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Show a Little Tenderness; For Her 40th Birthday Kirsten Case Asked Friends to Perform Acts of Kindness
Here’s a feel good story for you. Kirsten Case, or as some of you may know her, Kirsten Romero Case, is a serial do-gooder in Omaha with a lifetime of community outreach work behind her. She recently decided she would celebrate her 40th birthday by asking people in her life to perform acts of kindness. They did and the story of why she put out this sweet intention and the ensuing good works that followed is detailed in this piece I wrote for Metro Magazine. She heads the Literacy Center in Omaha and before that she worked for the Greater Omaha Chamber of Commerce and for various nonprofit human services organizations. It’s quite clear that whaterver she does from this point forward will involve doing for others.
Show a Little Tenderness; For Her 40th Birthday Kirsten Case Asked Friends to Perform Acts of Kindness
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally published in Metro Magazine
As her 40th birthday approached last fall Kirsten Case decided to celebrate the milestone in a most unusual way. The Literacy Center executive director used her personal blog to encourage friends and strangers alike to perform 40 Acts of Kindness in 40 days and to share these “simple, thoughtful” acts online.
Just like Kirsten
Case, a longtime Omaha transplant from Denver, has devoted her life to nonprofit human services work that delivers tender mercies to people in need. Wendy Hamilton and Angie Schendt are among those who granted Case’s birthday wish. They say the project fit her to a tee.
“It felt so natural that this idea came from her, and I was excited to participate,” says Hamilton, whose act of kindness involved reaching out to a young woman she didn’t know but who looked like she could use some friendly advice.
“Kirsten does have a big heart and it wasn’t surprising to me at all that she came up with this idea,” says Schendt, who honored Case’s request by organizing workmates to present a $500 check to a retiree who’d lost everything in a fire.
Shannon Smith, another friend who joined this mini-movement, says, “I’ve come to admire Kirsten both personally and professionally. She is one of the kindest people you will ever meet, always putting the needs of others before herself. When I first read her blog, I thought ‘of course.’ Of course Kirsten would come up with something compelling to motivate others to give back. Of course she would be selfless on her big day. Of course she would think big. The birthday request is everything that Kirsten is about.”
One way Smith fulfilled Case’s request was by befriending a female co-worker who rubbed her the wrong way.
“I could tell she needed a pick-me-up so I took her to lunch. We had a great chat, and I’m glad we did because I now have a greater understanding of where she’s coming from.”
Other acts people checked in ranged from reporting graffiti to giving someone a ride to donating unused clothes to a career closet to giving up a seat on a plane (twice) to making dinner for a sick friend to helping a dog owner find her lost pet in a park. Comforting words. Helpful advice. Lending a hand. Opening one’s heart.
Then there was the Saturday when Case and her daughter were in the family car in a ATM drive-thru when a man approached, speaking in broken Spanish. The bilingual Case made out he needed to deposit money and she assisted him. She says she drove off before realizing he could benefit from the Literacy Center, “and so I drove back and talked to him about it. It would have been easy to ignore him and been scared of him and to assume certain things but he was just a hard working guy that needed help.
A helping hand
Case says doing unto others is “the easiest and most inexpensive way we can improve the condition of somebody else’s life and our own. I mean, being kind or helpful to others isn’t just about them, it impacts our own life in a positive way, so it’s sort of a win-win.”
“The reality is any of us could be in a situation that could cause us to have to lean on a support network,” she says. “We’re all a heartbeat away from being in somebody else’s shoes. Besides, we’re always leaning on each other and so that’s why it really shouldn’t be a foreign concept to reach out and do something.”
She simply decided to be a conduit to help it happen.
“I just put stuff out there and hoped that maybe somebody noticed it. I really wanted to do something fun and special for my birthday. I have friends who’ve had big blow out parties and that didn’t feel comfortable. I spend a lot of my life trying to get other people to get involved in the community and do nice things for people and so it made perfect sense that way.”
She didn’t know who might respond and what they might do but as her birthday drew near she stumbled upon a Facebook event a friend created and to her delight she discovered plenty of folks heeded her request.
“It was the best birthday I’ve ever had. I was so excited to hear about things people were doing. It just brought me a lot of joy, it made me really happy to know they’d done things. I didn’t really know if people would do anything at all. I mean, how do you really ask people to do stuff? And I’m surrounded by people that are very giving and very involved, so how do you ask those people to do more?”
But more they did.
She says even though she and her friends already give-back to the community “a lot of us are working on a level where we’re not connected one-on-one, so it’s easy to get disconnected from the human side of the work that we’re doing.”
Paying it forward
She’s surprised her project’s elicited so much interest, saying, “A lot of people have talked to me about it,” and though the project ended Oct. 17, she adds, “Even now people still email me wanting to go to lunch because they want to talk about this. That part’s been fun – that people are still talking about it and telling me about things and wanting to do it themselves.”
Case says she doesn’t know how many acts of kindness overall resulted from her appeal because she hasn’t counted but she likes to think its ripple effect is ongoing. “My hope is that there’s a lot more that happened or that might happen that I don’t know about, although I do like hearing about it because it makes me happy.”
Encouraging kindness may just become her new birthday tradition.
“I do think I’ll have to do this every year now. Honestly, it really was my favorite birthday, hands-down. I feel like the people that did it did it because they do care about me and in fulfilling this request they cared about doing something. It was just so meaningful to me that somebody would honor a request like that.”
Related articles
- A different kind of birthday wish (whas11.com)
- 22 Random acts of kindness (blogs.windsorstar.com)
Generosity at Core of Anne Thorne Weaver’s Life, Giving Back to the Community Comes Second Nature to Omaha Woman Whose Live-out-loud Personality is Tempered by Compassion and Service
Generosity at Core of Anne Thorne Weaver’s Life, Giving Back to the Community Comes Second Nature to Omaha Woman Whose Live-out-loud Personality is Tempered by Compassion and Service
©by Leo Adam Biga
Soon to appear in Metro Magazine
Anne Thorne Weaver has known privilege and pain but like a real-life Auntie Mame she views the world as a banquet to be sampled.
A giving heart
The adventurous traveler and enthusiastic hostess says, “I’ve had a really a good life. I’m one of these few people that would go back to the beginning and live it all over again.” The generous Weaver has spent her adult life volunteering with local service clubs and nonprofits in order to better her adopted hometown.
When most persons her age defer to the next generation, she’s still an active board member and patron with various organizations, including the Salvation Army, the Museum of Nebraska Art and the Nebraska Methodist Hospital Foundation. Her work on behalf of causes earned her the 2011 Junior League of Omaha Distinguished Sustainer Award and community service awards from the WCA and Methodist Hospital Foundation. On June 5 the Women’s Center for Advancement’s 25th Tribute to Women recognizes her community philanthropic efforts.
“It came as a big surprise to have been selected,” she says.
She’ll arrive at the program from her summer sanctuary in Okoboj, Iowa. As soon as the evening’s over, she’ll head straight back to her beloved lakeshore cottage. It takes a lot to get her to leave the retreat, where she’s known to throw a party or two. Not even weddings or funerals can pry her away, unless it’s a close friend or family member, “For this though I’m leaving Okoboji, that’s how honored I am,” she says.
Plaudits are not why she helps others but if her example can spur others to follow her lead then she’s glad to be in the spotlight. By responding to needs she gets something in return more meaningful than any accolades. “When you give, everything is given back,” she says Besides, she adds, “I enjoy the people with whom I work a lot, I really do. I’m not going to do something if I don’t enjoy it. I only work on it when it’s going to be fun.”
