The winners are a diverse bunch–doctors, social workers, a single mother, a basketball great and energetic high-school students. But each recognized a need, and found an innovative way to meet it.
As we were assembling our list, a bomb blast ripped through the Oklahoma City federal building, killing 166 people. The unprecedented rescue effort mounted in its wake brought out hundreds more everyday heroes. Their self-lessness, and bravery, helped lift the nation’s spirits at a time of grief and terror. They receive special recognition here.
They came with stretchers, pickaxes, sensitive listening devices and trained rescue dogs. They came from down the street and as far away as New York City – cops, doctors, structural engineers and fire fighters from more than 50 departments. Oklahoma City officials don’t even know how many hundreds of emergency workers, and ordinary citizens, rushed to the bombed-out Alfred P. Murrah Federal Building on April 19 to help search for survivors and comfort the grieving over the next grueling days. Some rescuers, in turn, don’t know the identities – or the fate – of the victims they retrieved.
One local nurse, Rebecca Anderson, was hit by debris and died of her injuries. Other volunteers may be hunted for years by their memories. (One common reaction is being awakened by a “snapshot”– a mental image from the scene. “It may be a kid’s rattle, or a picture on a desk,” says Maj. David Bowman of the fire department’s stress-debriefing team. “We tell them that’s OK–just look at it and put it away.”) Some devastated families “adopted” favorite rescue workers–and local Oklahomans spent countless hours tending to their needs. Together, these brave men and women reassured the nation that there is far more heart than hate in the heartland.
Archie Roberts needed serious help. He was homeless, living on friends’ couches when he was lucky and in shelters when he wasn’t. Because of an “anger problem” and a cocaine habit, he hadn’t held a steady job in years. He didn’t know where his five children were. At the age of 40, he had nothing to show for himself except a bad back, a case of diabetes and $68. “It was like, the end of my life,” says Roberts. That’s when he met The Phoenix Group.
The group was rounded in 1991 by Chuck Beattie and Bret Byfield (above, left and right ), two Minneapolis social workers who shared a growing anger at the way government helps-or fails to help-street people like Roberts. Throwing money at them doesn’t work, Byfield and Beattie believed, at least not for long. The key is helping them find jobs, a community and a sense of purpose for themselves. Armed with a few grants from private donors and foundations as well as a healthy dose of optimism, they began buying run-down houses on Minneapolis’s shabby south side and fixing them up. They not only hired and trained people like Roberts to do the construction and maintenance: they also moved the homeless workers in, so they could benefit from what they’d built. “It’s the most hopeful activity I’ve seen in a long time,” says former Minnesota Human Services commissioner Sandra Gardebring.
It didn’t stop there. Phoenix now houses more than 800 tenants in 39 properties, all run by Steve Wash (center). And as its successes multiplied, the group has started other operations to employ its residents. It opened an upholstery shop, a supermarket, an art gallery–11 businesses in all, and all hiring people who couldn’t get work elsewhere. Some, like the People’s Garage auto shop, turn a tidy profit. Most, like the Wall Art Gallery and the Phoenix Cafe, about break even. But profits are beside the point. “I don’t make a lot of money, but I feel like I’m a king,” says Roberts, who earns $200 a month as a Phoenix property manager. He also owns a Phoenix-rebuilt home and spends the summers with his kids, who visit him in Minneapolis. “Nothing can stop me.”
When Anita Septimus started as a social worker for HIV-infected children in 1985, she did not know how emotionally draining the job would be. In her first few months she watched three of her tiny clients die–and the despair began to overwhelm her. She turned for advice to Dr. Arye Rubinstein, head of the Pediatric AIDS Center at New York’s Albert Einstein College of Medicine. What was the point? How could she help these children? Rubinstein persuaded her to give it three more months, and Septimus aid some soul-searching. She remembered a classmate in social-work school who complained about working in poor areas. “My teacher said, ‘Well, my friend, you have not chosen a pretty profession.’ Those words were ringing in my head.”
That was 10 years ago. The clinic has since grown to become the Family Comprehensive AIDS Center, and Septimus now heads its social-work department. She and her staff look after more than 300 families with AIDS-infected children–going to their homes, teaching infection prevention and helping parents plan for the future. They also give their young clients a semblance of childhood, with trips to the zoo, the circus and summer camps. “She makes us feel wonderful about ourselves,” says Petra Berrios, the mother of a child with AIDS who is HIV-positive herself.
