We all struggle to find purpose and meaning in life. But few of us struggle for as long or as painfully as Raul Baez, the founder of WITO, Inc.
Baez founded the nonprofit, which is named after his late son, to teach inmates financial literacy and character development. The unique acronym stands for “We Innovatively Transform Ourselves.”
The idea came to Baez while he was in prison serving 12 years for a failed armed robbery. Before being imprisoned, he fell into a life of crime while heavily abusing drugs and reeling from the loss of his son, who was killed in the Bronx in 1993, the victim of drug violence.
About halfway through his sentence, Baez experienced a transformation. Walking through the prison yard with a fellow inmate, they heard a service going on in the nearby chapel and decided to go in for no other reason than to procure donuts and coffee. But upon entering, Baez had an experience that ultimately changed his life.
“I heard Matthew 11:28,” says Baez, “‘Come to me, all of you who are heavy at heart for I will give you rest. My burden is easy and my yoke is light.’ And the words just penetrated my heart.”
Baez found faith and slowly began to turn his life around. Over the course of two years, he quit abusing drugs — choosing instead to spend all of his free time reading, taking courses and learning everything he could about finance, real estate, personal budgeting and healthy habits. Eventually, he felt that God was asking him to assist others, so he began sharing his knowledge with his fellow inmates. In 2010, he was released from prison, and three years later, he officially launched WITO Inc. as a nonprofit, teaching inmates about the various subject matters he studied so intently while behind bars himself.
WITO is now present in six New York City correctional facilities. Since its conception, 140 inmates have graduated from the six-month program. So far, 43 percent of those have found jobs post-incarceration. But perhaps the biggest measure of WITO’s success is the recidivism rate for its graduates, which stands at 23 percent — compared to 67 percent for New York State as the whole.
Baez shows no plans of slowing down, describing his mentoring work as his calling.
“These men and women will never break out of this cycle,” says Baez, “if somebody didn’t take the initiative.”
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The Simple Way to Make Education More Accessible for Tens of Thousands of Americans
According to the Millennial Disruption Index, 71 percent of all millennials would rather go see their dentist than deal with their bank.
Not surprisingly, that’s “my favorite statistic,” says David Klein, CEO and cofounder of CommonBond, a graduate student loan refinancing company.
CommonBond has come a long way since its beginnings as a pilot program in 2012. At the time, Klein was a graduate student at Wharton Business School in Philadelphia, and like most of his peers, he was dealing with the labyrinthian student loan process to finance his education.
“The rates were unnecessarily high,” says Klein. “The process was unnecessarily complex and to kind of add insult to injury, the level of service that was provided throughout the process was quite poor.”
Klein teamed up with his classmates Michael Taormina and Jessup Shean to launch CommonBond, which saves its average borrower about $10,000 over the course of repayment.
CommonBond also provides a high level of customer service. The company periodically sends customized gifts to its borrowers and hosts borrower dinners in cities across the country where its clients can meet each other and the lending team. Klein says this seemingly novel approach to finance is actually a throwback to the way banking used to happen, when small-town Americans would have personal ties to their bankers. Soon, CommonBond wants to apply this approach to other financial needs, such as mortgages and personal loans.
Perhaps most important, though, is what CommonBond dubs its “social promise.” Partnering with the organization Pencils of Promise, which provides education to underserved students in developing countries, CommonBond funds a year of schooling for a needy child for every degree fully funded through its platform. In 2014, this meant $50,000 went to the nonprofit. In 2015, CommonBond expects to give up to $250,000.
Prudent business practices are important, but customer appreciation dinners, being responsive to borrowers’ needs and supporting education around the world demonstrate what CommonBond stands for. “Business can and should have a positive impact on social change,” says Klein.
How Putting One Foot in Front of the Other Is Saving the African-American Community
“One in two African-American girls born in the year 2000 will get diabetes if something doesn’t change,” says Morgan Dixon, co-founder of GirlTrek. “That’s absolutely not acceptable on our watch.”
Statistics like that, as well as sobering data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention reporting that 80 percent of African-American women are obese or clinically overweight, are what motivate Dixon.
