision and was denied again in 2009. She did not file again until September 2012. More than a year later, the ICLC is helping, but her case is still pending. “It’s really troubling that this woman experienced an injustice in the military and she’s being victimized again by having to wait for so long to get the benefits she deserves,” Campbell says.
LaVonda had been on the streets for eight years before moving to Long Beach, into transitional housing provided by the nonprofit U.S. VETS, which has a program that provides homeless female veterans with a safe and sober living situation. She’s been sober for almost two years. Now, having also connected with the ICLC, LaVonda says she feels like she finally has someone fighting for her.
“I’m a survivor, baby,” LaVonda hollers, laughing. She closes her eyes, now dusted with white tissue, as she describes her new reality: She’s back to school full time, living in an apartment with her children and free from some of the guilt that used to weigh her down.
Next up? A job in security, she says. “I aim high.”
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SXSW: NationSwell on the Rise of Online Youth Activists
On the final day of SXSW Interactive (that stands for South by Southwest for the uninitiated), two inspiring student activists joined Greg Behrman, Founder and CEO of NationSwell, and Ronnie Cho, the former Associate Director of the White House Office of Public Engagement, to discuss how they’ve successfully used technology to address national challenges.
Simone Bernstein, a senior at St. Bonaventure University in New York, said her frustration from the lack of information for teenagers who wanted to volunteer in her hometown of St. Louis, Missouri, led her to work with her brother to start a website called St. Louis Volunteen. This later grew into VolunTEEN Nation, a national organization that lists volunteer opportunities for teens while also encouraging organizations to recognize the potential of younger volunteers.
“So many kids wanted to volunteer but there were very few places they could go to find those opportunities,” she said. “A few months after we launched St. Louis Volunteen, we got hundreds then thousands of emails from people who wanted to volunteer in their own cities.”
Bernstein wakes up at 6:30 every morning, runs three miles, then spends six hours each day working on VolunTEEN Nation — all of this on top of her academic work. She says she is grateful for Skype, Twitter, and other online tools that allow her to lead the national team, including 240 ambassadors across the country.
High school senior Charles Orgbon III talked about his work founding and running Greening Forward. The has its roots in a school project that had him picking up litter around the Mill Creek High School campus in Hoschton, Georgia. Initially, his Earth Savers Club only had three members, but the Internet provided Orgbon with a power platform to rally student action. Using a blog called Recycling Education, he shared posts on environmental issues with, as he describes it, “anyone who wanted to listen.”
Describing the transition that led to Greening Forward, which works to provide a diverse group of young people with the resources they need to protect the environment, Orgbon says that he started thinking toward the end of eighth grade about how he might use technology to advance the impact he could have.
“Let’s do more than just post on a website. Let’s build some resources and support tools to help young people build similar projects like the Earth Savers Club in their own communities,” he said.
The audience, many of them working professionals in their 20s and 30s, laughed when Orgbon defined a young person as someone under the age of 25.
This old 26 year old tweeting in the corner captured some other memorable moments from the conversation:
Cho moderated the afternoon session. While serving as President Obama’s liaison to Young Americans and writing the White House’s For the Win blog (which focused on the remarkable initiatives young Americans advance in their own communities) Cho came across many stories of student innovation. He talked about the importance of a platform to “highlight interesting, effective, impactful work” or Americans across the country.
This is exactly where NationSwell comes in, Behrman said, talking about the website’s model of telling stories about individuals making an impact and mobilizing support around innovators like Ben Simon of the Food Recovery Network. He then shared a video outlining the impact of its call to action.
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“The founding impetus is really these guys, people throughout our country who are doing amazing things, and sometimes they’re overlooked and sometimes people who are interested may not know about them, so we want to be a platform for them, a source for their stories,” Behrman said.
Then panel went on to explore the way tools from social media to smart phones have helped Bernstein, Orgbon, and so many student activists advance their causes and achieve national impact. The audience posed questions ranging from the distinction between activism and service to the role of school curriculum in encouraging volunteering. The conversation itself seemed likely to inspire not only more stories about student innovators who have leveraged technology to address national challenges, but strong support for them as well.
