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Friends United Meeting |
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June 1998
Speaking Out
By Ellen Cooney
I teach entrepreneurship to inner city kids. [Sidebar on Start-up Education] A couple of years ago I stood at a flipchart listing responses from 10 to 12-year-old girls from two housing projects in Atlanta, Georgia. Where could they get money to start a small business? We had almost exhausted the usual answers-saving up allowance, asking friends and family for loans, saving earnings from working odd jobs.
A little girl waved her hand, and said "God." We were stunned. "You know how sometimes your family has no food and no money, not even enough to buy diapers for the baby?" she explained, "Well, you ask God for help and sometimes you get what you need."
Another time, I was on the phone with the director of a nonprofit organization who was planning to leave her job. With just a couple of staff, her departure could be devastating. I asked what she was doing to find a replacement before she left. I was thinking in business terms like succession planning; she said "I pray every night to find someone who can do this work."
When I made a radical career change in 1993, I was prepared to bring my faith to my work; I just wasn't prepared for the fact that the work itself, and the folks I met, would bring faith to me. They have challenged me to speak out about my faith-not just among Friends, but in all aspects of my life.
Before the career change, I had worked for 13 years as a management consultant with major international consulting firms. My life was focused around 60 hour work weeks, and almost daily travel to different cities to meet with clients. Though highly successful in building a consulting practice, I was increasingly dissatisfied, not only with a lifestyle that left little room for personal or spiritual growth, but also with the work itself. The consulting I did on health care benefits generally helped people, and I was sometimes able to prevent employers from taking draconian measures to exclude employees or diseases such as AIDS from medical coverage. Generally, though, the work just wasn't close enough to my spiritual values to feel really worthwhile.
A close friend whom I had known through the Atlanta Friends Meeting for a decade was in a similar position. Mary Ann Downey had been running her own business, Performance Dynamics, for nearly 20 years. She routinely had to turn down requests for her seminars, yet she too was dissatisfied and ready for a change. So, in 1992 we began planning to form our own non-profit focused on entrepreneurship and career training with youth. In 1993, we left our jobs and formally incorporated Start-Up Education as a tax-exempt nonprofit.
Research proved what we knew intuitively-youth who could envision economic opportunities for themselves were less prone toward drug use, violence and teen pregnancy. We started teaching middle and high school youth in alternative schools, housing projects, public schools and summer camps how to create their own opportunities by starting their own businesses.
We've reached about 100 to 200 students each year with a hands-on course in which they operate a small business venture, often a concession stand within their school or camp. In addition, we are now training teachers, and staff from community organizations, so that they too can offer entrepreneurial programs and give youth hope and alternatives for the future.
One summer we offered our program to youth at a city-run camp. The camp was oversubscribed, with about 800 campers and only about 20 counselors. Each day we cringed as overworked counselors screamed at little children, and children were shamed and sent to stand in corners.
As the only two white people in the camp, and from an outside program, we felt pretty helpless. All we could do was offer the small group of students in our classroom each day an island of respect and support. Each night, we went home in tears to offer prayers.
Perhaps out of those prayers, it occurred to me one morning to cut some lilies from my garden. I brought them to the camp director saying, perhaps when a child got on her nerves that day she could look at the flowers and find some relief. Even as I did it, it seemed like a useless gesture; what difference could flowers make? Much to my surprise, the flowers became a turning point in our relationship with the camp director, who felt that we understood how difficult her job was.
The students and adults we work with, most of whom are African-American, have taught me to speak openly about my faith. Perhaps as the product of American individualism or of white, middle class liberalism, I have tended to consider faith and religion a private matter to be kept hidden. Even where I had incorporated Quaker practices (like seeking consensus) into my prior work with corporations, I had always used secular language and carefully concealed any religious connection.
Over the last few years, though, I have been around people who witness to their faith in casual, unselfconscious ways: wearing Christian T-shirts (one of our best-selling items for student ventures!); opening business meetings with prayer, without worry about separation of church and state; saying things like, "I can't make a meeting on Wednesday evening; that's my church night"; or, like the little girl in our class, looking to God for start-up capital.
These people have challenged me to be more open in talking about my faith; to be open and honest about my involvement with Friends rather than keeping it compartmentalized and separate from work and business. But more than these external changes, I have been challenged to make sure that faith infuses all parts of my life, that it is not compartmentalized and hidden even within me.
Ellen Cooney, a member of the Atlanta Friends Meeting, recently moved
to Pueblo West, Colorado, where she and her husband Tom Webb are working
with Friends to establish an unprogrammed worship group.
Start-up Education
Start-Up Education's mission is to teach youth career skills through hands-on experience in running a business venture. Experiences with entrepreneurship show youth that they have options for self sufficiency; that they do not need to rely on drug trade, violence or the welfare system.
We teach youth directly, and we train teachers and staff in community organizations how to start their own entrepreneurship programs. We serve a variety of populations, but focus on those who may be disenfranchised from the free enterprise system by their race, gender, personal history, disability or economic status.
We are eager to help others offer programs like ours. We offer teacher training seminars, a teachers' manual which includes masters for student workbooks, and (currently under development) an Internet-based teacher training program with graduate teaching credits offered by Adams State College in Alamosa, Colorado.
You can call Start-Up Education at (719) 547-4798 between 9:00 and 5:00 Mountain Time, Monday through Friday; e-mail Ellen Cooney at ekcooney@way.opens.org or write us at P.O. Box 7072, Pueblo West, CO 81007.
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