That, Septimus says, is her job–helping families make the most of the lives they have. Happily, that time is expanding for some of them. One AIDS baby at the center wasn’t expected to see her first birthday. Now she’s 10 years old. Such “long term” clients give septimus something in return–what she calls an “indestructible sense of hope.” As she puts it, “You don’t choose the day you enter the world and you don’t choose the day you leave. It’s what you do in between that makes all the difference.”
It may not be history’s biggest victory garden, but don’t underestimate the size of the victory. Shortly after the Los Angeles riots in 1992, a group of 40 students at Crenshaw High School and their energetic biology teacher decided to reclaim the weedy quarter-acre plot that had long been abandoned behind the school’s football field. The goal was simple: to create a community garden that would bring life back to one of the city’s most battered neighborhoods while giving the students some hands-on science experience. They planted flowers, herbs, lettuce, collard greens and other vegetables. A colorful mural soon appeared on the back wall, with a brown hand teaching toward a white one. In the middle of South-Central L.A., an oasis bloomed. The kids donated some of the produce to needy families in South-Central and sold the rest at local farmers markets. They called their project Food From the ‘Hood.
And the ideas kept on sprouting. Buoyed by their success and aided by a growing roster of adult volunteers, the Crenshaw students decided to diversify. They had the herbs, they had the lettuce–what could be a better accompaniment than salad dressing? The Food From the ‘Hood members created theft own recipe and designed their own label for the brand, called Straight Out ’the Garden. Local business leaders helped with the marketing and manufacturing, and now the dressing is sold, for $2.59 a bottle, in more than 2,000 stores in 28 states. The burgeoning enterprise has catapulted the student farmers into student owners; they expect to earn $50,000 in profits this year, which will go toward funding college scholarships. Ten of the 15 seniors in Food From the ‘Hood have been accepted at four-year colleges – a remarkable record for an inner-city public school. “When a kid gets an acceptance letter to college, that’s our immediate payoff,” says Melinda McMullen, a marketing consultant who worked with teacher Tammy Bird to steer the kids toward produce and profits.
Even more important than the money is the sense of accomplishment that has grown out of Food From the ‘Hood. “We showed that a group of inner-city kids can and did make a difference,” says freshman Terie Smith, 15. The students run all aspects of the business–from weeding and harvesting to public relations and computer logs. They’ve received inquiries from across the country about duplicating their business plan, and they may franchise their logo to a group of New York kids who hope to sell applesauce. Food From the ‘Hood members also have set up a mentor system and an SAT preparatory program. “We all try to help each other in everything,” says Jaynell Grayson, 17, who will attend Babson College on scholarship next year. Grayson doesn’t know who her father is; her mother has been incarcerated most of her life. Food From the ‘Hood has been a substitute family for her. “What comes from that garden is inspiration,” says McMullen. “From anything–even the riots–amazing things can grow.”
They roamed the plains 70 million strong before the white man, and they are still sacred to the Lakota Sioux. Like many Plains tribes, the Lakota used he bison for food, clothing, shelter and spiritual sustenance–and as they dwindled, so did the tribe’s livelihood. On the Cheyenne River Sioux reservation in South Dakota, Fred DuBray learned about the buffalo from his grandmother, who was born three years after Wounded Knee. Now 102, she told him the Lakotas believed the buffalo saved mankind. “They felt sorry for us and offered themselves so we could have life,” DuBray says.
Now 44 and president of the InterTribal Bison Cooperative, DuBray is betting heavily that the buffalo will save the Plains Indians once again–as a symbol of tradition, and as a source of income. Like other Plains tribes, the Lakota suffer from high unemployment and a lack of opportunity. “I looked at everything–our geographical isolation, the cost of shipping, the cost of setting up an artificial economy,” DuBray said. “I studied all the failures.”