Dixon speaks passionately about her family’s American story, from her mother being part of school desegregation in Oklahoma to her ancestors fighting in the Kentucky Regiment during the Civil War. She is the first in her family to graduate from college and found success that wouldn’t have been attainable without the sacrifices of those who came before her.
But something was still missing.
Through long conversations with her friend and eventual GirlTrek co-founder Vanessa Garrison, Dixon discovered that both she and Garrison had an unfulfilled sense of purpose. Specifically, they both wanted to give back to female African-American community.
So they started GirlTrek, an organization that was launched in 2010 to encourage black women to walk their way towards better health. Beyond the obvious physical benefits and community building, Dixon and Garrison cite African-American history as motivation, from the endless walking of Harriet Tubman along the Underground Railroad to the civil rights marches of 1965 in Selma and Montgomery, Alabama.
In March of this year, GirlTrek chartered 10 buses so 500 of its members could participate in the 50th anniversary of the Selma Bloody Sunday March. Wearing their “superhero blue” GirlTrek T-shirts, Dixon, Garrison and their sisters in health marched to honor the sacrifices their community had made before and the desire of African-American women to stand up for their health.
“Black women have prioritized the health and wellbeing of everyone else above themselves because they needed to do that,” explains Garrison. “It’s gotten us to this point, but it’s absolutely going to kill us.”
As of April 2015, GirlTrek had more than 29,000 members in 500 cities nationwide. Their goal? To reach 1 million by 2018. Dixon and Garrison see what they are doing as an extension of civil rights, and they say the time has come for African-American women to focus on themselves.
“We have an obligation,” says Dixon, “to just live our healthiest most fulfilled lives because so many people have walked so far for us to get to this moment.”
Morgan Dixon, co-founder of GirlTrek, is a NationSwell Council member.
A Big-Hearted Man and His Calling to Build Tiny Houses for Oakland’s Homeless
“Homeless people,” says Gregory Kloehn, an artist, plumber and construction contractor based in Oakland, Calif., “they’re not really seen… I don’t want to say as human but almost. I mean, they’re definitely [viewed] lower than second class citizens.”
To Kloehn, it’s odd that our society finds it acceptable to ignore the plight of those living on the street.
Several years ago, when Kloehn got an iPhone, he began taking pictures of the structures erected by the homeless of West Oakland, compiling the photos in the book “Homeless Architecture.” Through this work, he came to know his homeless neighbors as the unique people that they are.
But Kloehn’s fascination didn’t stop there. Inspired by the ingenuity of his homeless neighbors, he put his construction and artistic skills towards making homes with the materials they were sourcing, mostly illegally dumped items found on the streets of West Oakland. Mostly famously, he created a house out of a dumpster that garnered a lot of media attention.
“I really just ripped a page out of the homeless peoples’ book, their own game plan,” says Kloehn.
The first home — complete with wheels for mobility and a lock for safety — and a bottle of celebratory Champagne was given to a homeless couple Kloehn had come to know while taking photos. As he saw them wheel it down the street and live in it, he came to understood the value that a safe, dry place has to people who have fallen on hard times.
To date, Kloehn has built 35 miniature homes for the homeless in Oakland and San Francisco. All construction materials (except for the wheels and a few other odds and ends), are sourced from garbage. He also runs workshops and give lectures, teaching other artists and handypeople the tricks of the trade. Following his lead, other builders have made homes for their neighbors in Los Angeles, Tucson, Arizona, and even abroad.
“It’s really put me in tune with the homeless,” says Kloehn. “Now, I see them as people. I know their name, I know their story, I know where they come from, I feel comfortable going up, chatting with them, just hanging out as a person.”
Would You Be Willing to Give Up Everything to Help the Environment? This Man Has
Walter Fuller says each morning at his beachfront home is “heaven.” A painted sunrise spotlights the blue-white waves. A symphony of birds alight and sing. It’s a beauty that’s made Ormond Beach, a two-mile stretch in Ventura County a destination for surfers and fishermen from all over Southern California.
