Transcriber: Lane Etheridge Reviewer: Nauka N. Prasadini
I hate poverty.
That doesn’t make me special. Everyone hates poverty, right?
On the ever-shrinking list of things that we can actually agree on as Americans,
that’s got to be right up there.
We love Morgan Freeman. We hate poverty.
Everything else up for debate.
I was recently asked to define what it is that I actually do.
I replied by saying I’m a poverty abolitionist.
That’s what drives me.
I think it’s completely senseless,
that we have so much poverty in a country as wealthy as we are.
From 2008 to 2014, I was chairman of the board
of the largest homeless aid agency in Chicago.
We did so much good at that organization,
but it was never quite enough to thwart
the downward spiral of poverty that our individuals suffered from.
That's when I decided that I needed to make a philanthropic pivot.
I need to figure out a way to stop poverty dead in its tracks.
I need to get to people before they became homeless or helpless or impoverished.
It was about that time,
that I heard a vignette on NPR,
about a first of its kind, college scholarship program
in Kalamazoo, Michigan, called the Kalamazoo Promise.
First of its kind because it was the first ever to guarantee college access
for students from a specific geography.
So if you go to one of the three public high schools in Kalamazoo, Michigan,
and if you do the work, you go to college for free.
And a light flipped on for me.
This program didn’t just fun deducational access.
This program manufactured hope.
Kalamazoo, Michigan, is a city on the western shore,
about 73,000 people.
It is produced thousands of college graduates over the last decade,
that would not have gone to college without the intervention
of the Kalamazoo Promise program.
There's not a lot going on in Kalamazoo,
but the Kalamazoo Promise has got it going on.
The society has changed.
The ecosystem has changed, just because of this one factor.
Public school enrollment has doubled from its trough.
There are very, very few public school systems in this country that are growing.
High school graduation rates are up 35%,
and most notably, poverty is declining five times faster
than the national average.
So with the inspiration of the Kalamazoo Promise,
I decided that I was going to start educational access programs
in my hometowns: Toledo, Ohio, where I grew up,
and Chicago, where I have lived for the last 20 years.
Those programs are called Hope Toledo and Hope Chicago,
and we send thousands of students to college or trade school for free.
Now, we do one thing a little bit different than Kalamazoo,
or than any other scholarship program in the country.
We also send the parents or legal guardians of our students
to college or trade school for free.
Why do we do that?
(Cheers and applause)
We do that because we believe that
the largest source of poverty is lack of education or skill
that will make anyone a credible hire.
We also believe that poverty is multigenerational,
and so you have to attack it, from a multi-generational lens.
So I needed to understand, though,
before I dove headfirst into this.
What exactly was the math behind this?
How did this work?
And if we invested our time, energy, and treasure in these two cities,
would it produce societal outcomes that we wanted?
Along came an economist from the University of Pennsylvania
named Clive Belfield.
He studied and found that for every $1 we invest in a student after high school,
society gets a $4 return.
And societal outcomes, like violence reduction,
entrepreneurs starting to [unclear] businesses and underserved communities
and more taxpayers contributing to the tax base.
I mean, imagine if you had a wallet where every time you put a dollar in,
you got $4 out.
You’d be like George Costanza with your big wallet.
Now, the value that college creates,
some people have debate with me,
but the value it creates and the data that supports it is irrefutable.
A college graduate makes, on average, $36,000 more
more than his or her high school peer.
And additionally, the IRS says that a college graduate earns
an additional $1.2 million over the course of their lifetime.
And it's not just the college graduate.
The benefits. Society benefits.
The state of Illinois where I live,
states that a high school dropout cost state taxpayers $221,000
over the course of their lifetime,
while a college graduate contributes $750,000 over the course of theirs.
So if we know that education reduces poverty and creates societal value,
we have to create a system,
a symbiotic system that makes sense,
to actually educate every American.
So I studied symbiotic systems that operate effectively in nature.
This is a rhino. You all recognize a rhino?
Well, you probably don't recognize the little bird on top.
The English name for that bird is oxpecker.
Probably because the scientist who named it was a 12 year old boy.
Now, the rhino, while mighty,
has the dexterity of a retired NFL linebacker.