Some of her favorite things
Knowing first-hand the critical difference volunteers make in fulfilling the mission of nonprofits, she says, “just imagine what this town would be like without volunteers. I mean, everything would be closed – the libraries, the hospitals…” She credits the Junior League for its volunteer training and placement activities.
Refined in many ways, she’s also never outgrown her tomboy nature and love of nature. “My big passion is the Humane Society,” she says. Still an “Iowa girl” at heart, she enjoys the simple pleasures of the state fair.
Her appreciation for both fauna and the finer things is seen in her Loveland neighborhood home, where art objects share space with pets. She’s devoted countless hours to supporting the arts. “I am on the opera board and the symphony board and I love them both,” she proclaims. A relative newcomer to the Omaha Community Playhouse board, she says, “I’m finding it really interesting.”
She previously volunteered with the Joslyn Women’s Association and the Durham Museum, whose original board she served on.
“Another one of my great loves is the art center up there,” she says, referring to Pearson Lakes Art Center in Okoboj, where she supports several things close to her heart. Nearby Spirit Lake is home to a favorite worship place, St. Alban’s Episcopal Church. “I really love that little church,” she says. Weaver belongs to Trinity Episcopal Cathedral in Omaha.
An inveterate seeker with a burning curiosity, Weaver’s extensive travels have taken her to Timbuktu, New Guinea, the Galapagos Islands and the Grand Canyon.
A helping hand
She likes aiding people get where they want to go, too. In her work with the Patriotic Committee of the National Society of Colonial Dames she helps award scholarships to Native American nurses serving reservations and helps send an essay contest winners to a Congressional Seminar in Washington D.C. “It’s a wonderful opportunity and a life changing experience for these kids,” she says.
She chaired the volunteer bureau Junior League Omaha once co-sponsored. For JLO’s Call to Action program she served on a team of ombudsmen. “We had to learn where everything was in Omaha that could assist people. If somebody had trouble or a dispute, we would tell them where to go to get it resolved.”
Her giving back is an expression of the saying that to whom much is given, much is expected. Born into a Mayflower family of self-made and inherited fortunes in Des Moines and Chicago, she harbors deep respect for American history and ideals.
Formative years
As a child she was immersed in history living at Terrace Hill, a circa 1860s mansion with 90-foot tower overlooking downtown Des Moines. The home was once the residence of the Hubbell family, whose late tycoon patriarch, F.M. Hubbell, is her great-grandfather. The National Historic Place home is now the Iowa governor’s residence. She’s pleased it’s well preserved. “They’ve done a beautiful job on the restoration. It never looked that good when we lived there. It was just home.”
After her folks split she was shuffled between two sets of grandparents. “They were two totally different worlds,” she says. “In Des Moines I could wear blue jeans and men’s shirts. But in Chicago I couldn’t leave the house without wearing a hat and gloves and having my nose powdered.”
Her grandparents set a model for philanthropy she’s followed.
Despite being an only child, she recalls Terrace Hill as anything but lonely. She had the run of the place and its extensive grounds. Adventure was everywhere.
“It was just a wonderful home to grow up in. My cousin Patty and I spent a lot of time together. We’d run up in the tower and hop out on the roof. We just jumped all over the place. We spent quite a bit of our time in the pool. We were like fish.”
For company there were also the servants, “and I loved them,” says Weaver. “Two couples had been there 40 years, so they were my family. I’d take my meals with them in the dining room.”
A life well lived
Not everything’s been rosy. Growing up, her parents were largely absent. Her only marriage ended in divorce, though she and her ex remained friends. One of the couple’s four children took his own life at age 21.
Today, she’s alone but hardly lonely. She entertains at home. She attends social and civic engagements galore. There’s her volunteer activities. Breakfast with the girls. Doting on her pets. She goes on excursions whenever she feels like.
“I don’t know where the time goes,” she says.
Her bucket list includes touring the American West’s national parks and Ireland.
A matriarch in age if not spirit, she recently celebrated her Almost 80 birthday bash with friends in Des Moines. The progressive party moved from the botanical gardens to an art center to a country club to Terrace Hill.
“The joy to me is, they say you can’t go home again, but I can.”
As part of an unbroken lineage of service she feels responsible “to prepare whoever follows you to do an even better job than you have done.”
For Tribute to Women tickets call 402-345-6555 or visit http://www.wcaomaha.org.
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A Story of Inspiration and Transformation: Though Living on the Margins, Aisha Okudi Gives Back, and She Nurtures Big Dreams for Her Esha Jewelfire Mission Serving Africa
Life is what you make of it, the saying goes. Attitude is everything, goes another. Aisha Okudi is living proof that when these aphroisms are put into action life can take on a whole new meaning and direction. By being intentional about how she apprehends the world, Okudi is no longer living the self-centered life that led to ruinous consequences. Her life today is focused on positive self-empowerment through service to others. That doesn’t mean hard things don’t still happen to her. But she’s much better equipped to handle what the world deals her in healthy ways rather than the destructive ways she used before. Her inspirational story of transformation and recovery is beginning to get her noticed. That has a lot to do with her charming personality, high-energy, and humanitarian vision. She has very little in the way of monetary means or material goods, yet she’s embarked on an international mission that she seems destined to fulfill. She’s not likely to let anything stand in her way either. You go, girl!
A Story of Inspiration and Transformation: Though Living on the Margins, Aisha Okudi Gives Back, and She Nurtures Big Dreams for Her Esha Jewelfire Mission Serving Africa
©by Leo Adam Biga
When buoyant, self-made social entrepreneur, visionary and humanitarianAisha Chemmine Mure Okudi reviews how far she’s come in only a few years she can hardly believe it herself. It’s not so much that her three-year old Shea Luminous by Esha Jewelfire line of organic shea butter bodycare products is such a thriving success. It’s more to do with her business being an expression of her ongoing recovery from unfortunate life choices and setbacks as well as a conduit for her African missionary work.
At the base of her products is butter extracted from the shea nut, a natural plant indigenous to the very rural West African provinces she serves.
After years helping poor African children from long-distance by sending supplies and donations, she visited Niger, West Africa for the first time last spring through the auspices of the international NGO, Children in Christ. She engaged children in arts and crafts and games and she enlisted the support of tribal leaders, church-based volunteers, Nigerian government representatives and American embassy officials. She purchased a missionary house to accommodate more evangelists.
She says she’s tried getting local churches on board with her missionary work but has been rebuked. She suspects being a woman of little means and not having a church or a title explains it. Undaunted, she works closely with CIC Niger national director, Festus Haba, who calls her work “a blessing.”
She intends returning to Africa in May. Her long-range plan is to move to Niger. She envisions growing her business enough to employ Africans and to open holistic herbal health clinics. She’s studying to be a holistic health practitioner.
Contrast this with the desperate young woman she was in 2004. The dissolute life she led then found her crying in an Iowa jail cell after her second Operating While Intoxicated offense. Her arrest came after she left the strip club where she performed, bombed out of her head.
“I had to get drunk so I could let these men touch me all night,” says Okudi, who ended up driving her car atop a railroad embankment, straddling the tracks and poised to head for a drop-off that led straight into a river.
The Des Moines native had been heading for a fall a long time. Growing up, her family often moved. Finances were always tight. She was a head-strong girl who didn’t listen to her restless mother and alcoholic father.
“There were issues at home. I was always told no coming up and I got sick of hearing that. I felt I was a burden, so I was like, ‘I’m going to get out and get my own stuff.’”
At 15 she left home and began stripping. A year later she got pregnant. She gave birth to the first of her four children at 17.
“I found myself moving around a lot. I really didn’t know what stability was. I never had stability, whether having a stable home or just being stable, period, in life. I was young and doing my thing. My dad walked in the club where I was stripping. My sister told on me.”
