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Doing Well by Doing Good
Giving / A weekly look at those who help
Tuesday, July 27, 1999
Home Edition
Section: Southern California Living
Page: E-1
Author and anti-poverty activist Bill Shore
believes profit-building principles are just what the nonprofit
sector needs.
By: MARY McNAMARA
Los Angeles TIMES STAFF WRITER
Jacob Marley summed it up pretty well. Or,
rather, his ghost did. When complimented by cringing former
partner Ebenezer Scrooge for being "a good man of business,"
Marley's ghost, jaw unhinged, wailed its rejoinder. "Business,"
he moaned, "mankind was my business. Their common welfare
was my business."
Bill Shore--author, social activist and
nonprofit guru--couldn't have said it better. Minus the unhinged
jaw. And the guilt. Marley's ghost, with its chain of money
boxes and eternal wanderings, was a bit of a downer. Bill
Shore is none of that. He believes business is good, profit
is good, and people are, basically, very good. He believes
people want to give, to share, and that it's just a matter
of letting them give and share their talents, including their
business acumen, as well as their possessions.
A friendly sort of guy, with a direct blue
gaze and a firm handshake, Shore is many things.
He is founder and executive director of
Share Our Strength, a Washington, D.C.-based anti-hunger,
anti-poverty organization, which organizes--among other things--the
annual Taste of the Nation, for which well-known chefs gather
in various cities, including Los Angeles, to serve up signature
dishes to premium-paying crowds.
At 43, he is an author of "The Revolutionary
Heart" (Riverhead Books), about the founding of Share
Our Strength, and more recently "The Cathedral Within:
Transforming Your Life by Giving Something Back" (Random
House).
And increasingly he is speaker and consultant,
called hither and yon for conferences and workshops by a philanthropic
community that is frantically trying to figure out how to
thrive in an economy where about the only thing growing faster
than the wealth is the nonprofit sector.
* * *
Shore's message is a bit more complicated
than that of Charles Dickens' creation, but they agree about
one thing: Helping others is the surest, straightest way to
helping yourself, and building a better world.
Marley came to this conclusion the hard
way--death and damnation. Shore's path was just a bit easier--presidential
campaign politics with Bob Kerrey and Gary Hart. In 1984,
while still working for Hart, he and his sister began Share
Our Strength. After Hart's campaign foundered, Shore turned
his full attention to solving the problem he believes should
be this nation's first priority: the unrelieved want in which
more than 35 million Americans, most of them children, live.
Shore and his organization, which has distributed
more than $50 million since its creation in 1984, operate
with the heretical belief that the future of the nonprofit
sector lies in the creation of wealth. Business ventures,
marketing partnerships, licensing agreements--these are the
terms Shore would have join, if not replace, the more traditional
lexicon of philanthropy.
"It used to be you graduated from business
school and you had to decide 'Do I want to help the public
sector or create wealth?' " Shore says. "I want
people to realize you can do both."
To make his point, he offers up the success
of Share Our Strength. Most of the money is the fruit of business
ventures--Taste of the Nation's sponsors include American
Express, Williams-Sonoma and Evian. The chefs also offer department-store
cooking demonstrations; Share Our Strength collects a portion
of the profits from the cookware sold. There are cookbooks
and endorsements, there's even a specific Taste of the Nation
Calphalonpot. Share Our Strength also organizes Writer's Harvest,
an ongoing literary benefit, and maintains other corporate
relationships.
But serving as an example is not enough
for Bill Shore. After his first book, "Revolution of
the Heart" told the world the story of the founding of
Share Our Strength, he became a much-sought-after speaker,
which brings him to L.A. about every six weeks.
A recent fete for his new book "The
Cathedral Within" was held at downtown's Cuidad by long-time
Share Our Strength friends and chefs Mary Sue Milliken and
Susan Feniger. Dee Dee Myers and Arianna Huffington were part
of the unusual assortment of folks chatting it up over empanadas
and margarita shooters. Emissaries from the fiefdoms of politics
and food and Hollywood and philanthropy, all heeding the same
counselor--Bill Shore.