It is powerless against the ticks burrowing in its back.
And that’s where the oxpecker comes in.
It feasts on those ticks, and it also alerts the rhino to looming dangers,
because the rhino is nearly blind, like humans or lions.
And the ticks, you know, they have their role too.
They feast on the rhino's blood,
but they leverage the birds to fly to the next rhino,
because that’s their only chance of mating
with someone who is not one of their siblings.
So now, how do we take this system that operates effectively in nature
and use it as an analog and apply it to a real world conundrum,
relative to how we educate all of our children?
This mandates a three sided funding platform between students,
schools and employers, all held equally accountable to the same standards,
all equal participants in the process.
Let’s start with the rhino.
American corporations. Large, powerful.
But beneath their tough exterior, they are getting eaten alive. I know.
I started five companies and employed thousands of people.
I know how tough it is to recruit and retain and train employees.
In fact, Korn Ferry did a study recently
and found that we will be 10 million employees short in this country by 2030
because of a lack of education and skill.
And corporations are spending billions of dollars trying to recruit
an ever smaller pools of career ready professionals.
So we are going to ask that our big corporate employers,
those employers who have more than 10,000 employees,
contribute one half of 1% of their net income.
That's after expenses, after taxes, after CEO golf memberships.
One half of 1% of their net income,
to help fund educational access for America’s underserved families.
Now, folks, this is not just an act of corporate charity.
This is bottom-line capitalism.
These organizations don’t have any other choice.
And furthermore, in symbiosis with the colleges they’re partnering with,
they’ll be able to advise the college advisors and teachers on curriculum,
so that these students are more career ready when they join the workforce.
And then we have our oxpecker.
Colleges and universities across America,
who are busy protecting the back of employers,
by training the human capital that they will need
to grow and scale into the future.
Now, our oxpecker, our colleges, universities, they have major challenges.
For 12 of the last 13 years, college enrollment has been declining.
The Department of Education estimates
there are a million fewer college graduates today
than there were just five years ago.
But do not confuse this with the pandemic phenomenon, folks.
This is a trend that’s been happening for 10 to 15 years,
and it’s a trend that will bring this company to its knees
if we don’t reverse it soon.
Now, our colleges have challenges, but some of them are self made.
They have to hold the line on expenses,
and administrators and trustees have to stop making the excuse,
that a reduction in government funding is their rationale for increasing tuition
and fees to underserved students.
We actually know that is not true.
The Wall Street Journal just released a study a few weeks ago.
A 20 year longitudinal study,
studying 50 of the largest public universities in this country.
And here’s what they determined.
They found that for every $1 of reduced government funding,
colleges increased tuitions and fees to their students by $2.40.
So enough with the shiny new buildings and
the massive infrastructure that look great.
But create a situation where only rich kids can afford to go to college,
while everyone else is stuck with the dilemma
of incurring six figures of debt just to get educated.
And lastly, we have our ticks.
Our students, busy sucking up and absorbing all the knowledge
from their collegiate experience and their student internship opportunities,
but they will also be held accountable to standards and service requirements.
They must agree to be mentored,
is freshmen and sophomores, and they must pay it backward
and mentor others, is upperclassmen.
Additionally, they need skin in the game.
They are going to be mandated once they graduate and become career earners,
to contribute $1,000 every year for the rest of their life, minimum,
back to the Educational Access Fund
to provide the same opportunity that they got to families just like theirs.
Now, most of the kids that I work with, that don’t have educational access.
They have no family alma mater.
The only launch pad they’ll build for future generations,
is the one they will build for themselves,
if given the chance.
These kids are every bit like mine and probably like yours.
They have dreams and they have drama.
They have BFFs and maybe even a playground nemesis.
What they do not have that, my children take for granted,
is an expectation of college.
And when we change that one factor,
we begin to dismantle poverty brick by brick.
Now, this is no longer an option between doing something and doing nothing.
Poverty is powered by gravity.
Every time we do nothing, it gets worse.
So we’re either fighting to end it,
or we're inadvertently creating more of it.
My commitment is to fight to end it.
I believe that we can abolish poverty
by providing educational access to all Americans
and by manufacturing hope.
Thank you.