Soccer, Not Just a Pastime — but a Path to Citizenship
A year after arriving in New York City from Italy in 2009, the soft-spoken Reindorf Kyei, 18, was still struggling. He struggled with schoolwork, and he struggled at home. His mother was unemployed and his father was never home, working out of state to support the entire family and to maintain their legal residency status.
When Kyei was 7, his family had moved from their native Ghana to Italy in pursuit of economic opportunity, and then resettled again when his father landed a job in the United States. Torn between the three cultures, and speaking only broken English, Kyei and his family labored to fit into their new home.
Then, in March 2010, on a soccer field in the South Bronx, everything changed for Kyei. At the urging of his mother, he had sought out the youth coach of South Bronx United, a nonprofit soccer club based in one of New York’s poorest neighborhoods. Kyei started playing competitively with the club, and his teammates nicknamed him “Balo” — after Ghanian-Italian striker Mario Balotelli — a sentiment that carried special weight. Playing with South Bronx United not only provided an outlet for Kyei’s passion for the sport, but it also became the key to his dream: legal residency in the U.S.
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South Bronx United uses soccer as a way to engage with underprivileged kids, while providing them with tutoring, college prep and mentorship. Unlike other youth-mentoring programs that sometimes have a hard time keeping kids from dropping out, South Bronx United has a built-in draw. “They are always going to stay for the soccer,” says Andrew So, executive director of the club, which boasts a 99 percent retention rate.
The club has about 600 participants, who play on seven competitive teams and a recreational league. Staying true to the diversity of its South Bronx environment, the club is mostly made up of kids from immigrant families, and more than half were born outside the U.S. “That’s exactly the reason this program is so powerful. We have the added benefit here in the South Bronx because so many of our kids come from that [sports] culture and have that huge passion for soccer,” says So, a former high school teacher.
After joining the club in 2010, Kyei learned that his father had decided not to stay in the U.S. If he left, his children would be obligated to leave as well. However, Kyei, a sturdy central defender whose grades were improving through participation in the club’s tutoring and summer-school programs, had his heart set on something higher — a college scholarship. But that would require proper paperwork.
Through South Bronx United, pro bono attorneys helped him declare special immigrant juvenile status, which allows children to obtain green cards without mandatory parental approval. “At the beginning they tried to work with my dad, but he kept switching his mind about whether he wanted to stay [in America],” Kyei says. “Eventually, I just had to prove in a court that one of my parents, my dad, had abandoned me.”
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By the time his senior year came around, Kyei had a green card. He was also on the radar of a number of local colleges. During a game organized by South Bronx United, he caught the eye of Bloomfield College, a Division II college in New Jersey. After the school reviewed Kyei’s grades, which had drastically improved over the previous two years, it offered him a scholarship.
“We have a lot of immigrant youth who bring enormous challenges [around] language skills and things like that,” So says. “So we have kids who are very talented, but have not done well enough on SATs to qualify for a scholarship yet. That’s another reason educational components are so important for us.”
A higher degree helps down the line as well. Immigrant athletes who are in the U.S. on a visa need to be employable to keep it. A college degree helps with that. Meanwhile, players without the proper documents — many of whom may study in college through programs like Golden Door Scholars — may one day be eligible for amnesty, particularly if Congress passes new legislation similar to the DREAM Act (a bill that proposed giving legal status to illegal immigrants but was defeated in the Senate in 2010), which would grant residency to undocumented immigrants with a higher education.
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Kyei wouldn’t be headed to college without South Bronx United, he says. He is almost certain that he would be back in Italy or Ghana by now were it not for the club’s help. The same is true for other students in the club, such as Innocent, 21, and his 15-year-old brother, Paul, who came to the U.S. from Nigeria in 2008. (The club asked for the boys’ surname to be withheld in order to safeguard their efforts to gain residency.) They are working with the club in hopes of finally getting their green cards.
“We didn’t ever have Mommy and Daddy around,” says Innocent, whose parents returned to Nigeria in 2008, leaving him and his brother in the care of an uncle in New York. “[South Bronx United is] the reason I’m where I am, and there was no way we were ever going to get our cards without them.”