"Out of all the organizations we know,"
says Milliken, addressing those gathered at Cuidad, "SOS
is special, because it treats nonprofit as for-profit."
"We can give back in a bigger way,"
interjects Feniger, "because they've found a way to make
profitable your skills. And those are easy to give because
that's what you love to do."
Part business pitch, part innovators' hit
parade, part parenting manual, "Cathedral" clings
to a central metaphor. A cathedral, Shore argues, is proof
of the power of faith and vision. Its creation required the
efforts of thousands--designers, artists, craftsmen, laborers--over
hundreds of years. And few who literally invested their lives
saw the finished product. A cathedral is a thing of beauty
with a communal purpose, and, Shore repeats: it was paid for,
for the most part, by the community. Those who seek to solve
the world's ills, he says, would do well to consider themselves
cathedral builders.
"We know how to handle many of our
problems--hunger, violence," he says to the crowd gathered
at Cuidad. "We have the solutions; we just need to make
them replicable, and sustainable."
"Unfortunately," he adds, "we
spend too much energy reinventing the solutions. It's as if
we were giving other [researchers] money and asking them to
come up with another vaccination for polio."
* * *
Much of the book is devoted to describing
some of the programs that have worked locally--the innovative
job-training program Chrysalis in Los Angeles, Chicago's Children's
Choir, CityYear in Boston--and pointing out how many of their
leaders came from the private, not nonprofit sector.
"There's a line in Bill's first book
that really spoke to me," says Maura Manus, a program
officer with the Ford Foundation. "It says, 'If your
vision is based on a need of your own, it will not fail, because
your need will not let it.' "
Until recently, Manus ran Chrysalis, the
L.A.-based nonprofit that helps the poor and homeless prepare
for, find and keep jobs. She appears in Shore's second book
as a near-perfect example of the antithesis of selling out.
A successful studio executive, Manus decided that sitting
on boards wasn't enough. Her personal need, coupled with well-earned
business sense, helped her make Chrysalis a success.
Shore's insistence that nonprofits need
the talents of the private sector--the MBAs and CPAs--is right
on, she says.
"Foundations are expecting more and
more of nonprofits," she says. "It's not enough
to do good. You have to handle the money you get well."
Manus, who met Shore a few years ago at
a conference, calls herself a big fan.
"Bill is on a mission," she says.
"His message is very singular, very focused. He's a certain
kind of hero to people, and we certainly need heroes."
"I think he's really on to something,"
says Myers, former press secretary to President Clinton, who
has worked with Shore in various capacities. "It's a
completely new approach to an age-old objective. It's hard
to have long-term income if you are dependent on grants and
donations, and it's hard to be on the other side, always being
asked to write a check. With things like Taste of the Nation,
everyone--the chefs, the restaurants, the cities, the donors--everyone
wins."
* * *
Like Shore, Myers believes that the rise
of social entrepreneurs is part of a larger trend, a redefinition
of leadership. In "Cathedral," Shore talks of a
switch toward "servant leadership," power emerging
from the ability to effect social change, rather than the
other way around.
"Young people especially seem to look
up to community leaders," Myers says, "and people
are beginning to look more toward nonprofits and schools for
leaders. This expands the number of ideas that are acceptable."
Shore concurs. If nothing else, he says,
he wants to change the way we think about giving.
"The real intersection between politics
and business is that both are about convincing people to do
something because it is in their best interest," he says.
"Nonprofits shy away from this. They urge you to give
so you won't feel guilty."
But sustainable success, he argues, means
helping people connect to their greatest passion, even if
that passion is making money.
"Creating wealth is fun," he says.
"But you can have that fun and fulfill your need to give
back at that same time. It's so simple."
Simply revolutionary.
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