Larry M. Rosen

President & CEO

“In the end, there really is no ‘us’ and ‘them,’ only us. Throughout human history, that’s all there’s ever been. Us..”

                  --  Father Greg Boyle, SJ, Homeboy Industries

                      Accepting the 2010 Brotherhood Award

                      At the YMCA’s 39th Annual Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. Brotherhood Breakfast

Father Greg has a gift for reminding us of our common humanity and washing away the artificial distinctions we tend to make between ourselves and other people. We honored him for founding Homeboy Industries – a collection of serious business enterprises staffed and operated by former gang members in East Los Angeles – and for lovingly standing alongside young men and women for the last 20-some years that most of us would cross the street to avoid. Homeboy Industries (H.I.), a non-profit economic development corporation employing thousands of otherwise unemployable young people, has become a national model of what works in freeing kids from the tyranny of gang culture. It’s estimated that L.A. has 1,100 known gangs: former members of more than half of those gangs have found a way out through Homeboy Industries. Starting with a bakery, H.I. now includes Homeboy Silkscreen, Homeboy Maintenance, Homeboy/Homegirl Merchandise and Homegirl Café. Father Greg has configured these businesses to provide these kids “true opportunities, in an unconditional community.” Besides the training to work in and run a company, H.I. offers peer counseling, legal services, mental health counseling, and (NBA players take note) tattoo removal. It also offers hope, by the barrel full.

We also honored Connie Rice and Molly Munger with the YMCA’s Human Dignity Award, celebrating them on the tenth anniversary of their founding of The Advancement Project, a non-profit advocacy/social action organization with the mission “to develop, encourage, and widely disseminate innovative ideas, and pioneer models that inspire and mobilize a broad national racial justice movement to achieve universal opportunity and a just democracy.” As you can tell from a mission statement like that, Connie and Molly don’t cotton to small goals. With their law partner, Molly’s husband Steve English, they have proven equal to their grand ambitions. Using all the tools of education, advocacy, influence, litigation, public policy, inspirational flourishes, bullying and pleading, Connie and Molly have played a major role in scores of Big Time Social Problems in this city, including helping the L.A. Unified School District build 80 new schools. They have drawn together community partners from hundreds of organizations and created L.A.’s first comprehensive web-based “asset map,” describing the location, contact information and services of virtually every public and private social service organization in the county. They refer to themselves as “recovering civil rights attorneys,” but what they are is a powerful force for good.

Since the Brotherhood and Human Dignity Awards were first presented in 1975, the YMCA has presented them to only 110 individuals. It’s a special honor, meant to call attention to people who have put the vision of Dr. King on the street. Father Greg, Connie Rice and Molly Munger bring honor to the award.

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Antonia Hernandez, CEO of the California Community Foundation and herself a 1991 recipient of the YMCA’s Human Dignity Award for her work with the Mexican American Legal Defense and Education Fund, keynoted this year’s breakfast. She opened her remarks by observing that by honoring Father Greg, Connie, and Molly, the YMCA had reunited her with her three favorite “fellow troublemakers.” That made us very proud – we need more of the kind of trouble these four are making.

Raised in East Los Angeles after immigrating from Mexico at the age of 8, Antonia attended public schools, earned her law degree from UCLA and rose to become staff counsel to the U.S. Senate Committee on the Judiciary. Blessed with brains, ability and a no-limits future, Antonia’s compassionate heart chose a return to Los Angeles to do good work in one of the largest, most diverse and messiest urban communities in the history of the world. She looks at Los Angeles and she sees hope, progress and promise. She sees the world here, sharing the same lunch counter, and she imagines, as many of us have, that if we can promote tolerance, understanding and kinship in Los Angeles, we’ll have a demonstration project from which the whole world can take a lesson. She has lived the struggles and inequities: she knows we have far to go…but what she sees most clearly is the reason to believe we’ll get there, get to what Dr. King referred to as the Beloved Community. “…the end is reconciliation; the end is redemption; the end is the creation of the Beloved Community.”

If you were there, you were inspired and left knowing that this was an event worth attending. If you weren’t, I’m sorry you missed it. We’ll do it again next year.

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It may be hard to believe that people not only read this silly newsletter, but many remember what they read here and even have their favorites. I’ve been asked to reprise a piece I did almost 5 years ago on the soul of charity…and the hierarchy of “worthy” gifts.

In light of the latest heartbreaking examples of human suffering in Haiti, in consideration of those in our own community whose safety nets are naught but gossamer, and in view of the ever widening gap between rich and poor in our own nation, I agree that it may be time to revisit these thoughts.

Americans always have a choice when they are asked to confront the harsh, unyielding realities of those that Dr. King observed living “…on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity.”

• We can choose to ignore the problems that have persisted across generations and expect the poor, uneducated, disabled, mentally ill, homeless, elderly and marginalized among us to do a better job of solving their own problems. This has always worked for a tiny fraction of the problems in our communities, but you’d have to be a regular customer at one of those Medical Marijuana Clinics to believe that this could be a societal solution. Clawing your way out of poverty while earning a minimum wage and putting yourself through college at night after your day job cleaning hotel rooms is something that enough people have managed to do to sustain the myth that everyone can do it, but this is a hard race to run without shoes.