Innocent is now a student at Borough of Manhattan Community College. Paul is a winger for the club’s competitive travel team, and also aspires to receive a college scholarship one day.
“I don’t know where he would be without this,” Innocent says of his brother. “Nowhere, really. And the one thing he truly loves to do is play soccer.”
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Chalk, Paper, Scissors: A Startup Aims to Help Teachers and Save Detroit
Brothers Andrew and Ryan Landau, along with Aaron Wolff, aren’t household names. They don’t have the swagger and sass of a lot of Internet entrepreneurs. And when they decided to launch a startup, they deliberately picked a rather boring business: providing paper, pencils, rulers and other office and back-to-school needs. “We saw an opportunity to provide a great experience purchasing office and school supplies while also making a difference,” Andrew Landau says. Now there’s a manifesto for you.
But make no mistake. Andrew, 28, Ryan, 25, and Aaron, 26, are pioneers, working a rough and unforgiving terrain. What they are attempting is daring, hopeful and quite possibly a triumph of faith over reason. Through their year-and-a half-old company, Chalkfly, the Landau brothers and Wolff have already provided free school supplies to 1,000 teachers, doling them out to kids whose parents can’t afford the stuff. And they’re doing it in downtown Detroit, whose $18.5 billion debt, dismal police response time (fully 58 minutes; national average: 11) and darkened byways (40 percent of the streetlights don’t work) have made the city the enduring symbol of American urban blight.
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“People see empty buildings here. I see it as a place full of opportunity,” says Andrew Landau. It’s a statement that sounds a little like something John Winthrop, an early governor of Puritan New England, talking to the original American colonists, might say.
The Landaus and Wolff are part of a hardy group of grass-roots innovators who have taken up residence in a refurbished old movie theater, banding together to try to jump-start their troubled city. The scene at their headquarters in the Madison Building is encouraging — a hip, urban workspace with exposed brick walls, beanbag chairs and a pingpong table. There’s an atmosphere of collaboration, not competition, among the 20-somethings swarming there. “If I need help with an HTML issue, I can send out an e-mail and within 15 minutes, I have people responding,” Wolff says. Detroit entrepreneurs possess a “grittiness and determination to do whatever it takes to make things successful,” says Andrew Landau. As an entrepreneur in the city, he relishes the chance to be part of “something larger,” and witnessed the opening of the first Whole Foods in the city. He’s also enjoyed seeing yoga take shape on a wide scale, being offered in such places as Campus Martius Park and Ford Field, as well as on the roof of the Madison Building. “You can just see with everyone down here, everyone’s rooting for the city as a whole to do better. Everything is so new, exciting and fresh,” he says. Chalkfly is a part of the hubbub, sponsoring monthly cultural events, like a sushi class and coffee tastings.
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A graduate of the University of Michigan, Andrew Landau was working for Google in Chicago when he began brainstorming with his brother Ryan, an IBM employee in Washington, D.C. They decided they would update the drab office-supplies business — offering round-the-clock customer service and free overnight shipping on every order. They set out to become “the Zappos of office supplies.” But there was a twist. “What’s different about Chalkfly is our focus on doing social good, not just creating wealth,” Andrew says.
Wolff, who heard about their idea from Ryan while standing on a beach on North Carolina’s Outer Banks, helped flesh out that part of their mission. He was on spring break for Teach for America in Charlotte. He had personally spent thousands of dollars of his own money to cover the costs of pencils and paper for his classroom.
“Unfortunately, in most low-income districts, parents cannot afford the supplies,” Wolff says. “The burden then falls on the teachers. If they want their students to take notes, but the parents did not buy them pencils, someone has to buy them.”
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His experience is far too common: According to the National School Supply and Equipment Association, a trade group, public school teachers paid more than $1.3 billion out of pocket for supplies and instructional materials in the 2009-2010 school year. A survey, released by the school supply association in June 2013, found that the figure had climbed to $1.6 billion for the 2012-13 academic year. (The National Retail Foundation estimates that in 2014 families with children K-12 will spend an average of $634.78 — and a total of $26.7 billion — on back-to-school supplies.)
