The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World (25 page)

I feared going to bed that night. After working until I could no longer keep my eyes open, I fell into a deep sleep. At about 3:00 a.m., the sound of a security alarm jolted me out of bed. I flew instinctively out of my room and banged loudly on Dan's door. Together we entered the living room to find that his stereo and CDs, his television, some furniture, and my computer had all been stolen. Most likely, the same men who'd attacked me on the beach had followed me and returned to rob us. Because they must have spent quite some time inside the house, it was likely that the guards had been paid off.

We spent the rest of the night in a sleepy police station recording everything that had been taken, though we knew we'd never see any of it again. Dan immediately fired the guards and later the same day hired armed guards from the country's best security firm-a good thing, because two nights later the robbers returned and cut a hole in the outside gate, though they never got close to the house.

In a week's time, I completed my report and got a ride into town to buy Fantas and cakes for the gardener and cleaner at Dan's house; they had both been so good to me. The driver from UNICEF dropped me back at the house with my goodies, and it was only after he'd left me there that I realized I'd forgotten my wallet and passport at one of the stores where I'd gone shopping. Not believing how careless I'd been, I fell into a frustrated, furious feeling of panic. I was ready to go home. Memories of the previous week's violence reemerged. With no phone at Dan's and no car of my own, I had few options but to wait for Dan to finish work, though I knew the longer I waited, the more I'd increase the chances of losing my things and, with them, my lifeline home.

The gardener and I started walking and knocking on the doors of houses in the area, one by one, asking each person if he or she had a phone we could borrow. Finally, we found a lovely couple who agreed to drive me to the stores. By now, several hours had passed. My heart was racing as I flew from store to store, stopping finally at the bakery, where a smiling woman handed me my wallet and passport, telling me she'd wondered what had taken me so long to retrieve it. I gave her a big hug and a tip and bought another cake, laughing that she'd reinforced my belief in human nature.

AFTER RETURNING TO NEW YORK the next day,Iresumedmy work at the Rockefeller Foundation, focusing on the Philanthropy Workshop, meeting incredible people who wanted to change the world, learning from the foundation's history. It was clear that the course needed to explore what didn't work with traditional aid and charity, as well as find successful exam pies, especially in Africa. Seeing the program's poor results in Tanzania had demonstrated how failure reinforces low expectations. Many of the women I met had shrugged sheepishly when I asked about their businesses, as if they themselves had never believed they would succeed in the first place.

Africa-like all communities large and small-needs success stories. Programs like the one I'd reviewed in Tanzania would do a greater service by focusing on a few things and doing them well. A pilot once told me that if you shoot for the moon, you'll have a better chance of clearing the trees. Programs serving the poor needed to do a better job of giving people the chance to aim high and believe in themselves-and of holding them accountable for reaching their goals.

One spring morning in April 1994, while riding the subway to work at the Rockefeller Foundation, I glanced at the front page of the New York Times and froze at the sight of the headlines about massacres in Rwanda. Among strangers on the train, I quietly shed tears of sadness, though I'd no notion of how bad things would become. I feared for the people I knew and for the country at large. For a tiny African country to make the front page of the US news, something terrible must be happening.

With each passing week, the news from Rwanda worsened: People were killing each other with machetes, studded clubs, with anything they could find. Longtime neighbors murdered one another; in some cases, fathers and mothers killed their own children. Though the stories seemed inhuman, impossible, we'd heard these tales before, in Germany and in Cambodia. On television I watched foreigners line up to board planes, leaving terrified Rwandans behind to face unknown fates. The memory of the Rwandan woman who'd told me that expatriates come and never stay haunted me-it still does. I wondered what I would have done if I had been there and felt ashamed that I wasn't sure of the answer.

My dreams filled with images of dead bodies, of being trapped beneath them, screaming to be heard. Inevitably, I would awake shaking like a leaf in a storm. As I struggled to comprehend these horrors, I realized that I didn't even know whether many of the women with whom I'd worked were Hutu or Tutsi.