• We can ask our government to step in and mop up the mess. This has always worked at one level, but  Americans generally find this distasteful. We ask the government to do the work, and the image we can’t get out of our minds is trying to get anyone at a County office to answer the damn phone. Besides, the government taxes us to pay for the stuff and we hate that.

• We can think like Father Greg and see our greater community, not as those people and us, but just us. This has always worked at one level and is, in fact, the solution proposed in the teachings of all the major religions. It doesn’t work for every problem – the need for prisons, for example – and it requires an attitude of personal sacrifice and joyful sharing, but communities that embrace it tend to surprise themselves with how much better things become. I know the YMCA saves the community tons of trouble and lots of money in the form of kids who don’t get in trouble in the first place and people who are too healthy to be sick all the time; the only problem with the YMCA is there isn’t enough of it to go around in the communities that need it the most.

Americans, the most generous people on earth, give about $300 billion annually to charities and their churches. The churches get about half of this total, leaving community work, education, the arts, international causes and the like to divide the rest. This generous total is far, far short of the tithing we’re all capable of and it’s probably less than 1/3 of what’s needed to really change the odds in most communities, but it’s a promising start.

What we should all know by now, however, is if we won’t step up as members of the community to tackle these issues, the government will do it for us. We will complain about tripping over panhandlers and seeing poor people clogging our emergency rooms until one of our politicians feels the heat and gets a bill passed. Then we’ll be taxed for it and we hate that.

Anyway, here are those thoughts from 5 years ago. I stand by every word.

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“He who wishes to secure the good of others has already secured his own.”

Confucius (551-479 B.C.)

“Do good with what thou hast, or it will do thee no good.”

William Penn (1644-1718)

“The heart of the giver makes the gift dear and precious.”

Martin Luther (1483-1546)

“Wealth and children are the adornment of this present life: but good works, which are lasting, are better in the sight of thy Lord as to recompense and better as to hope.”

The Koran, 18:46

“And when ye reap the harvest of your land, thou shalt not wholly reap the corners of thy field, neither shalt thou gather the gleanings of thy harvest.

“And thou shalt not glean thy vineyard, neither shalt thou gather every grape of thy vineyard; thou shalt leave them for the poor and the stranger.”

The Bible, Leviticus, 19:9-10

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Most of you didn’t have the opportunity to spend 10 hours a week for 6 long years in Hebrew school while all of your friends were out playing baseball and riding their bikes to the beach, so here’s what you missed – not counting the ability to pronounce the “ch” sound (as in chutzpah and Chanukah) properly and without spitting.

Jewish teachings, as with those of all the great religions and philosophers, are filled with lessons about charity. The lessons were necessary, it was learned, because no child emerges from the womb writing checks: charity is not natural to the human condition – it must be taught, practiced and learned. Jews didn’t invent charity, by any means, but they did articulate it, codify it and deliver it with a ribbon on it to Western civilization, including Christianity and Islam.

It was a Catholic, actually, who asked me to write about this subject. Bill Mortensen, a director of the Metropolitan Board and one of the most generous men I know, is a student of charitable acts and he thought you’d be interested. Here goes.

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Jews believe that the giving of charity is one of the highest forms of piety and righteousness. The Hebrew word for it – tzedakah – combines the meaning of righteousness and justice. In the whole of Jewish teachings, the answer to the fratricidal Cain’s rhetorical and hypocritical evasion, “Am I my brother’s keeper?” is an emphatic “Yes!” Talmudic interpretations of biblical text even go so far as to point out that instructions are not written so much about “care of the poor” as they are about care for “thy brother,” stressing the familial equality of the needs of all who share God’s earth and bounty.

Not all acts of charity are considered equal in the eyes of God, however. As author Nathan Ausubel observes in A Treasury of Jewish Folklore, “charity must come from the heart as well as from the pocket. The unwilling giver, or the one who gives ostentatiously, forfeits his heavenly reward.”

The legendary rabbi and philosopher, Maimonides (1135-1204), conceived “The Golden Ladder of Charity” to distinguish the relative merits of forms of charity, using the intentions of the donor to segregate the lowest from the highest. Maimonides says there are eight steps (or levels of worthiness) in the duty of charity (from lowest to highest):

1. To give, but with reluctance and regret – a gift of the hand, not the heart.

2. To give cheerfully, but not in proportion to the distress of the sufferer (or the magnitude of the need).

3. To give cheerfully and proportionately, but not until asked to do so.

4. To give cheerfully, proportionately and without being asked, but “to put it in the hand of the poor man, eliciting the pain of shame.”

5. To give in such a way that the beneficiaries know their benefactor, but the benefactor will not know those he helps.

6. To give knowing the objects of the gift and their need, but remaining unknown to the beneficiaries.

The two highest mitzvahs or blessings are reserved for the forms of giving on the last steps of the Golden Ladder:

7. To bestow charity in such a way that the donor may not know the relieved persons, nor they the name of the benefactor.

8. The most meritorious of all, to anticipate charity by preventing poverty – the gifts of capacity, access, opportunity, equality, justice and freedom from want.

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Be well,

Larry