So Chalkfly’s founders decided they would donate 5 percent of every purchase to teachers, helping them get the supplies they needed for their classroom for free. The overwhelming majority of those donations have gone to support educators in Detroit. “To me, it’s so obvious that focusing on education will dictate the future of a city,” Wolff says. “Even if it just means a couple extra students are able to take notes in math class, at least we’re impacting them positively.”
The more they make, the more they give. Chalkfly launched in June- July of 2012 with $750,000 in startup funding from venture partner companies and a business accelerator. In its first year, it is on pace to earn more than $2 million in revenue. Internet Retailer Second 500 ranked Chalkfly among the top 1,000 e-retailers in the country — the youngest company on the list.
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At first, their friends thought they were a little crazy to locate in Detroit. “The murder rate definitely came up,” Wolff says. But all three were raised in the city’s suburbs, and “we just really felt a draw to come back home and help in our community.” And being in a place that just declared bankruptcy can have its advantages. It’s easier to stand out from the crowd, for starters. “Whatever it is, you can be first to market. There’s no other place like that,” Wolff adds. There’s also a far lower barrier to entry. Rent for a spacious office is 20 percent to 30 percent less than it is in many other cities. Living costs are lower. Wolff pays a mere $450 a month to share an apartment in Southwest Detroit. When his current lease is up in the suburbs, Landau plans to head to the city as well.
It’s also possible that in a city infamous for “feral houses” — a place with so many abandoned neighborhoods that city officials talk not of growth, but of strategic shrinkage — there are simply fewer distractions from work. These guys certainly don’t get out much. The defiant souls who haven’t joined the urban flight might take solace at a Tigers game, or hang out in bars, drinking to better days ahead. But Wolff and Andrew Landau go late at the Madison Building. It is not uncommon for their workday to stretch from 7 a.m. to 11 p.m.
But then again, maybe that’s just their personalities. Andrew is the sort of person who sets weekly and monthly professional and personal goals for himself. For 2014, one of his personal goals is to volunteer weekly with an educational organization in Detroit, while a professional goal is to become the fastest growing e-commerce startup in the country. His motto is “lift hard,” meaning that as long as he’s in good health, he needs to “do something all the way, whether it’s work, school or volunteering.” He’s also earning his MBA through a part-time program at the University of Michigan and is on the board of several nonprofits. He says Chalkfly is “not just a job but part of who I am.” Wolff will work late, then take online classes in coding. Training for the Ironman Miami is his only diversion. “It doesn’t feel like work when it’s what you love doing,” he says.
The long hours are paying off, and the startup community is taking notice. Amy Gill of Bizdom, a business accelerator that provided support to Chalkfly, likes the fact that the company has no inventory; it can leverage existing office-supply distributors, eliminating overhead and allowing the business to scale faster. And the company’s social good mission is proving infectious. Chalkfly “has been a catalyst for getting involved in their community schools. It has led to book drives, tutoring programs and much more,” she says. “That’s very desirable for people these days — to believe in the mission of a company, especially one that gives back.”
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Alexa Kraft, 22, believes. She teaches Spanish to 240 students, grades K through 6, at Loving Elementary School on the North End of Detroit. Thanks to Chalkfly, she heads into class with an ample supply of white boards, clipboards and markers. “As a first-year teacher in a low-income community and an under-resourced school, the supplies I received are absolutely crucial,” she says. After graduating from college with significant student loan debt, she can’t afford to stock her classroom herself. She says the children in Detroit, which she calls a broken but resilient city, are “smart, strong and fully capable of being tomorrow’s leaders and heroes.”
Kraft is optimistic, despite the hardships she witnesses. “This city is rising from the ashes. I see it every day in the smiles and perseverance of my kids. There is no city in need of more support right now.” She applauds Chalkfly for helping fill in those material gaps in the education system so that children can be raised to become the future of the city. “I am so thankful to them, and our kids are thankful. I do believe we’ll feel the impact of this service for generations.”