The confrontation that ensued only drew her and her parents farther apart.
“I was trying to live that life. I wanted to have whatever I wanted to have. My mom and dad struggled and we didn’t get everything I thought we needed, so I did my own thing. I danced, I sold my body and I made lots of money from it. I did it for about 12 years. I wanted to have it all, but it was not the right way.”
She got caught up in the alcohol and drug abuse that accompany this sordid life. Stealing, too.
“I was in and out of prison a lot. I used to steal to make money. I was in and out of trouble and the streets.”
She served a one year sentence for theft by receiving stolen property.
That night in jail seven years ago is when it all came to a head. “I just sat there and I thought about my kids and what I just did,” she says.
She felt sure she’d messed up one too many times and was going to lose her children and any chance of salvaging her life, “I was crying out and begging to God. I had begged before but this time it was a beg of mercy. I was at my bottom. I surrendered fully.”
To her great surprise and relief the judge didn’t give her jail time. “I told the judge, ‘I will never do this.’ He said, ‘If I ever see you in my courtroom again it will be the last time.’ I burnt my strip clothes when I got out, and I didn’t turn back. I got myself into treatment.” She’d been in treatment before but “this time,” she says, “it was serious. It wasn’t a game because it used to be a game to me. I enrolled in school.”
Seven years later she has her own business and a higher calling and, she says, “I ain’t doin’ no jail time, I’ve paid all my fines, I never looked back, I kept going. I’m so proud that I write the judge and tell him how I’m doing.” She’s learned how to live a healthy lifestyle and not surround herself with negative influences and enablers.
Her life has turned many more times yet since getting straight and sober.
In 2006 she seemingly found her soulmate in George Okudi, an ordained Ugandan minister and award winning gospel artist. They began a new life in Washington DC and had two children together. Then she discovered he was still married to another woman in Africa. The couple is separated, awaiting a divorce.
“He didn’t treat me right — the way he should have,” she says. “Facing that really hurts. God, I wasted these years with this man. But my kids are a blessing. I love them. They’ve really kept me focused. I try not to be bitter, I’ve forgiven him. I’m friends with him. We do have kids”
If there’s one thing she’s learned in her own recovery journey, she says, “You’ve really got to forgive, forget and let God, and He will move you in ways you can’t even believe.”
But she’s only human, therefore doubt and self-pity still creep in when she considers her sundry “trials and tribulations.” Even though she’s forgiven her husband, the betrayal still stings. “I’m going through that, too,” she says.
“Even though I’ve grown,” she says, “sometimes it feels like, When is it going to end?’ But to much is given, much is required. You’ve just gotta consistently stay on track. No matter what it is, stay focused.”
The last three years have been equal measures triumphs and tests. The difference this time around is that when good times happen or adversity strikes she doesn’t get too high or too low, she doesn’t feel entitled to act out.
She claims she experienced an epiphany in which God spoke to her and set her on her Esha Jewelfire mission.
“When I had that vision and dream I was pregnant with my youngest son. I was living with my grandmother (in Des Moines). I was newly separated from my husband. I said to my grandmother, ‘I don’t know if I’m going crazy or what, but the Lord said I will build like King Solomon and go and help my people in Africa.’”
Since childhood Okudi’s cultivated a fascination with all things African, including a desire to help alleviate poverty and hunger there. Her visit to Niger last spring and the overwhelming reception she received confirmed she’s meant to serve there.
“It was immediate. I was able to blend in wherever I went. I’m a true African and I know that’s where my calling is. It’s natural. I cook African, my children are African, my friends are African. It’s just a natural thing for me.”
She even speaks some of the native dialects.
She’s long made a habit of sending clothes and other needed items to Africa. But a call to build was something else again.
“Where am I going to get the money from to help these people in Africa?” she asked her grandma. “I didn’t know.”
Then by accident or fate or divine providence a friend introduced her to shea butter, an oil extracted from the shea nut that grows in West Africa and is used in countless bath and beauty products. “And that’s how the idea for my business came up,” Okudi says.
In its gritty, foul-smelling natural state, sheer butter held no interest for her. But, she says, “I researched it and found that it moisturizes, it cleanses, it refreshens, it brightens, it just makes you shine. So figured out what I needed to do with it.”
She experimented with the substance and developed organically sweet shea butter products and began marketing them under the name, Esha Jewelfire, which means to empower, serve and honor the almighty.
She gets the raw shea in big blocks she breaks down by chopping and melting. She incorporates into her handmade products natural oats and grains as well as fruit and herb oils to lend pleasing textures and scents. She presses the fresh fruit and herbs herself. Nothing’s processed. “All this stuff comes from God’s green earth — oils and spices and herbs, organic cane sugar,” she says. Nothing’s written down either. “I have it all in my head. I know every ingredient in everything I make. Everything is made fresh to order and customized. I hand-package everything, too.”
Selling at networking events, trade shows, house parties, off the Internet, the small business “started really growing and taking off for me,” she says. “It was prophesied to me I will have a warehouse and be a millionaire one day and I believe that. Getting prepared is all I’ve been doing.”
Her business has been based at various sites, including the Omaha Small Business Network. Production unfolds in her mother’s kitchen, in a friend’s attic or wherever she can find usable space. She’s placed her products in several small stores but having a store of her own is attractive, too. Earlier this year “an angel” came into her life in the form of Robert Wolsmann, who within short order of meeting Okudi wrote her a check for $10,000 — as a loan — to help her open her own shop.
Wolsmann of Omaha is not in the habit of lending such amounts to near total strangers but something in Okudi struck him. Besides, he says, “I could see she needed help. She showed me what she made and I was so impressed that I presented her with that money. I couldn’t resist investing.”
“He’s an awesome person,” Aisha says of Wolsmann. “We’ve become great friends.”
She says her dynamic personality has always attracted people to her. She feels what Wolsmann did is evidence that “things work in mysterious ways — you don’t know what’s going to happen, you’ve just got to be prepared.”
Her Organically Sweet Shea Butter Body Butter Store at 3019 Pinkney St. opened last spring after she returned from Africa. It was a labor of love but it proved a star-crossed venture when after two months her landlord evicted her.
Her reaction was to ask, “What is going on God and why does this keep happening to me? I didn’t have nowhere to go. I was seeing myself back living from place to place like I’ve always been, still trying to take care of my kids and do my business.”
Stripping’s fast money tempted her before she rejected the idea. Then she found a haven at Restored Hope, a downtown transitional housing program for women and kids.
“Restored Hope has been stability for me. It’s a year program. It keeps me focused on my mission. I’ve been called to be that missionary, so I’m not so upset anymore about why I’ve been bounced around or why things have happened the way they have. There’s a way bigger purpose. If you just be really humble and wait and be patient to see what God’s doing, He’ll turn things around.”
It’s why she doesn’t dwell on the past or worry about what she doesn’t have right now.
“Nothing matters when it comes to material things. The only thing that matters to me is my health and just doing what I know is right in my heart to do. Even though I live the way I live, basically homeless, I realize I am very blessed. And I’m grateful.”
She’s aware her ability to stay positive and keep moving forward amid myriad struggles inspires others. She says some of her fellow Restored Hope residents tell her as much,
“It reminds me who I am and that when I don’t think people are watching me they are. I’ve always been a happy person. Even when I’m going through something, I pick myself up. I’ve always been a giving, loving person. Even my father said, ‘Because of you my life’s changed. I’ve seen where God has taken you through and you still hang on. If you can be changed from where you came from, I know there’s a God.’ Now he’s stopped drinking. He’s reborn.”
Her own rebirth would be hard for some to believe. “People who knew me in my past might say, ‘Oh no, not Aisha, with what she used to do?’” She doesn’t let skepticism or criticism get her down.