I wrote the following on April 14, 1994, 8 days after the plane carrying the presidents of Rwanda and Burundi was shot down, unleashing the genocide:

Rwanda is exploding in an anarchical bloodbath of rampant, wanton killing. More than 20,000 lie dead, most of them murdered by machetes and spears. The killers see the eyes, hear the screams, feel the metal pushing through bone and marrow and sinew. In a town like Kigali, the killers know their victims. They have seen them in the street, said hello to them in the marketplace, exchanged pleasantries. Killers are related to their victims-husbands killing wives, brothers killing sisters. And the women are killing, too. I don't know how to think about the carnage in the city I knew so well-or at least I thought I did.

My friends ash my opinion, pushing me on why we should even be involved in countries "who refuse to move into the 20th century, let alone the 21st." All of your work, what has happened to it, they ash. I don't have a good answer for them, only that I know we could have avoided this if we'd paid more attention.

If only we had listened.

On the first day of the genocide, the army captured 10 "Blue Helmets," UN peacekeepers who were armed but not allowed to use their weapons. The Rwandan army castrated, mutilated, and killed the boy soldiers, showing the entire world their viciousness. The Hutu Power government of Rwanda understood that after the horrors of Somalia, the United States and Europe would be stopped dead in their tracks by images of 10 maimed blue-eyed blonds. As is so often the case, the supposedly insignificant understood the psychology of the strong, while the strong didn't have a clue about the other.

Had the West retaliated powerfully, immediately, and deliberately, even killing a few warriors early in the conflict, hundreds of thousands of lives might have been saved. Instead, bureaucrats argued endlessly until, in a country of 8 million, 800,000 were killed in 100 days. In some areas of Rwanda, 75 percent of Tutsis were massacred. Only near the end did the US government concede that this was not war, but genocide. By then, it was too late.

After the genocide ended in July, I wanted to work in the refugee camps, where I'd learned that Liliane and Prudence were living. Dan had been transferred from Tanzania to Rwanda to lead UNICEF's efforts at reconstruction, and I knew he would have hired me had I wanted to return. My mother and I argued fiercely about whether or not I should go. She felt strongly that I should focus on my best use, while I thought the notion of "best use" was arrogant in the face of an emergency. She said I'd made a commitment at the Rockefeller Foundation to run the Philanthropy Workshop and needed to honor it, emphasizing that what had happened in Rwanda should inspire me to be smarter in my thinking-and action-about solving problems of poverty. She argued that we all have different ways of using ourselves, and mine was needed for the longer-term view. I finally agreed not to go, though to this day I wonder if I made the right call.

It was against the backdrop of the horror of genocide that I now concentrated on understanding the potential of philanthropy to effect change in the world. Rwanda would always remind me of how serious the work of change is, how we have to build accountability into all aspects of development-and of philanthropy-and how the world really is interconnected. I would feel ashamed when I would hear people say "never again" in the media, feeling that these words were empty unless we helped build a stronger world economy in which all people could feel they had a vested interest in society.

Had the majority of Rwandans believed that they could change their lives through their own efforts and earn enough income to send their children to school, provide for their health, and plan for the future, it would have been much more difficult for morally corrupt politicians to instill a fear so deep it led to genocide. Private initiative and innovation driven by philanthropy were, I believed, our best hope for finding those ways to give the poor the opportunities they deserved.

In the years I oversaw the Philanthropy Workshop, I met wonderful people who would become colleagues and friends at a time when philanthropy was undergoing rapid change-moving from being dominated by a few older foundations to a flourishing sector driven by innovative individuals who had earned significant wealth and wanted both more involvement and more accountability in their charitable work. Ultimately, some of the workshop members would work with me in creating and building Acumen Fund, bringing their own creativity and networks to a shared endeavor to change the world.

While I was transitioning the Philanthropy Workshop to new leadership, the president of the Rockefeller Foundation, Peter Goldmark, and his able, elegant senior vice president, Angela Glover Blackwell, approached me to take on a new challenge. The Los Angeles riots had revealed America's fault lines of race, ideology, and class, which were growing in the 1990s. Angela and Peter worried that America needed to revitalize itself as an increasingly diverse democracy in a global society.