That’s music to Wolff’s ears. “We have financial goals. But the emphasis is on building an awesome company where people are passionate about working and that makes a difference,” he says. He and Landau hope their entrepreneurial spirit will spread to other parts of the city. Wolff points to a recent decision by the advertising firm Lowe Campbell Ewald to bring 600 employees downtown, along with the opening of the retail store Moosejaw and the commitment to revitalizing downtown by the entrepreneur Dan Gilbert’s Bedrock Real Estate Services. “People are coming,” Wolff says. “Companies are starting every day. I only see this growing.”
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The Man Behind No Child Left Behind Has a Surprising Answer on How to Improve Education
If you’re a music fan or a film buff, guaranteed you’ve heard of South by Southwest, a gathering in Austin, Texas that’s more commonly known by its acronym SXSW. But the annual event isn’t only rocking concerts and documentary viewings. It also attracts some of the brightest, innovative minds in education. The SXSWedu sessions discuss ways to improve teaching and learning and are filled with a-ha moments of invention and inspiration around how to help our kids.
But in a keynote session titled “Education: The Civil Rights Issue of Our Time,” Rod Paige, the former U.S. Secretary of Education, focused on the achievement gap that exists in our country and what needs to change.
After the session ended, NationSwell had the opportunity to ask him two exclusive questions: What is working in education and what is his call to action for the room of people he had just addressed?
He quickly replied: “Go visit Rocketship and visit KIPP.”
By mentioning these charter schools networks (KIPP is national network consisting of 141 schools; Rocketship currently serves three regions: The Bay Area in California; Milwaukee, Wisconsin; and Nashville, Tennessee), Paige echoed what has come up time and again in the full days of conversations and long halls of conference rooms at the Austin Convention Center: The importance of re-imagining the traditional school system. The underlying message of his two answers in one? His belief that bottom-up solutions (such as charter schools) are more exciting than some of the innovations in the public arena.
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The focus of Paige’s keynote conversation with Evan Smith, Editor in Chief and CEO of the Texas Tribune, comes out of a stance the former secretary of education has taken for years — that education is a civil right. That position was a driving force behind his work in the George W. Bush administration and in his book The Black-White Achievement Gap: Why Closing it is the Greatest Civil Rights Issue of Our Time, which was published in 2010.
“There is no strategy available that has a higher leverage opportunity to change the ethnic equality issue than closing the achievement gap in education,” he said on Wednesday. When Smith asked whether closing the gap should be dealt with at the federal level, Paige responded that while the federal government can have some influence, “the primary impact has to be at the place where the people walk the halls of the schools and look in the eyes of the children.”
Coming from a man who helped develop the controversial No Child Left Behind Act, this was certainly an interesting answer. However, Paige said he views education as a three-legged school made up of “the school, the home, and the community.”
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“We are doing all we can” to improve what goes on in the school and “very little” to improve what is going on in the home and the community, Paige added. “A child who has a loving and caring and supportive parent has a huge advantage,” he said. Those who lack that support are at a major disadvantage — a void that a teacher cannot fill on his or her own.
And when it comes to making sure that the original intent of No Child Left Behind Act “to close the achievement gap with accountability, flexibility, and choice” is realized, Paige said the leadership in African American and American Latino communities have to own this issue.
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Still, he said he does see a place for a national approach to education when it comes to the Common Core (also a controversial topic in education), explaining that 50 different state systems cannot control the public education of the United States.
Referencing the 1983 report by the National Commission on Excellence in Education, Paige said it was called “A Nation at Risk,” not “50 States at Risk,” for a reason. “There has to be some coordination,” he said explaining that there cannot be efficiency when there are too many points of authority.
But real change cannot come without those aforementioned three legs of the stool.
Perhaps that is why Paige was so quick to mention Rocketship. Its motto? “We do more than educate students. We empower teachers, engage parents, and inspire communities.”