“I just get up knowing I gotta do what I gotta do, and I live one day at a time. I don’t let my financial and emotional path haunt me. I’m not in control, God’s in control. There’s nothing you can do but do what you need to do every day and be a part of hope.
“Too many people are hopeless. You can see it in their facial expressions and the way they do things. There’s no light in them. I’m not about that, I’m about life and living to the fullest and being happy with what I have and where I’m at because I know greatness will come some day for me. I’m a very favored woman in all things I do.”
She suspects she’s always had it in her to be the “apostolic entrepreneur” she brands herself today. “Sometimes you don’t discover it until things happen to you. I think I had it but I didn’t embrace it then. I heard so much negative in my life coming up that it turned me away…I said, ‘I’ll show you,’ and I made wrong decisions. What the devil meant for bad, God turned it for good.
“I’m a natural born hustler but I hustle in the right way now.”
View Aisha’s entire product line and read about how you can help her African mission at eshajewelfirellc.homestead.com.
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Louise Abrahamson’s Legacy of Giving Finds A Perfect Fit at The Clothesline, the Thrift Store the Octogenarian Founded and Still Runs at Boys Town
Even though I know better, I sometimes find myself making assumptions about people based solely on their appearance. Pint-sized octogenarian Louise Abrahamson didn’t look like my idea of a dynamo not to be trifled with when I first laid eyes on her but as I soon discovered that’s exactly what she is. This sweet little old Jewish lady has been running, variously with an iron fist and a velvet glove, a thrift shop at the Catholic run Boys Town for decades now and she shows no signs of slowing down. This story of a Jew deeply embedded at Boys Town reminded me of the deep relationship that Boys Town founder Father Edward Flanagan enjoyed with Jewish attorney Henry Monsky – a story I wrote about and that you can find on this blog. While Monsky’s contributions were more advisory, legal, and monetary, Louise’s are more cultural, charitable, and practical. My story about Louise that follows originally appeared in the Jewish Press.
Louise Abrahamson’s Legacy of Giving Finds A Perfect Fit at The Clothesline, the Thrift Store the Ocotgenarian Founded and Still Runs at Boys Town
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally appeared in the Jewish Press
Eighty-nine years ago, Omaha Jewish leader Henry Monsky befriended an Irish Catholic priest with whom he shared a dream of creating a safe haven for troubled youths. The priest found a site, but lacked funds. Monsky, a successful attorney and inveterate do-gooder, lent Rev. Edward Flanagan $90 for the first month’s rent on the original Boys Town building in downtown Omaha. Besides serving, pro bono, as attorney for both the home and the late Fr. Flanagan, Monsky was a member of the Boys Town board of directors from its 1917 inception until his death in 1947. His support of Fr. Flanagan and the youth care program got other civic-business leaders to follow suit. The rest is history. As Boys Town’s approach to serving at-risk children caught on, donations poured in and the organization expanded. Now, it’s become a much replicated national model and the names Fr. Flanagan and Boys Town are synonymous with youth care worldwide.
The role Monsky played in the then-fledging institution’s founding is even portrayed in the 1938 Oscar-winning film Boys Town.
Twenty-six years ago, an Omaha Jewish woman named Louise Abrahamson, a former legal stenographer, small business owner, retailer, grant writer, fundraiser and political advisor, got the idea of starting a thrift shop to outfit children at the home with new clothes and things. At the time, she was a secretary and much more at Boys Town. Struck by how little new arrivals had in the way of clothes or other possessions, she took it upon herself to solicit donations from clothing and sundry manufacturers. Donated goods began arriving at her home and were stored in her garage. She distributed the gifts to Boys Town residents and to other organizations helping families and children. Before long, the operation outgrew her garage and moved to new quarters on campus.
Today, she operates out of a retail store-like setting called The Clothesline. The volume of goods that comes in year-round is enough to keep the store’s neatly dressed shelves, bins and racks filled and to take up floor-to-ceiling sections of a warehouse storage area. At any given time the inventory — a typical shipment contains hundreds or thousands of items — includes everything from apparel to accessories to toiletries to toys. Each box must be unpacked, sorted and labeled. In 2005 alone she collected merchandise worth a combined commercial value of $1.3 million, a record year. And that’s only counting donations of $1,000 or more.
There, she applies her well-practiced people skills and business acumen — “I’ve done a lot of things in my life” — to sweet talk corporations out of in-kind gifts and to ease the transition displaced kids face miles away from home. All her considerable time on the project is given as a volunteer.
More than just a place where children get a new set of duds, The Clothesline is where kids find a friend in Abrahamson they can always confide in.
“She is so wonderful to all these kids. When they come in they get a hug and kiss,” said Betty Rubin, a friend and fellow volunteer at the store. “This is what makes it tick — the warmth of it. I mean, it’s very personal to her.”
“Louise is one of those rare people who flourishes by helping others,” said Fr. Val Peter, recently stepped down as executive director of Girls and Boys Town. “Her joy is in giving to others. She is an expert at human relations. She can talk major manufacturing reps into helping us and she has a way with the kids, too. She is an enormously happy person, and to be that happy you have to work at it.”
“This is my life,” Louise said by way of explaining why, at age 86, she still works at the store four days a week. “I get a lot of pleasure out of this. It’s just kind of a challenge to see if people remember me and send me stuff I ask for for the kids.”
Besides, the need that inspired her to start the store in the first place, is still there. Then, like now, newcomers arrive with few possessions and little trust. If anything, she said, kids today present “a lot more problems than when I first came here. I have just taken it into my heart to care about the kids. Generally, when they come in, I don’t settle for a handshake. I have a hug. I want them to know I truly care what happens to them. That, to me, is what sets the pace for a youngster. Rather than have them feel like a stranger or a truant, I want them to feel welcome,” said the former Louise Miller, an Omaha native and Central High graduate. “That’s why I tell them, ‘We want you here. It’s a great place to be. Make the most of it. If you take advantage of what we offer, we’ll never let you down.’ I love that about Boys Town. I like what we do for children.”
“Louise is a great ambassador for those kids,” Girls and Boys Town Public Relations Director John Melingagio said. “She manages to take some of the fear and anxiety away for them.”
On a typical day at the store, the pint-sized Abrahamson, crisply-attired in a pants and sweater suit and her hair nicely coiffured, is seated at her command center at the front of the shop, her phone, computer and files within easy reach. An adult man saunters in with a teenage boy trying hard to suppress his unease. The man’s a campus family teacher and the youth a newbie in need of threads to replace the banned gang clothes he’s come with.
She greets the teen. “Good morning. How are you?” He says, “What’s up?” “And you are?” “Tavonne,” he tells her. “Where you from?” “Baltimore.” “Baltimore, well you know cold weather then. You just pick out what you want, bring it up here and we’ll check it out. That’s all there is to it,” she explains.
A few minutes later, after trying on some pants, shirts and shoes, Tavonne’s back. Louise asks him, “Did you find what you’re looking for?” “Yeah.” “So now you’re all fixed up with dress clothes, right?” “Yeah.” “That’s good. How long have you been here?” “This is my second day.” “Second day, you’re an old-timer.” He smiles shyly. “Probably by the end of next week you’ll be sworn in as a Boys Towner. We’re glad to have you here.” The boy, warming to her, replies, “Thank you.” She tells him, “We hope you do well. It’s a great place to be. Now, I have these…if you want a watch,” she says, pushing a basket filled with nice men’s watches near him. He fishes through the bunch and finds one he wants. “I like this one.” “It’s yours.” “Thank you, I appreciate it.” “You’re very welcome. I want to wish you a merry Christmas.” “Same to you.” “And I hope things work out for you, dear.” “Thanks.”