Angela spoke to me of "minoritarian leadership": "America needs leaders who are comfortable with diversity," she said. "The country itself is changing demographically, and we have a chance to play a different kind of leadership role in the world. I believe that women and people of color might have an advantage in leading diversity because they've been outsiders by definition."

I agreed with Angela, but wanted to learn more about the term "minority leadership." She answered, "Individuals in the dominant group assume that the rules work because they've always seemed fair to them. On the other hand, people who view themselves as outsiders have had to learn to navigate the dominant culture in order to be successful. Becoming attuned to how others function and make decisions is a critical skill set we need to inculcate in our next generation of leaders."

I thought of Rwanda again, of how the tiny country understood the psychology of the West and acted on it by castrating the Belgian UN soldiers. The leaders of Rwanda knew that the killing would unnerve the United States, especially given the public's response to US soldiers being dragged through the streets of Mogadishu, Somalia, months earlier. For its part, the West had paid no heed to Rwandan culture. Intuitively, I understood what Angela was talking about, but I wasn't sure how to implement it.

Peter and Angela asked me to create a program to identify, link, educate, and inspire extraordinary young American leaders who represented diversity across boundaries of class, race, religion, and ideology. The program should be part-time, they said, and it should be transformative. Rockefeller would provide a budget, and I was to lead a team and make it happen. I felt flattered that they'd thought of me to do this, but also sure they'd found exactly the wrong person. What did I really know about leadership? I asked them.

Wearing a black turtleneck and skirt that made her appear even more regal than usual, Angela smiled and told me that of course I knew something about leadership. "The issue is the new kind of leadership we need. You know how to listen. To do what you've done, you know what it means to collaborate across lines of difference and to be unafraid to take on big challenges. What you don't know intuitively, you will learn. The world needs this new program. We'll help you. Just say yes."

John Gardner told me that when you are young, sometimes the most important thing you can do is find the best leaders and follow them. Here were two individuals I admired deeply. Even though I couldn't see fully what I would be creating, I accepted on faith-and never looked back.

Angela helped me build a diverse team that included Jessie King, an Outward Bound instructor, and Rockefeller colleagues. I worked closely with Lisa Sullivan, a grassroots organizer who had worked with Marian Wright Edelman, founder of the Children's Defense Fund. An American original by all accounts, Lisa was brilliant and powerful, with a political science degree from Yale. She was also black, gay, and built like a truck driver. She always wore mascara and dainty earrings and could beat any kid in the hood in a game of pool while simultaneously winning him over to her side. I'd never met anyone like her.

At our first meeting, we eyed one another warily as we discussed our goals for the program and how to achieve them. We surprised ourselves by agreeing on the basics: The program would be action oriented; focus on solving problems, not just discussing them; and include reading and reflection. Two of my great privileges had been to serve as a teaching fellow at Harvard with the reknowned child psychologist Robert Coles, and to participate in an executive program at the Aspen Institute. Both experiences had taught me the power of using literature and great philosophical and political works as springboards into conversations about values and principles. I agreed with Plato that our world needs philosopher-kings and felt it was critical to combine action and reflection in building future leaders.

From hundreds of nominations, each year our team selected a group of 24 activist-leaders from all walks of life: community organizers, human rights activists, social entrepreneurs, even a fighter pilot with the US Marines. Each one was extraordinary in his or her own right. I loved knowing Rita Bright, a tall, thin, formidable African American community leader from Washington, DC. One of 10 children, Rita had lost a number of siblings to drugs and alcohol. She understood the low-income neighborhoods of Washington, earned the respect of the young men there, and made miracles happen on a regular basis. Once, she convinced the mothers in one of the most dangerous neighborhoods in DC to stand on the street corners where their sons dealt drugs in order to shame their boys into going home with them. She also started a community laundromat, believing fervently in the power of enterprise and the philosophy that God helps those who help themselves.