Meet the Former Navy SEAL Saving Lives — by Saving Energy — on the Battlefield
Doug Moorehead remembers the exact moment senior Marine Corps officials rendered their verdict. In the summer of 2010, soldiers being trained near the desert town of Twentynine Palms, Calif., had been testing a hybrid generator system — a system Moorehead himself had helped engineer to power everything an off-the-grid military outpost needs. Out on the scorched Mojave Desert, home to the hottest temperature ever recorded, the devices — made up of a diesel generator equipped with solar panels, a high-tech battery and automation software — sucked up energy from the sun and stored the excess. As a result, the generator systems used diesel fuel for only a few hours each day, rather than 24/7.
Flash forward several months. Moorehead, a Navy vet and the president of Earl Energy, a startup based in Virginia Beach, Va., was at the Pentagon to discuss the results. He had just finished presenting the data that the military had collected during the tests when the senior official across the table said the line that still sticks in his mind to this day: “It’s almost too good to be true, Doug.”
If the device Moorehead had helped develop after retiring from SEAL Team Two was unbelievable — indeed, it reduced fuel consumption by a whopping 70 percent — it was in part because the military’s setup had been in need of an overhaul for quite some time.
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The Mojave Desert, a scorching hot area used by the Marine Corps for training. Thinkstock
But Moorehead was the right man to revamp the system. At the United States Naval Academy, he found he loved the problem-solving aspects of science and technology, and says he could have been happy studying everything from physics to electrical engineering. “Unfortunately you can’t be an undergrad for 25 years, you have to pick one,” he says. He chose chemistry. Then he trained as a SEAL pilot navigator, spending three years working with battery-powered submarines, traveling 40-plus miles underwater at a go on top-secret work in places like the Pacific and the South China Sea. Those subs’ rechargeable batteries did not last long, he recalls. He applied to grad school at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to work on building better ones.
There he joined forces with Yet-Ming Chiang, a professor of materials science and engineering, who encouraged him to try for something big in his research, rather than an incremental advance. Moorehead worked on coming up with a way to make self-assembling, rechargeable batteries: mix the right set of chemicals together, the idea went, apply them to a surface, then just add heat and watch the components arrange themselves. Going big paid off. By the time he finished his master’s degree, Moorehead was riding his bike across the Charles River several days a week to help train employees at the startup company A123 Systems in Waltham, Mass., which had licensed his technology from MIT.
Then it was back to the battlefield, in summer 2005. He trained soldiers in the Philippines and Colombia, and fought in Iraq as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. After nine years in the Navy, he headed to Harvard for an MBA and went to work at A123. In 2009 he ran into a former Naval Academy classmate, Josh Prueher (at a string of weddings, Prueher recalls), and heard about Prueher’s new company, Earl Energy.
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Fuel is enormously costly on the battlefield, both monetarily and in terms of the lives lost when fuel convoys are attacked. An Army Environmental Policy Institute study found that between 2003 and 2007, one military fuel convoy in 24 was attacked and resulted in a casualty, either injury or death, and that 1 in 8 Army casualties in Iraq during that period occurred while defending such convoys. “I recognized that fuel and maintenance and spare-parts logistics on the battlefield was a critical vulnerability,” Prueher says. Moorehead knew this issue well: “We spent a lot of time as special forces, providing security for the movement of necessities around Iraq — fuel, water, food,” he recalls. And he knew that with his knowledge of batteries, he could help.
Photo courtesy of Earl Energy.
The generator system they eventually produced is surprisingly simple. Normally, a military generator runs on diesel fuel all day long, and it uses enough fuel to power everything attached to it, should the need arise. But often the need doesn’t arise — and that’s wasted energy. Moorehead likens it to turning your car on, driving it to work, leaving it running all day, driving home from work, parking it in your garage — then letting it run all night.
With Earl Energy’s system, the generator only needs to run a few hours, at the level at which it has the greatest fuel efficiency. The excess energy is saved in the battery, along with any solar energy that might be available. Automation software switches the generator off when it’s not needed and power is drawn from the battery, until it’s time to recharge again. It’s not complicated, but it is the change the military needed. “The technology is evolutionary, but the concept and its impact are really interesting,” says Capt. Frank Furman, U.S. Marine Corps, logistics program manager in the Office of Naval Research’s Expeditionary Maneuver Warfare and Combating Terrorism Department.