“Every morning, I’m waking up to a different sunrise,” Fuller says, of his routine. “Sometimes it’s cold, sometime’s its raining. But I’m right out in nature, and for me, it’s good.”
Fuller, now 60, doesn’t wake in a palatial villa by the seaside or even a cozy bungalow. From 2008 until last June, he lived in a steel shipping container, a unit crammed with field guides and notebooks that doubled as his office. If the beach looks heavenly today, it’s because Fuller has been its guardian angel for nearly two decades. After first seeing the beach in 1996, he couldn’t keep away. Each day, he works to transform it from an industrialized, crime-ridden dump into one of the last preserved wetlands on the Southern California coast.
“I knew [Fuller] was a completely volunteer person out here trying to protect the wetlands,” says Carmen Ramirez, the vice mayor of Oxnard, the nearby city of 200,000 wedged between two naval facilities. “We didn’t have … .enough protection for it, and he would come out here and talk to people and try to engage them about bird-watching, about not doing negative things on the beach that would hurt the environment,” she says. “More and more, he’s become a legend. We count on him.”
Born outside Phoenix and raised at his grandparent’s home in Ojai, Calif., Fuller says he’s always had an affinity for nature — in particular, for birds. His first pet was a parakeet named Whitey, who’d bop his head in time with Johnny Cash records. Other caged birds — a cockatoo, parrot and myna — remained fixtures at home until a high school science teacher assigned Fuller a report on eagles. He bought a pair of binoculars in 1972 and was instantly hooked; watching birds in the wild became his new obsession.
Today, if you ask Fuller what is favorite bird is, he’ll claim it’s the bald eagle, which he spotted at Ormond last year after a lifetime of waiting. Then he’ll rattle off a list of a couple more — the great blue heron, white crown sparrows, mallards, pretty much all of the egret family — before he gleefully admits, “Actually, I love all the birds.”
His passion for the flocks has been one of his most valuable contributions to Ormond Beach, a much needed bird habitat. The beach is home to the threatened western snowy plover, a nearly inconspicuous bird that pecks food from the shoreline and whose nests are often damaged by humans. It’s also a key stop along the Pacific Flyway, a north-south route that migratory birds follow in pursuit of food, breeding grounds or warmer climates. More than 200 species have been documented at the site, including the endangered California least tern.
Due to development along the coast, “these species now have been so confined, and there’s a limited numbers of places where they can breed,” David Pereksta, a local ornithologist who works for the federal Bureau of Ocean Energy Management, explains. Fuller’s presence helps “reinforce what the regulations are and keep an eye on these places,” he adds. “It’s not just putting up some signs and fences. It really needs a strong human presence to engage the public,” Pereksta says. “Without this active management, these birds are just not going to survive.”
Though Ormond now looks pristine, it’s hemmed in by the scars of industrialization. The Halaco scrap metal recycling plant was originally built on the city dump near the beach in the mid-1960s, but after the plant shuttered, the area was deemed a hazardous waste cleanup site by the federal government. Behind the dunes, the GenOn power plant’s tall smokestacks puff fumes into the sky. Nearby, there’s also a deepwater port to the north and a naval base to south at Point Mugu. Ironically, the factories and plants may have actually saved the beach over the long-term because they discouraged developers from putting up condos, boardwalks and marinas on the coastline.
“My vision for Ormond Beach is that it will be restored for the youngsters, that it will be turned over to them someday,” Fuller says. “I want to see my age group put it back together to what it used to be hundreds of years ago, so kids don’t have to go look up birds in a book that used to be out here and have gone extinct. You think of years past, the ivory-billed woodpecker, the passenger pigeon. They’ve all gone extinct because we didn’t take care of them. We didn’t watch them.”
Fuller began tending the beach back in the mid-1990s. He stumbled upon it while searching for a lunch spot before his afternoon maintenance work at Point Mugu began. At the time, the beach was a mess. People got wasted on booze and drugs, fired off guns and dumped trash and old furniture in the canal. Vandals canvased the parking lot for valuables. “You wouldn’t be safe walking your dog out here,” Fuller recalls. “You couldn’t walk down the pathway without worrying about stepping on glass.”