It’s this kind of human exchange that keeps Abrahamson coming back day after day. “Yeah, that tells a story,” she said. “We get a lot of new kids in this time of year. Family teachers will come in with new children, most of them with little or no clothes other than what they have on their back. All our clothes are new and appropriate to wear at church and school. The kids pick out what they want.”
She said her empathy for them extends back to her own childhood. “I knew my folks loved me, but they were busy making a living and really didn’t have much time for me. I was lonesome. I needed somebody I thought cared. And I think that’s why I feel a special need to help children,” she said.
It was while working as a secretary in Boys Town’s Youth Care program she saw first hand the want and conceived the idea of a free clothing center. She got it up and running out of her home in no time.
“I’d see these unhappy youngsters come in carrying a grocery sack and I’d say, ‘Where’s your luggage?’ They’d say, ‘This is it.’ My husband and I used to be in retail — we had a shoes and clothing store — and I wondered if I called on our old dealers, would they help and send me what they have. So, those were the first people I wrote to. They were very giving and began sending merchandise to me.”
With the chutzpah all doers possess, she just thought it up and went ahead. “I did this strictly on my own. I didn’t ask anybody’s permission. I just started doing it,” she said. “Once I’d get the merchandise in, I’d open up the boxes and I’d send out a memo and invite the family teachers and the kids to come over my house.”
By then, Louise and her late husband of 58 years, Norman Abrahamson, lived alone. Their two sons, Hugh and Steve, were grown. She credits Norman for her success. “He taught me everything I know. He taught me how to greet people. He taught me how to go for the product. He taught me that being kind is unusual. He was very supportive. He encouraged me. He said, ‘Go for it, honey. You can do it.’ He was there when I asked for advice and when I faltered.” A former Edison Brothers shoe salesman, he opened his own retail men’s apparel and shoe stores, Hugh’s. He later became a real estate builder-developer.
Soon, the amount of donations was too much for the couple’s garage. “My husband said, ‘Don’t you think Boys Town would give you a spot?’ So, I went to Fr. Hupp (the late former executive director of Boys Town), who knew I was inviting the teachers and kids over to my house to get clothes, and he said, ‘We’ve got space down in the boiler room (of the Youth Care building). Can you hack that?’ ’Any place would be good,’’ I said. So, we had our stuff delivered there, and this is pretty much the way it started.”
She wore a mask to protect against fumes in the cramped boiler room. It was under Fr. Peter’s watch the operation moved from that dank place to its pleasant environs today — in the building that houses the U.S. postal station on campus.
“When Fr. Peter came aboard, we just went on from there. He and I worked very closely, especially at Christmas-time. The store grew and grew, as did the demand.”
She’s done it almost entirely on her own, too, running things the way she sees fit. “There’s nobody that’s been put here to watch me.”
Generations removed from Henry Monsky helping make the dream of Boys Town a reality, fellow Jew Louise Abrahamson is helping Boys Town fulfill its nonsectarian mission of providing a caring environment to homeless and abused children of all faiths and creeds. She’s familiar with Monsky’s legacy, too, as she helped organize a touring Nebraska Jewish Historical Society exhibit on him in collaboration with Boys Town. Fr. Peter said that if Monsky is the grandfather of Boys Town, then Abrahamson is “the grandmother. She is loved and appreciated here.”
Playing the role of matriarch to kids with severed family relationships appeals to her. “While they’re here, I am like their grandmother,” she said. “A lot of the young people come in and tell me their problems, and I’ll listen very carefully. They’re welcome to come in anytime. They don’t have to make an appointment.”
Her contact with the children often extends well past their graduation and departure from the home. “Even two or three years later,” she said, “kids can have hard luck. I’ll get a call that says, ‘Louise, so and so is going out on a job interview and doesn’t have a thing to wear.’ And I’ll say, ‘Send ‘em over.’ Now, where else can you go and get that kind of a feeling that you’re needed and wanted?”
The ties go well beyond that. Her desk at the front of the store displays photos sent by former Boys Town students, many pictured with families they’ve begun. She exchanges cards and letters, just like any good grandma does. “I keep in touch with a lot of the children after they leave,” she said.
Just don’t assume her kindly ways and diminutive stature mark her as a pushover.
“Louise is a very pleasantly, disarmingly assertive little old lady,” said Dan Daly, Girls and Boys Town’s Vice President and Director of Youth Care. “You see this pleasant looking, smiling, tiny person and pretty soon she’s got her hand in your right back pocket. That’s how Boys Town was founded. Her and Fr. Peter, made a very, very potent tandem. He knew what kind of talent she has at doing this sort of thing and he was very supportive of her. It’s grown and proliferated because of her personality and her keen business sense.”
So savvy is this nice little old Jewish lady in sizing up people, Daly said, that he and other Boys Town officials would steer family teacher candidates by her desk, so she could observe them. Her assessment factored into new hires. Her counsel was also sought ought off-campus by candidates for mayor, governor and senator. She even wrote a booklet to help prospective candidates weigh bids for public office.
Using her political skills, she routinely contacts corporate giants like Target, Wal-Mart, Dillards, Lands-End, Johnson & Johnson and Colgate, and gets them to donate surplus items. Her personal appeals, scripted herself, are laced with tug-on-your-heart pathos and practical let’s-do-business talk. She tells them, “We have so many young boys and girls who…desperately need clothing…I am asking for your help. If you have any donation department of your discontinued styles, over-stocks, irregulars or out-of-season merchandise, could I ask that you place us on your recipient list? Any merchandise sent can be a tax write-off…Thank you. I hope you will share in Boys Town’s grand mission.”
She doesn’t stop there, either. She follows up with phone calls and letters, always gently reminding potential donors of the need. Her persistence often pays off. “I’m after them all the time. I don’t take no for an answer. I keep pitching, and pitching kindly.” Every donor receives a personal thank you note from her.
Melingagio said the donations she brings in help Boys Town “leverage our dollars. Those in-kind gifts she gets from corporations allow the monies we get to go to things that help the kids get better.”
When she approached Fr. Peter with her concept for the store, he embraced it. “I knew that if we let Louise loose at The Clothesline, that it would become very big,” he said. “The best thing to do is to let Louise do her work. She does it better than anyone else.” He said the store’s proved a winning venture. “Oh, yes, it’s a great idea. We needed it badly. It helps everybody. The best ideas come from people like Louise who have talent and a willingness to make their ideas successful.”
He added there’s never been any thought of taking it out of her hands. “It has been Louise’s baby from the get-go. What we do here is we give people a job and say, You’re in charge of making it a success, and she’s made it a success. We’re all proud of her.” He confirmed there’s also been no talk of what will happen once she’s gone. “We don’t want to think about that. We tell her, Take your vitamins. Stay healthy. We need you for years to come. She’s it.”
Before she came on the scene with her business-like practices, Daly said, the home didn’t have a formal apparatus for processing donated goods: “There was a day when, without Louise, you would have walked in and seen just big piles of stuff, and Louise moved the organization away from that way of handling donations to a very effective, modern way where things are very attractively displayed to the kids and to the adults.”
Daly said Abrahamson is quite adept at “networking with family teachers. She alerts people when new stuff comes in. She’s always pushing the product, so to speak. Louise has her favorites. If she gets something in that she knows one little girl would like, she makes sure that little girl gets the first crack at it.” He said it’s not only the 500-some kids on campus who benefit from the fruits of her labor. Another 200 or so in foster care settings also have dibs on what she collects. When supplies or shipments exceed the Boys Town demand, she places the extra goods with places like The St. Francis House and the Salvation Army.