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“If we want to fly a helicopter from point A, we need to get fuel to point A,” Furman continues. “That largely involves fuel convoys, which is why our enemies have relied on the IED as its primary weapon. That tactic is a reaction to our reliance on this specific form of energy. … We’ve been living it in Iraq and Afghanistan. With the cost of fuel rising and the costs of alternative energy generation — such as solar — falling, the economics of investment begin to make more sense.”
Doug Moorehead. Photo courtesy of Earl Energy.
Moorehead’s technical savvy and on-the-ground experience led him to that panel at the Pentagon, where the numbers proved that Earl Energy’s generator system could perform above expectations. In addition to reducing fuel consumption 70 percent, it decreased the amount of time the diesel generators had to run by 80 percent. The Marine Corps bought two units, and dispatched them to Afghanistan for 18 months to be tested in a demanding combat situation. The hybrid generator passed with flying colors: Fuel consumption dropped 52 percent and generator run time declined by 80 percent. Ten Earl Energy generator systems are currently being used by the military around the world.
Now Moorehead and the rest of Earl Energy are working with defense contractors to incorporate the technology into products to be provided to the military. They are also developing new versions that run on natural gas and can be used in oil and gas prospecting. “We have ambitions that this technology could really change the way every single generator in the world operates,” Prueher says. “Not just the military.”
This is the first story in a series about former Navy SEALS who have gone on to serve the country in other fields, from business and government to social innovation and military affairs.
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Life After the Military: Helping Veterans With Their Second Act
In June 2012, just a bit over a year since a back injury forced him into retirement from the United States Army, former Staff Sergeant David Carrell found himself in an air-conditioned Yale University seminar room with eight other veterans, discussing Alexis de Tocqueville’s “Democracy in America” under the guidance of Professor Norma Thompson, director of undergraduate studies in the humanities department. It was a long way from the inside of a tank in Iraq.
Carrell, who had served in the Army for 12 years, was among the first veterans to participate in the Warrior-Scholar Project, an intensive summer program that aims to help soldiers transition from the battlefield to the college quad. During the project’s pilot week of 16-hour days on campus, the vets, who hailed from every service branch, attended academic seminars, untangled essay arguments with personal tutors, and participated in mealtime presentations on topics like emotional intelligence and campus leadership.
Carrell, then 30, was taking classes at Central Texas College, near Fort Hood, working toward an associate’s degree. During his four deployments to Iraq, Carrell had served as a tank commander, but back at home he acknowledged that his biggest fear was being outperformed in the classroom by 18-year-old freshmen.
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The Warrior-Scholar Project seeks to address such challenges in part by helping veterans recognize and harness the qualities they already possess — leadership, dedication and motivation, among others — to succeed as scholars and citizens. Veterans receive substantial financial benefits toward college, including the GI Bill and the Yellow Ribbon Program, but the U.S. military doesn’t have any college planning or counseling services built into its discharge operations. A program like the Warrior-Scholar Project not only encourages veterans to pursue a four-year academic experience, but it also tries to help them do well. There are currently no definitive statistics on veteran graduation rates, but one Department of Education estimate suggests that as few as 10 percent of veterans who entered college in the 2003-04 school year got their bachelor’s degree in six years, compared with 31 percent of nonveteran students. When student-veterans receive support from academic institutions, however, they tend to earn higher GPAs and are less likely to drop out than their traditional student peers.
Today, having obtained his associate’s degree from Central Texas, Carrell is a freshman at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, N.Y., where he plans to earn his bachelor’s degree. He is taking a writing-intensive course load, participates in a public speaking forum, and is considering pursuing a career in clinic psychology. He may even run for local political office. “By the end of the Warrior-Scholar Project, I felt like I could take on the world,” he says, with a laugh.
This is exactly the sort of bridge that the Warrior-Scholar Project hopes to build between the military and academia. “Our goal is not only that the veterans are going to go to respected universities, and complete university, but that they’re going to become leaders on campus and represent the veteran voice on campus,” says Jesse Reising, a second-year law student at Harvard University who dreamed up the program during his senior year at Yale.
