Be Audacious

Last week I attended the Open Society Institute’s Annual Baltimore Fellows lunch to announce a new class of Fellows, awarding funding to social entrepreneurs in Baltimore creating innovative solutions to community problems. From educating children to rehabbing bicycles, the fellows are all doing amazing, inspirational work around Baltimore. While not local to Baltimore, Van Jones (the keynote speaker and last month’s guest editor of my favorite Baltimore mag, the Urbanite) continued the inspirational spirit with one of the more exciting speeches I’ve ever heard. An elderly man at the next table, who needed assistance just getting to his seat, literally pumped his fist at one point during Van’s speech and almost fell out of his chair. While I can’t do the speech justice, I’ll try to paraphrase from the notes I scribbled furiously in the truck after lunch.

First of all, Van Jones is an absolute rock star in the world of human rights, social justice, and environmental activism. Almost any award you can think of, he’s won—Reebok human rights, Ashoka fellowships, Rockefeller Foundation, etc etc. He founded the Ella Baker Center for Human Rights and has been working in Oakland for over 15 years. Being very familiar with the experience of receiving prestigious fellowships, he told the new OSI fellows that it can be the best and worst thing that ever happens to you—because now you’re expected to live up to all those plans you’ve been making and take on the challenging and scary work that needs to be done. He encouraged the fellows, and the rest of us in the room, to “be audacious”. Take the leap and go a little farther than others will or you think you can, and the community will be there to support you.

Van spoke about first starting out, when he and a few friends started an organization to fight against police brutality and improve police-community relations. Friends and family told them their idea was a little crazy, it might not work, and they should definitely not quit their “real” jobs. But they took the leap and literally worked in a closet (probably an ego-bruising experience for a brilliant Yale law school grad), and created a database logging information about instances of police brutality. Through collecting detailed information via their community hotline and rigorously mapping incidents, they found that close to 90% of the brutality cases were linked to ONE officer on the police force. But, just as they found the root of the problem and were ready to take action, they ran out of funding and faced the possibility of closing up shop. Van announced their predicament on the local radio station to let folks know the hotline would be temporarily closed, but they were planning to regroup and make a comeback. A few days later they received an anonymous $50,000 donation and a note that said “Keep going. Keep going.” And they did, and “three smart kids with heart in a closet” drastically reduced police brutality in the San Francisco PD.

Van shared a few other similarly amazing stories from his work, including halting construction of a massive youth “superjail” planned outside Oakland and feeling old watching the next generation of audacious youth leaders take over (“You can’t just launch a campaign! You have to have…have…meetings!).

His most recent work links environmentalism with social justice and poverty eradication, and he spoke with conviction about the power of a new green economy to lift marginalized communities into the middle class. The society that creates disposable products and throwaway resources is the same society that allows throwaway neighborhoods and throwaway children. You can not save the polar bears without also saving the poor, black children in this country! Who do you think will install all of these solar panels? Who will retrofit the old buildings to meet new environmental regulations? The green economy will require labor, and with training and education, a former McDonald’s fry cook could become an engineer earning union wages and meeting demand for new, clean sources of power.

I got chills sitting there listening to him, and I had to agree when he said that “a crisis is a terrible thing to waste.” I hope we can use this crisis as motivation to truly be audacious and not just stop climate change, but maybe tackle public education and poverty too.