Her office is also the base for a whole other category of gifts she acquires for children. Daly said she manages to get kids passes to movies, concerts, athletic events, skating rinks and many other activities. She gets donated food for parties. She ensures every Boys Town resident has gifts at Christmas and graduation. “It’s a lot bigger than just The Clothesline,” he said.
Service to others is a lifelong habit. Whether advising politicos such as Kay Orr and Hal Daub, or helping run their campaigns for public office or volunteering with the American Red Cross, the Arthritis Foundation, the March of Dimes, Hadassah, the Special Olympics and the United Way or serving as a member of the credit committee of the Boys Town Federal Credit Union or as president of the Nebraska Jewish Historical Society, she gives her time in many ways.
Then there are the two years she devoted to caring for her son Steve after he was left a paraplegic as the result of an auto accident. He now lives independently. She became a vocal advocate for the rights and abilities of the handicapped. She was also careprovider for her husband after he contracted cancer.
Her good works have been recognized. Under her watch the Nebraska Jewish Historical Society won the Federation’s Achievement Award. She was nominated for the National Council of Jewish Women’s Humanitarian Award for “her great compassion for the needs of others.”
Nothing slows her down, either. A bad back that laid her up last year only kept her away from the store a few months, during which time she did all her business from home. The flow of merchandise never stopped. But she knows she can’t do it forever. That’s why she’d like to work out a plan for a successor — ideally someone like herself who, as Melingagio put it, “goes the extra mile.”
“I worry what’s going to happen to this place when I no longer can do it,” she said. “My hope is that there is somebody who has pretty much the idea that I have. That they’re caring and want so much for the kids that they know how to express that caring. Because that’s the bottomline. That’s what it’s all about.”
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Dick Holland Responds to Far Reaching Needs in Omaha
Dick Holland is the proverbial fat cat with a heart of gold. The avuncular Omaha philanthropist has been a major player on the local philanthropic scene for a few decades now. He was already a highly successful advertising executive when he heeded Warren Buffett’s advice and invested in Berkshire Hathaway. Holland and his late wife Mary became part of that circle of local investors who could trace their incredible wealth to that fateful decision to ride the Buffett-Berkshire snowball that made millionaires out of dozens of ordinary investors. Unlike some donors who prefer to remain silent, Holland is not shy about expressing his opinions about most anything. This classic liberal makes no bones about where he stands on social issues, and you have to give him credit – he really does put his money where his mouth is. The causes that he and Mary put their energies and dollars behind have helped shape the social, cultural, aesthetic landscape in Omaha.
Holland Performing Arts Center
Dick Holland Responds to Far Reaching Needs in Omaha
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally published in the New Horizons
When it comes to big time philanthropy in Omaha, a few individuals and organizations stand out. Richard Holland has become synonymous with king-sized generosity through the Holland Foundation he and his late wife Mary started.
If the 88 year-old retired advertising executive is not making some large financial gift he’s being feted for his achievements or contributions. In April he was honored in Washington, D.C. with the Horatio Alger Award “for his personal and professional success despite humble and challenging beginnings.” While his success is indisputable, how much adversity he faced is debatable. Closer to home Holland was presented the Grace Abbott Award by the Nebraska Children and Families Foundation “for his work in creating positive change for children through community.” No one questions his devotion to helping children and families, causes that legendary social worker Grace Abbott of Nebraska championed.
Several area buildings bear the Holland name in recognition of gifts the couple made, including the Holland Performing Arts Center in downtown Omaha and the Child Saving Institute in midtown. Mary was a CSI volunteer and benefactor. Her passion for its mission of improving the lives of at-risk children was shared by Dick once he saw for himself the pains that staff and volunteers go to in “restoring” broken children.
The couple made sharing their wealth, specifically giving back to their hometown, a major priority through the establishment of their foundation in 1997. Since Mary’s death in 2006 Dick, as he goes by, has continued using the foundation’s sizable assets, $60 million today and expected to be much more when he’s gone, to support a wide range of educational, art, health, human service and community projects.
True to his social justice leanings, Holland is a mover and shaker in Building Bright Futures. The birth-through-college education initiative provides an infrastructure of tutoring, mentoring, career advice and scholarship support for disadvantaged youth.
Like many mega donors he prefers deflecting publicity from himself to the organizations he supports. He makes some notable exceptions to that rule, however. For one thing, he vociferously advocates people of means like himself give for the greater good. For another, he believes in speaking his mind about issues he cares about and isn’t afraid to ruffle feathers along the way, even if those feathers belong to a political kingpin.
Just last March Holland took the occasion of accepting the NEBRASKAlander Award from Gov. Dave Heineman to criticize a stance by the conservative Republican leader. Heineman publicly opposes renewal of government-funded prenatal services for low income immigrant women in America illegally. Holland, who supports the care, used the evening’s platform to editorialize.
“No one should be denied prenatal care in Nebraska,” he bluntly told the black tie audience and the governor. His comments were viewed as ungracious or inappropriate by some and as a strategic use of the bully pulpit by others.
Consistent with his Depression-era roots, Holland is not rigidly bound by the constraints of political correctness and so he doesn’t mince words or tip-toe around controversy when he talks. Neither does he hide his political allegiance.
“I’m a liberal Democrat and I underline that,” said Holland, a Unitarian who also prides himself on his free-thinking ethos.
Dick Holland
He recently sat down for an interview at his home, where he readily shared his frank, colorful, unparsed, unapologetic impressions on the state of America in this prolonged recession. Critics may say someone as rich as Holland can afford to be opinionated because he’s already made his fortune and therefore nothing short of a mismanaged investment portfolio can hurt his standing. Besides, dozens of organizations and institutions rely on his goodwill and they’re not about to object to his pronouncements.
Those who know him understand that Holland’s just being himself when he says it like it is, or at least the way he sees it. Most would concede he’s earned the right to say his piece because unlike some fat cats, he worked for a living. His proverbial ship came in only after he’d launched a highly successful business. It was after that he followed his gut and his head and became an early Berkshire Hathaway investor. The millions he accrued made him a Player, but he first made a name for himself as a partner in one of Omaha’s premier advertising agencies, Holland, Dreves and Reilly, which later merged with a Lincoln agency to become Swanson, Rollheiser, Holland, Inc.
All along the way, from young-man-in-a-hurry to middle-aged entrepreneur to mature tycoon, he’s been speaking his mind, only when you carry the clout and bankroll he does, and make the kind of donations he makes, people are more apt to listen.
The Omaha Central High graduate came from an enterprising family. His father Lewis Holland emigrated to the States from London, by way of Canada, where a summer working the wheat fields convinced him his hands were better suited for illustration than harvesting. Lewis settled in Omaha and rose to advertising director for Orchard and Wilhelm Furniture. He later opened his own ad agency, where Dick eventually joined him and succeeded him.
Before Dick became a bona fide Mad Man in the ad game, he began studies at Omaha University. Then the Second World War intervened and after seeing service in the chemical corps he returned home to finish school, with no plans other than to make it in business and study art. Indeed, he was all set to go to New York when he met Mary. Their courtship kept him here, where he found the ad world fed his creative, intellectual, entrepreneurial instincts. He built Holland, Dreves, Reilly into the second biggest agency in the state, behind only Bozell and Jacobs.
He was certainly a well-connected, self-made man, but by no means rich. That is until he started investing with fellow Central High grad Warren Buffett, who is 10 years his junior. Much like Buffett, he’s careful about where he invests and donates his money. When Holland sees a problem or a need he can help with, he does his homework before committing any funds.
“I’m not throwing money at it,” he said, adding that the best thing about giving is getting “results.” He said, “It’s always great to have ideas but somehow or other somebody has to pay, and pay big, in order to get something done.”