Reising had planned to serve in the Marines after college, but a devastating tackle in the final quarter of his final game as a linebacker for the Yale football team left his right arm paralyzed. “I was searching for a way to serve those who would be serving in the military in my place,” he says.
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When Reising’s friend and the program co-founder, Nick Rugoff, introduced him to Chris Howell, a nine-year veteran of the Australian Army and a student at Yale, an idea jelled.
It was Howell’s younger brother, David, who had spurred his transition from the Army to university. Once Chris had set his sights on college, David, who was attending the University of Sydney at the time, sent him study advice and books packaged with brotherly tough love. Reising, Rugoff and Howell adapted the curriculum that David created and made it work for any U.S. military veteran hoping to embark on a college career. “There are so many challenges for veterans — academic, social, cultural, emotional challenges — in the transition from the military to college,” says Reising. “We launched the Warrior-Scholar Project with the idea that we were going to formalize the things that Chris did in order to successfully transition.”
The program, which has been expanded to two weeks, emphasizes reading and writing fundamentals, critical thinking and study techniques. Chris Howell, the executive director of the project, likens it to boot camp for its intensity — with five-page papers instead of push-ups. “When I rolled in there, I thought the professors were going to take it easy on us — but no, they were relentless!” says Jean Pierre Gordillo, a former Army convoy driver who attended the Warrior-Scholar Project in the summer of 2013.
The program also seeks to create an environment in which veterans feel understood, respected and empowered. Both Gordillo and Carrell emphasize the importance of the presence and perspective of fellow veterans like Howell, who have already made the transition to university and succeeded. In what Howell refers to as a “degreening seminar,” he and other veteran volunteers offer practical tips to help new students adapt to college life. You can’t swear in a seminar, for example. You can’t tell the same jokes you told in the military either. And you have to remember that you’ll be interacting mostly with 18-to-22-year-olds who, in all likelihood, have never witnessed combat and don’t know how to ask you about what you’ve seen.
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Before he arrived on campus for the program, Gordillo says he was most intimidated by the potential divide between the civilian student volunteers and the veterans. But built into the intensive academic work of the program was the occasional break — an afternoon on the beach, a backyard barbecue, a night on the porch of a Yale fraternity — that allowed his group to swap stories and ideas with current Yale students. “I left feeling I could share something of my military story, rather than being judged for it — and that that story gives me a unique perspective,” he says. Gordillo, who aspires to a career in U.S. foreign affairs, is now finishing his bachelor’s degree at Miami Dade College and recently submitted applications to master’s programs at eight selective universities.
Since 2012, every veteran who has completed the Warrior-Scholar Project and started college has stayed in college. Twenty-four Warrior-Scholars from the 2013 class are also currently in school or have plans to be enrolled by the fall of 2014. Last December, three more program graduates were accepted to Wesleyan University with financial help from the New York-based nonprofit Posse Foundation’s Veterans Program, which also provides Carrell with a scholarship to Vassar.
The Warrior-Scholar Project is now looking to scale up — but carefully. Its founders want to reach as many veterans as possible, while maintaining the support networks and one-on-one attention that have made the program so transformational. “There’s a saying in the special forces,” Howell says. “Slow is smooth, smooth is fast.”
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With that in mind, this summer the Warrior-Scholar Project team will work with veteran students at Harvard and the University of Michigan to run two additional weeklong pilot programs on those campuses. With every university that hosts the project, more veterans will be able to experience its empowering effect, says Jeffrey Brenzel, former dean of undergraduate admissions at Yale, who teaches philosophy seminars to Warrior-Scholar participants.
“Their sense of themselves changed over the course of the [program],” says Brenzel of the veterans he taught at Yale. “They could see themselves as active participants in their own education.”
This week, Carrell is in the midst of midterm exams, but he’s keeping his head high above water, thanks to Chris Howell’s late-night motivational phone calls and Dave Howell’s reminders that writing is a process, not an event. “Having the knowledge from the Warrior-Scholar Project is like having a reserve parachute,” he says.
Editors’ note: Since the original publication of this story, Jesse Reising, founder of the Warrior-Scholar Project, has become a NationSwell Council member.
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