Everything pointed to the buffalo as the tribe’s salvation–and in 1991 DuBray came up with the idea of raising bison, partly as a cash crop but mainly as a way to return to traditional Lakota spiritual practices. No longer an endangered species, buffalo have less fat than beef and less cholesterol than chicken; they’re hardy and relatively easy to raise. At DuBray’s urging, the Cheyenne River Sioux formed a nonprofit corporation, Pte Hcaka Inc., to expand their herd. Nineteen other tribes joined a cooperative that now oversees some 6,000 bison, up from 1,500 four years ago.
The co-op’s latest idea is saving buffalo that wander out of Yellowstone National Park, many of which are slaughtered as suspected carriers of brucellosis, a disease that can afflict cattle. “Buffalo can bring our people together,” DuBray says. “Now it’s our turn to take care of them.”
Without Dr. Patience White, Lorenzo Stewart might have never been able to make a life for himself. At 15, Lorenzo (photo, in background) was shot twice in the back by a person he never saw. He was left paralyzed from the waist down.
As a rheumatologist working with disabled people in Washington, D.C., White has seen a lot of patients like Lorenzo. The older ones, she noticed, got their treatment and then got on with their lives; the younger ones tended not to make that second step, She decided to do something about it. In 1985 she opened the Adolescent Employment Readiness Center in D.C., to prepare teens with physical disabilities and chronic illnesses for the working world. “Work is incredibly important in our society,” she says. “A lot of self-worth is defined that way. But kids with disabilities are constantly being told, ‘You’re different. You can’t do that’.”
White set out to prove they could. Her Readiness Center, located in the Children’s National Medical Center, has given some 500 teens career counseling and even job opportunities. They are pushed not toward “supportive employment” but “competitive employment,” just like anyone else. “These kids have tremendous resilience,” says White. “They want to do great things. The best thing we can do for their health is to get them involved.”
Lorenzo Stewart entered the program after being hospitalized for four months, and later landed a job at an investment group. Still confined to a wheelchair, he recently switched to part-time work so he could attend college, where he’s taking computer courses. He is a special worker, but not because of his disability. “We think of Lorenzo as one of our top employees,” says his boss. He has his own resilience, and the strength of Dr. White, to thank for that.
Even celebrities sometimes quietly give of themselves behind the scenes. In Joe Dumars’s life, basketball and community responsibility came together early on. The Detroit Pistons’ guard grew up in Natchitoches, La, the youngest of seven children. One day his father, a truckdriver, cut an old door in half, nailed a bicycle rim to it and transformed the neighborhood. “We had the biggest yard, a basketball hoop, and it was just a magnet for all the kids in the area,” he remembers. “It was always crowded, but everyone was made to feel welcome. My mother, Ophelia, made sure of that.”
Dumars (above, top, center) made his rep on one of the brashest teams ever to wear NBA uniforms, and he made it as a When Sport magazine named the NBA’s “classiest” players, Dumars swept the voting. But he says he’d rather be known for his work off the court, particularly with young people of Detroit. Since 1998 he has hosted the Joe Dumars Celebrity Tennis Classic, raising more than $200,000 for Detroit’s Children’s Hospital, and he’s active in Second Harvest, which collects food for the inner city. In 1994 he won basketball’s J. Walter Kennedy Citizenship Award for community service. This summer he’ll host a basketball camp for disadvantaged and disabled kids at his for-profit Joe Dumars’s Fieldhouse.
But according to former Piston Dave Bing. Dumars’s contributions go beyond what the public has seen. “He’s done things in a very quiet, unassuming way. And because he’s such an important part of our community, we’re not going to let him do that anymore. He just happens to be one of these young black athletes who has been thrust into a role-model position, and he has done it well. It may embarrass him, but it’s something he’ll have to de with.”
In a 1991 interview, shortly after his father died, Dumars described himself as “square” and “straitlaced,” He said it without apology; in his household, these were all you could aspire to he. “Growing up,” he says, “the only thing we knew was giving and sharing with others.” He learned his lessons well.
She was four months pregnant when the father of her unborn child first walked out on her in 1982. That was just the beginning of Susan Brotchie’s problems. The man refused to provide support for her daughter, Katie, and it took nine years and countless legal battles to collect the money. Brotchie could have simply put those grueling years behind her; instead she decided to put her experience to work for others. While raising her daughter and holding a full-time job as a cost analyst, she rounded Advocates for Better Child Support (ABCS), in Peabody, Mass., which has helped more than 9,000 people establish child support or collect overdue payments.