He soon spent nearly all his free time at the beach, watching the plovers scurrying in the surf or other rare birds in the dunes and informing visitors how to behave in the fragile ecosystem. Dogs off-leash or kids with pellet guns, for example, often spelled ruin for a nest.
When Fuller’s mother died, he started spending nights in his Ford Explorer parked at the beach. He took up an informal role as gatekeeper and caretaker. It was, after all, his home. Almost always dressed in a short-sleeved khaki shirt, Fuller kept one eye trained on the birds and another on the parked cars in the lot. Gradually, the beach’s clientele changed. Families and tourists showed up to see the sights, and new birds dropped in on the cleaner sands. Fuller takes notes on everything that arrives at the beach and guesses he now has at least 3,000 pages of observations. “It’s kind of about my life,” he says.
When the City of Oxnard found out about Fuller’s work, they gave him a cargo container to use as an office. Six years later, when they discovered it was also serving as Fuller’s home, they approved funds for a residential trailer. Their resolution also came with an official title and three-year contract to be “Steward of Ormond Beach.”
“This is all still in a wild state out here. Nothing has really touched it,” he says. “This is a jewel.”
Gun Violence Devastated This Man’s Family. He’s Determined to Not Let It Happen to Others
Since his childhood, Ian Johnstone has been unwittingly close to the issue of gun violence in America.
When Ian Johnstone was just 10 years old, his father was shot during a random robbery attempt in San Francisco. The perpetrators were a group of teenagers who had been using drugs; the 16-year-old shooter fired once into the elder Johnstone’s back, instantly paralyzing him. A week later, his dad died in the hospital from complications.
It goes without saying that Johnstone can personally attest to how the improper use of a firearm can devastate a family. He and his sister had to grow up without a father and their mother without the man “she had planned on spending the rest of her life with.”
“You can’t help but feel frustrated and jaded and powerless about the issue,” says Johnstone.
Those feelings returned to the forefront of his mind in late 2013 after the shooting at Sandy Hook Elementary in Newtown, Conn. While living in the San Francisco bay area and working in the tech industry, the idea of crowdfunding gun buyback programs came up while he was speaking with a group of friends. Instead of relying on funds from cities or grants, money raised to finance buybacks could come from private online donations — often from people in the very communities most affected by gun violence.
From this conversation, Gun By Gun was born. In less than two years, the organization has crowdsourced more than $80,000, using the money to collect more than 750 guns in four cities over the course of five campaigns.
Criticisms of gun buybacks stretch back to the 1960s when the programs first started being widely used. One of the strongest arguments against them was that they often collected inoperable firearms (certainly not the guns making America’s streets dangerous). To ensure that it only pays for working firearms, Gun By Gun, like most modern buyback programs, has a range specialist on hand at all their events.
Another criticism of these initiatives is that they only collect a small percentage of the guns out there in America (a number, which experts estimate to be anywhere between 270 million to 310 million). Johnstone acknowledges that the impact of Gun By Gun “may not be a drop in the bucket,” but cites the importance of letting communities affected by violence do something concrete together to address the problem.
Ultimately, Johnstone hopes Gun By Gun can be a catalyst for inspiring further action aimed at reducing gun violence. He points to the diversity of the people that the program has already brought together, from mothers who lost their children, to police officers and former criminals.
“Gun By Gun has been a way that I feel I can add meaning to the death of my father,” says Johnstone. “I’ve met so many people who have lost loved ones to gun violence and they want to do something which is, frankly, its part of the healing process.”
Meet the Hard-Working Veterans Offering a Safe Passage to Chicago Youth
“Veterans come from an environment,” says Eli Williamson, president of Leave No Veteran Behind (LNVB), “in which everyday they understand what their purpose is.” He continues: “When they come out of the military there’s this moment in which they say well, ‘what’s my new purpose?’”
Williamson asked himself this very question shortly after returning from a deployment to Iraq in 2004. His homecoming was met with the news that his student loans — which he used to pay for his college education before he went overseas — had come out of deferment. His friend and LNVB co-founder, Roy Sartin, was in the same situation. So the two army buddies from Chicago decided to write Oprah, in the hopes that the same charity that inspired her to give away cars might finance their student debt. When sharing their plans with other veterans, they discovered that student debt is a widespread burden for many returning servicemen and women.
