Boston Rising

Happy belated Valentine’s Day to all of Boston Rising’s friends.  It’s a complicated holiday, but I’m a big fan of things that make us focus on whatever love we’re blessed to have in our lives.

The mission moment this week comes courtesy of WGBH, the New York Times and the BBC.  They co-produce a radio program called The Takeaway that runs on some member NPR stations.  Having read a Huffington Post blog I did the previous week on the Rising Class in response to Mitt Romney’s now-famous, “I’m not concerned about the very poor,” comments after the Florida primary, they invited me onto The Takeaway to discuss the Rising Class concept.

One of the things I argue in my blog is that we fail to understand today’s economic phenomena if we fail to understand we’re all in the Rising Class.  You’ve heard me, and us, talk about this before.  We all want to rise.  Some of us have a harder time getting a hold of, and holding on to, the tools for rising – an education that gets you a shot at a job, a job that lets you build some assets over time, and the social connections undergirding both.  Today, the struggle to rise is being shared by a broader swath of the population.  That’s an opportunity to understand and address a shared experience, rather than divide ourselves by class.

I raise the radio show as a mission moment for two reasons.  First, they wanted more people to hear about the idea of the Rising Class.  Their producers understood the argument I was making, and found it interesting enough that they thought other people should hear it, too.  That’s tells me that we’re on to something.  It also tells me that people are hungry to understand what’s happening to us all in a new way, and are open to ideas that call us to a shared experience and a sense of shared identity.  I find that deeply encouraging.

Second, they put a trucking distribution driver on the show with me.  Kate is a white woman from Maryland who had written to them after Romney’s comments expressing her own frustration with the way she felt she and other middle class Americans were subsidizing both the “very poor” and the “very rich.”  When I listened to her, both before and after my own comments, I was struck by how un-caricature like she was.  She was a real person with a varied set of beliefs and concerns about poverty, the economy, race and the middle class.  While I disagreed with a good chunk of what she said, I was once again encouraged that someone who came to the conversation feeling angry was still so anxious to have a complex, open and real conversation about rising.  That bodes well.

If you have nine minutes, I encourage you to listen to the piece, and to Kate. We’re circling around a genuine and much-needed conversation here.  I believe the Rising Class gives us a way to get at it.

Up we go!

Tiziana

Tiziana C. Dearing
Chief Executive Officer

Dear Friends,

Unbelievably, 1/12th of 2012 already is behind us.  The bridge between past and future is what’s on my mind as I write this week’s mission moment.

As most Bostonians know, former Mayor Kevin White passed at the end of last week.  He served as mayor from 1968 to 1984, and is largely credited with leading Boston out of the final remnants of the Great Depression and into a new prosperity.  He also led Boston during the tumultuous years of racial tension in the late 1960s and early 1970s, culminating in the bussing crisis of 1974, the repercussions of which we still feel throughout our city today.  I never knew Mayor White, but he had a profound influence on a whole generation of Boston leadership – many of whom I call friends and colleagues today.  I am deeply sorry for their grief.

Not 48 hours before the announcement of Mayor White’s death, Boston Rising was privileged to have two other Boston greats who were contemporaries of Mayor White in our kitchen, talking about what it means to rise.  Mel King and Hubie Jones joined about 35 avid listeners to talk about the truth of what it takes to rise, the history of the work to end poverty in Boston, and the challenges we continue to face today.  Both Jones and King remain strong leaders in Boston’s black and non-profit communities, and everyone who attended felt like they’d heard something one of a kind.  We were lucky to have them with us.

Each day at Boston Rising, we are trying to do something new.  We are trying to practice philanthropy in a new way, to end the cycle of poverty in a new way, and in a way that really does end it.  Mayor White did much that was new for Boston. Mel King and Hubie Jones continue to work to break ground, bridging the lessons of yesterday with the needs and new realities of today.

We need it all, and we need to build those bridges from yesterday to tomorrow with great care.  That means telling ourselves our collective history over and over again, holding up every side to understand what we think worked and didn’t, went wonderfully and badly, carries forward today or has run its course.  It also means intentionally laying the groundwork for the next generation of leadership. Investing in emerging ideas, organizations and people, and making sure they understand our past while imagining what our city will become.

Last week brought home so strongly the rich past and present of leadership in our city.  Forty years from now, when we are still learning from and remembering the next generation, I firmly believe the richness will be there, too.

Up we go!

Tiziana

Tiziana Dearing
Chief Executive Officer