Brotchie has succeeded where others have failed by working within the system. She collaborated with Massachusetts Rep. Peter Torkildsen on a proposal to allow officials to pursue delinquent parents across state lines. That became the basis for the so-called “deadbeat-dads amendment” to the House Republican welfare-reform bill; it passed with unanimous support in March. Brotchie has also found novel ways to collect back child support. When she heard that a group of prisoners won $2.3 million from the state because of crowded conditions, she checked the list of recipients and discovered 84 deadbeat dads among them. She persuaded officials to seize $300,000 of that money as back child support instead.
Brotchie’s group has now opened offices in 11 states, all funded by grants and all run entirely by volunteers. “She’s a force to be reckoned with,” says Massachusetts Revenue Commissioner Mitchell Adams. Brotchie. who lives in Peabody with Katie, now 13, plans to expand her fight for kids nationwide, possibly by running for the state legislature. “I’m trying to prevent other women from having the same experience I did,” she says.
He is something of a legend in Miami, and so is the story of how he became passionate about getting medical care to the poor. As an intern in 1984, Dr. Pedro Jose Greer treated a homeless man with tuberculosis, a usually curable disease that had progressed to a fatal stage. Greer was so appalled that someone in his own backyard would be too poor or ignorant to seek medical treatment that he began working in a shelter and soon rounded a clinic there – setting up a folding table and dragging in as many fellow doctors as he could find. But there’s an equally telling part of the story that isn’t so well known: as the patient lay dying, Greer spent four days searching the streets for the man’s family, hoping to keep him from passing his last days alone.
Greer’s clinic – the Camillus Health Concern – is now one of the largest providers of medical care for the poor in south Florida, serving 4,500 patients last year. Greer, 88, has won numerous awards, including the MacArthur Fellowship in 1998. But he’s never forgotten the man who died alone. Somewhere between the three-days-a-week he spends at the clinics and his thriving private practice, the tall, bearlike doctor regularly prowls Miami’s underbelly, making sure the city’s homeless, drug addicts, hookers and other street people know that medical care is available if they need it. “To treat somebody that doesn’t have a home or a family, you have to adapt the therapy to their reality,” he says.
Greer, whose parents came from Cuba, knew early on that he would care for the poor. He quit the University of Florida before his senior year to attend reed school in the Dominican Republic and had planned to take his stethoscope to Africa or South America. But he’s thrilled to be giving back to his hometown – he went to high school with singer Gloria Estefan and was born at Jackson Memorial Hospital, where he now works. Greet is just surprised by the attention he’s received. He says: “I’ve had the privilege of treating the sick and the honor of working with the poor.”
Soo Yeun Kim was the kind of student who shows up in the “most likely to succeed” category in high-school yearbooks. At Jericho High School in Jericho, N.Y., the 17-year-old was an accomplished flutist, editor of the literary magazine and a star science student. The week after Thanksgiving, as she was putting the finishing touches on her project for the prestigious Westinghouse Science Talent Search, she and her close friend Joseph Ching were killed in a car accident on a rain-soaked road just a mile from her home.
Jericho had lost two of its best and brightest students – and their grieving friends refused to let Soo Yeun’s hard work go to waste. With only two days before the deadline, a group of her classmates joined together to finish her Westinghouse application, some putting off their own work to finish their friend’s. Most of her project, a two-year study of bone fragments as they related to the behavior of the Neanderthal man, was already complete. But an eight-page entry form remained, and there were questions that needed answers. What awards had she won? What clubs did she belong to? one question, especially, brought tears to the eyes of her friends: “What would you really like to be doing 10 or 15 years from now?”
The group finished the project in time and, with the help of Soo Yeun’s science teacher, Allen Sachs (above, in beard and tie), sent it off to Westinghouse with a note explaining what they had done. But the note was torn off, and judges had no inkling of the circumstances surrounding Soo Yeun’s application. Two months later, her project was selected as one of 40 finalists from more than 1,600 applicants. (Since finalists must be interviewed, Soo Yeun’s project could go no farther.) It was the first time in the competition’s 54-year history that Westinghouse has made an award posthumously – a tribute not only to Soo Yeun Kim’s hard work but to her selfless friends as well.