Eventually they settled on a simple plan. “What if we were to raise dollars,” says Williamson, “apply those dollars directly to the veteran’s student loan account, and then require that veteran to give back 100 to 400 hours of community service once that debt has been paid?” From this idea, the nonprofit was formed.
Hakki Gurkan, a Chicago police officer and a veteran of Iraq and Afghanistan, accessed it for student loan assistance in 2011. His mother’s cancer had recently come out of remission, his father had been through hip replacement surgery, and Gurkan struggled to financially provide for both of them. After his loans were paid, Gurkan’s service project created LNVB’s most visible program: Safe Passage.
In response to the widespread violence among youth in parts of Chicago, LNVB approached the Chicago school system to see if veterans could help. Tipped off about repeated violent incidents on the corner of 35th and Martin Luther King Drive, LNVB deployed 20 veterans to the location to stand guard, positively engage with youth and maintain the peace. Several weeks of calm led to expansion, and now, more than 400 veterans have participated in the Safe Passage program, positioned at several hot spots for crime in tough Chicago neighborhoods. On any given school day, about 130 veterans patrol the streets. As a result, the Chicago police has seen a significant decline in violence in the communities served.
Coming from all walks of life, the service members are paid $10 an hour and work during the times that students are traveling to and from school. That important off-time between shifts gives veterans the hours they need to search for jobs and to attend interviews. LNVB also provides its workers resume assistance.
Williamson and Sartin see the skills of returning veterans as a largely untapped resource. And part of that skill set is a sense of mission, whether applied to an operation overseas or a local effort to keep America’s youth safe.
Says Williamson, “Our ability to come back as veterans and be useful to people other than ourselves is critical.”
The Prescription for a Healthy Life: A Helpful Neighbor
In 2013, the New York City Health Department declared a diabetes epidemic in the city. The number of people who had contracted the disease had more than doubled in a decade. Part of the problem, they stressed, was a lack of information about the disease, noting that about a third of adults who had diabetes were unaware of it.
That same year, Manmeet Kaur founded City Health Works, a nonprofit based in East Harlem, which she hoped could provide a unique messenger to deliver this information to patients: their neighbors. City Health Works hired and trained six men and women from the neighborhood as health coaches. They meet one-on-one with more than 200 patients in East Harlem who have or are at risk of chronic diseases and conditions, like diabetes, to provide information and assist them in changing their habits.
Kaur says that City Health Works has reduced blood sugar levels for its diabetic patients by more than 1 point, on average, in its first year.
The Award-Winning Program That’s Kept 1,000 Kids Off Houston Streets
Getting kids into college isn’t the point at Workshop Houston.
“It’s hard to tell an 11-year-old who does not have any family members or friends that have gone to college, that it’s important to go to college eight years from now,” says Reginald Hatter, co-director of Workshop Houston, an after school program that runs out of a renovated house in Houston’s impoverished Third Ward. “We give them the tools and the resources that they can actually use today, and then when they get to the time to make the decision, they will say, ‘Not only do I want to go to college, I actually feel like I’m prepared.'”
Workshop Houston provides this assistance through four classes, or “shops” as it refers to them. The Beat Shop teaches kids how to make music, and the Chopper Shop helps them modify their bicycles to look like badass motorcycles. During Style Shop, students design and make clothes, and in the Scholar Shop — the only mandatory class — they receive lessons on a number of topics and homework assistance. The program, which has been running for more than a decade, has helped approximately 1,000 students in a neighborhood where extracurricular activities are sparse and one in four families live below the poverty line.