The socially-conscious Holland is keenly aware that in these financially unstable times the gap between the haves and have-nots has only widened, something he finds unforgivable in what is held out to be a land of plenty for all
“What has happened in the United States over the past 40 years has been to make a helluva lot of people poor and less wealthy and to make a few people much richer, and we’ve done that by taxation, by trade policies, by not controlling health insurance costs,” he said. “We increased poverty during this period by at least 35 or 40 percent, but the worst thing that’s happened is the middle class itself, which was coming along after World War II very well, suddenly starting making no gain, particularly when inflation’s taken into account.”
He said the great promise of the middle class, that repository of the American Dream, has actually lost ground. The prospects of poor folks attaining middle class status and the-home-with-a-white-picket-fence dream that goes along with it seems unreachable for many given the gulf between minimum wage earnings and home mortgage rates
“It’s almost ridiculous,” he said. “We might as well say we’ve screwed ‘em. I mean, it’s a really sad thing because this country is supposed to be a liberal democracy. The general idea is to provide an equal opportunity and life for almost everyone you possibly can. It sure as hell isn’t having huge groups of impoverished people going to prison and posing all kinds of social problems. All these things should be brought under control by education. It is not supposed to be a South American republic with wealth at the top and a whole vast lower class at the bottom, and we’re headed in that direction unless we make some serious changes in the way we approach this subject.”
When Holland considers the deregulated environment that led to unchecked corporate greed, the Wall Street bust, the home mortgage collapse and the shrinking safety net for the disadvantaged, he sees a recipe for disaster.
“We began to deregulate everything, thinking that regulations made things worse and deregulation would make everything better, and the truth is there are a lot of things that need to be regulated, including human behavior in the marketplace,” he said. “We just ignored that. In fact, it’s almost like saying our social system is every man for himself, and that’s crazy. It’s not every man for himself, we’re interdependent on one another on everything we do. This whole thing is wrong. We’re beginning to see we have to make some changes, but the changes I’ve seen so far are not nearly as drastic as I think they should be.
“I guess I sound like a doomsday guy, but I really believe unless we correct some of these things the United States risks its future.”
The health care reform debate brought into stark relief for Holland how far apart Americans are on basic remedies to cure social ills.
“Why can’t we get together more on this?” he asked rhetorically. “I have a hunch that part of it is misunderstanding, a growing ignorance among a large body of the populace, not recognizing just exactly what has happened. Talking about health care reform, poor people or middle class people objecting to it don’t seem to understand all the benefits they’re going to gain from it, they’re worried their health care won’t be as good as it was when it’ll be just as good,”
He said health care reform will help the self-employed and small business employees get the coverage they need but couldn’t afford before and will allow persons with preexisting conditions to qualify without being denied. Someone who will benefit from reform is right under his own roof.
“I have a helper who looks after the house. She has a preexisting condition. I pay her insurance, and it’s just over $1,300 a month,” an amount the woman couldn’t possibly afford on her own. “It’s absolutely wrong,” he said.He said the ever rising cost of health care under a present system of excess and waste drains the nation of vital resources that could be applied elsewhere.
“There’s no question in my mind that a nation as wealthy as the United States having to pay 17 percent of its gross national product for health care versus every other advanced country in the world sticking around 10 or 11 is just leaving several hundred billion dollars on the table that should be available for education, which at the primary level is in terrible shape.”Education has become the main focus of Holland’s philanthropy. Years ago he began seeing the adverse effects of inadequate education. He and Mary became involved in two local programs, Winners Circle and All Our Kids, that assist underachieving schools and students in at-risk neighborhoods. The couple saw the difference that extra resources make in getting kids to do better academically.
Dick Holland with his late wife, Mary
He views education as the key to addressing many of the endemic problems impacting America’s inner cities, including Omaha’s. He wasn’t surprised by what a 2007 Omaha World-Herald series revealed in terms of African-American disparity. Blacks here experience some of the worst poverty in the nation and lag far behind the majority population in employment and education. He said he and other local philanthropists, such as Susan Buffett, were already looking into the issue and formulating Building Bright Futures as a means to close ever widening achievement gaps.
“I think one of the things we don’t really understand really well about cause is the effect of abject poverty,” said Holland. “Most people who have a decent life don’t understand that having no money, no transportation, not having an adequate diet or health care or stimulating opportunities for children in a very poor family is a straight line to prison and social problems. Those children, more than half of them, enter kindergarten not ready at all, with limited vocabularies of 400 words when they should have 1,200 to 1,500, and you can just go from there and it just all goes down hill.”
He said those critical of the job teachers do miss the point that too many kids enter school not ready to learn.
“That’s not because a bunch of teachers are dumb, that’s because there’s a bunch of kids that have not been looked after properly from the beginning. You can blame teachers until the cows come home, but I just say to you, How is a teacher going to teach a child who is that far behind? It’s almost impossible, and that’s the first great neglect. If we had been doing that differently, we would avoid an awful lot of this. In fact, we’d avoid most of it.”
When students enter school unprepared to learn, he said, there’s little that can be done.
“After they get into the grades, there again, there’s no family, no money, no reading, no looking after, no stimulation, no going places, and the net result is the child goes from 1st through 4th grade not catching up and instead starting to diminish. By the 7th and 8th grades they find out they can’t hack it and they get awfully damn tired of being regarded as dumb, and the net effect of that is dropping out.
“It’s as plain as the nose on your face this is what goes on and this is what we don’t do anything about. It’s a tragedy and one of the great national disasters.”
Things get more complicated for children who enter the foster care or juvenile justice systems. Teen pregnancy and truancy add more challenges. The entrenched gang activity and gun violence in Omaha, he said, has at its source poverty, broken homes, school drop outs, lack of job skills and few sustainable employment options.
He said the fact the majority of Omaha Public Schools students come from households whose income is so low they qualify for the free/reduced lunch program indicates how widespread the problem is. “When a child has to have a free lunch all you can say is something is terribly wrong,” he said.
To those who would indict an entire school district he points out OPS students attending schools in middle and upper middle class neighborhoods do as well or better than students in the Westside and Millard districts. He said the real disparity exists between students from affluent environments and those from impoverished environments.
“The way I sometimes put it to people is, ‘The kids make the school.’ It’s a funny thing how we don’t understand this. It’s very obvious to me,” he said, that on average children from “reasonable affluence” do better than children from poverty. He said Winners Circle and All Our Kids, two programs under the Building Bright Futures umbrella, are full of success stories, as is another effort he and Bright Futures endorses, Educare. Through these and other programs Bright Futures is very intentional in putting in place the support students need from early childhood on.
“We’re going to have a thousand kids this year in early childhood programs. We have organizations that are working in something like 12 or 14 schools. We’ve got five hundred volunteers of all kinds. And we actually have cases. From the very beginning it’s been shown that if we get a hold of a child, even after this bad beginning, and mentor him properly we can get him higher up in the education scale. In All Our Kids we have 40 kids in college, 50 that have graduated, several with master’s degrees, and every one of those kids was a kid at risk. So we know what to do if we work hard enough on it. What we have to overcome is the kid who doesn’t think he’s so hot. At home an impoverished child often gets put down, diminishing his ego. We have to overcome that, and that’s one of the things we really try to do.”
Mary Holland recognized there must be a continuum of support in place all through a student’s development. Dick said that’s why she encouraged the merger between Winners Circle, whose focus is on elementary school students, and All Our Kids, whose focus is on junior high and high school students.
“We’re trying to take those kids all the way through the 11th grade, taking them every where and teaching them what college requires, what businesses are like, exposing them to the world,” he said. “Bright Futures is not a five or six year program, it’s a 15-year program. It’s gotta be done like that.”