Hatter wasn’t around when four college friends decided to open the bike shop. He came along four years later, in 2007, after spending six months tutoring kids for state efficiency tests at a public school on the other side of town. “There was something about what was happening [at Workshop Houston] it was different, it was unique,” explains Hatter, who was yearning for more freedom in the classroom. He received an offer to run the program’s Scholar Shop, but along with it came a significant reduction in salary. To help make up for the low pay, he also received housing — a single room — in the abandoned home behind the school. It wasn’t exactly a strong selling point, but it was enough to convince him to break his lease and take the job. Hatter bathed in the school’s sink and ran an extension chord through the window, attaching it to a small air conditioner. “I didn’t have no bathroom, I didn’t have nothing,” says Hatter, who lived there during his first six months on the job.
Three years later, Hatter was promoted to co-director of the program and remains in that position today. Under his leadership, he replaced volunteer instructors with paid professionals, like Bass Heavy, a New Orleans-based bass player. Heavy, a music producer who has worked with artists such as Mannie Fresh and Juvenile, now runs the Beat Shop.
After 12 years, Workshop Houston continues to grow and receive attention. A few months ago, the organization received a National Arts and Humanities Youth Program Award; part of the winnings included the opportunity to perform at the White House. This year, the organization is partnering with Berklee College of Music to help further participants’ music education. Hatter doesn’t just see the program expanding in the Third Ward; he also believes it is a model to be implemented in other underserved neighborhoods across the country.
“I would love to have Workshop Dallas, Workshop Los Angeles, Workshop New York. There’s not even a doubt in my mind, its going to happen.”
Meet the Harlem Native Who Is on a Mission to End Poverty in America
“Government is not ‘a system’,” says Elisabeth Mason, co-founder of Single Stop, USA. “It’s lots of systems. And what we care about are the people.”
The East Harlem headquarters of Single Stop, the nonprofit that Mason helped establish seven years ago, invites at-risk Americans from all walks of life to pay a visit. There, representatives demystify the labyrinthine process of accessing aid — quickly determining which public benefits and safety-net programs (from local to federal) their low-income clients may qualify for. And depending upon eligibility and needs, they may be connected to private charitable organizations, too. Through coordination of disparate programs, the organization aims to stabilize individuals and families, eventually lifting them out of poverty and into the middle class.
Mason has spent practically her entire life in East Harlem. Her father, a teacher and playwright and her mother, a social worker, were theater lovers of limited means and wanted to find an affordable way to live in Manhattan. Shortly after the 1968 riots, when Mason was a baby, the family moved into a dilapidated row house that they purchased for $6,000.
Mason’s parents were educated, giving her opportunities unavailable to most of her neighbors. Winning a scholarship to a top-notch Manhattan prep school, Mason’s childhood was divided between playing with her Harlem friends and attending school with, as she puts it, “millionaires’ and billionaires’ children.”
“This is a great blessing,” says Mason, speaking of her divergent childhood experiences, “when you want to do something around economic inequality because it means that you can understand all sides of the puzzle and you know how to talk to different people about that puzzle. But as a child, certainly, you feel at one time like you fit in everywhere and you fit in nowhere.”
While finding her way in the world after high school, Mason continued to rub shoulders with the elite and underprivileged alike, studying at Columbia and Harvard and working for six years in Central America, assisting street children. Her deep connection to East Harlem remained, however, and she returned, settling with a family of her own in a house two doors down from her childhood home.
Co-founding Single Stop is her way of addressing poverty in America — something she has witnessed her entire life. Annually, the U.S. allocates about $750 billion on a variety of safety-net programs, but many low–income Americans are unaware of what they are eligible for or don’t have the time or resources to jump through the hoops to apply for different programs.
Single Stop has expanded rapidly, existing at more than 113 locations (many at community colleges, since they already serve large low-income populations) in eight states. According to its website, Single Stop’s efforts have helped 1 million households access about $3 billion worth of existing benefits.
But Mason wants to do more, faster. Single Stop is currently developing software that will allow clients to screen themselves for benefits they might qualify for. This won’t eliminate the need for the human interaction that will still be available at every Single Stop location, but it should vastly expand the service’s reach.
“We never solve anything in society by talking about how hard it is to do or that it’s impossible,” says Mason. “Do I think alone we can end poverty in America?” she continues. “Probably not. Do I think with what we are doing we could actually significantly reduce it? Yeah.”
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