The idea is to get kids on the right track and keep them there. Getting kids to believe in themselves is a big part of it. “If you don’t have a lot of self-confidence you don’t try things, and we try to overcome that. With some kids it works. Some find out, I’m better than I thought, I can do that.”
The goal is qualifying students for college and their attaining a higher education degree. Towards that end, Bright Futures works with students from 12th grade through college.
“We follow you there,” said Holland. “We’ve set up things in universities to help people. We’re still trying to bring it all together. It’s an effort to refresh, restore, make them understand what they have to achieve in order to do anything in life.”
Enough funding is in place that cost is not an issue for Bright Futures students.
“We have adequate scholarship money for thousands, we don’t even have to worry about that, and yet we don’t have enough people to take them that qualify. Just because you graduate from high school doesn’t mean you’re ready for college. Sometimes I think they (schools) get ‘em out of high school just to get ‘em out of high school.”
Holland has a better appreciation than most for the barriers that make all this difficult in practice. He and Mary mentored some young people through All Our Kids and they experienced first-hand how things that most of us take for granted can be stumbling blocks for others. He recounted the time he and Mary mentored a young single mother. Things started out promisingly enough but then a familiar pattern set in that unraveled the whole scenario. He said the young woman got a job, her employer liked her and her performance, but she stopped coming to work and she got fired. The same thing happened at another job. And then another. Each time, he said, the challenge of affording child care, getting health problems addressed and finding reliable transportation sabotaged both the young mother’s and the Hollands’ best efforts.
“She couldn’t hold a job, and we gave up,” he said. It’s not something he’s proud of, but he’s honest about the frustration these situations can produce. Other mentoring experiences ended more positively but still highlighted the challenges people face.
“You find out an awful lot about how tough this is because they don’t have the same kind of get up and go confidence like my daughters, who think that nothing is beyond them. You try to instill that, and when you see a little bit of it happening it’s worth the price of admission.”
He acknowledges that despite government cutbacks there’s still plenty of public aid to help catch people who fall through the cracks. But he feels strongly that a different emphasis is required — one that helps people become self-sufficient contributors.
“We have all kinds of government programs designed to grab these people as they fall off the cliff. The failure is to raise them so they can climb cliffs. There’s no question in my mind sooner or later it’s going to be a major government project. It has to be.”
Policies also need to change in terms of guaranteeing people a living wage, he said.
“Let me give you an idea of how we look at things,” said Holland. “We had a $2 (hourly) minimum wage in 1975 and that was adequate to get people out of poverty, it really was. But since the ‘80s the minimum wage has not kept pace with the cost of living and inflation. It’s kept people in poverty. The Congress of the United States, Republicans and Democrats alike, failed to really go after that. They failed to understand it.”
He said despite the minimum wage having increased to $7.25 in Nebraska and higher in other states, “it ought to be $10 or $11” to give families a chance of not just getting by but getting ahead. “We’re not looking at this problem the right way, we’re just creating it. There’s a dismissal of the problem by people that don’t have it.”
Similarly, he said early childhood programs must be learning centers not babysitting or recreational centers, that address the entire needs of children.
“We have a fractional help system. Somebody helps them after school, somebody sets up a club, somebody sets up something else over here. Some of those after school things make you feel better, they’re fun to go to, they’ve got cookies, but that doesn’t focus on their actual intellectual needs. There’s a lot of that that goes on.”
Holland calls for systemic change that comprehensively affects lives.
“I’m more and more positive it’s going to take a revolution. We’re going to have to stop what we’re doing and start doing something along the lines I’ve talked about. At various times there’s been various suggestions about poverty, but one thing that will help alleviate poverty a helluva lot is money, there’s no getting around it. If it takes 5 or 10 percent of the gross national product it will be a benefit over time because once you have a little money you begin to be able to do a few things, and then you begin to learn a few things, and your children do the same.”
A model approach in his eyes is Educare’s holistic early childhood education. “We’re (surrogate) parents there, that’s what we are,” he said, “and the people that bring their children there know what’s happening, they know that suddenly the whole world is opening for that child. When those kids enter kindergarten they’re ready, they’ve got these big vocabularies. We know it can be done, but we also know the price.”
To those who might balk at the $12,000-$13,000 annual cost of caring for a child in a state-of-the-art center, he said it’s but a fraction of what it costs to incarcerate someone or to navigate someone through the justice system or the foster care system.
Agree or disagree with him, you can be sure Dick Holland will continue putting his money where his mouth is and where his heart is.
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The Joy of Giving Sets Omaha’s Child Saving Institute on Solid Ground for the Future
Omaha is known as an unusually philanthropic community and the following story for Metro Magazine (www.spiritofomaha.com) charts how a venerable childcare institution found support for a badly needed new building from a circle of dedicated divers and why these well-heeled individuals contributed to the project. The result is that the drab, old and cramped institutional-looking structure was remade into a gleaming, new and expansive showcase. What a difference a few million dollars can make.
The new, redesigned Child Saving Institute
The Joy of Giving Sets Omaha‘s Child Saving Institute on Solid Ground for the Future
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally published in Metro Magazine (www.spiritofomaha.com)
The Child Saving Institute has a brand spanking new home for its mission of “responding to the cry of a child.” CSI dedicated the new digs at 4545 Dodge St. in March, turning the next chapter in the organization’s 106-year history. The social service agency addresses the needs of at-risk children, youth and families.
The project was made possible by donors who saw the need for a larger, more dynamic, more kidscentric space that better reflected the organization’s expanded services and more comfortably accommodated staff and clients. A $10.7 million campaign secured funds for a complete makeover of the old building, which was stripped to its steel beams, redesigned and enlarged. An endowment was created.
The goal was soon surpassed and by the time the three-year campaign concluded, $12.2 million was raised.
Upon inheriting the former Safeway offices site in 1982 CSI officials knew it was a poor fit for the child care, emergency shelter and adoption programs then constituting the nonprofit’s services. The mostly windowless building was a drab, dreary bunker, its utilitarian interiors devoid of color, light, whimsy, fun.
The two-story structure was sound but lacked such basic amenities as an elevator. The day care and early childhood education classrooms lacked their own restrooms. Limited space forced staff to share offices. Inadequate conference rooms made it difficult for the board of directors and the guild to meet.
The drab, old Child Saving Institute
There were not enough dedicated facilities for counseling/therapeutic sessions. As CSI’s services have broadened to address youth, parenting and family issues, with an emphasis on preventive and early interventive help, more clients come through the doors.
Additionally, the organization’s outdoor playground was cramped and outmoded. Limited parking inconvenienced staff and clients alike.
“We were dissatisfied with the building,” CEO Judy Kay said. “It had at least been 10 years prior even to the decision to build that we knew we needed a different space.” She said CSI once explored new building options but “gave up, because, honestly, we all became so frustrated and we didn’t have the funds to do it.”
Enter philanthropists Dick and Mary Holland. The late Mary Holland was a CSI board member with a passion for the agency and its mission. At his wife’s urging Dick Holland toured the place Mary spoke so glowingly about. Two things happened. His big heart ached when he saw the children craving affection and his bad knees screamed from all the stairs he had to climb.
Holland pestered CSI to install an elevator. One day he and Mary summoned then-CEO Donna Tubach Davis and development director Wanda Gottschalk to a special meeting. “And at that meeting he said, ‘Ladies, it’s time to have an elevator. We’re going to get started on this project,’ and he handed us a very large check. It was for just under $3 million,” Gottschalk recalled.
He wasn’t done giving. After Mary passed CSI remembered her at a board luncheon. Upon accepting a plaque in her memory daughter Amy surprised CSI with a million dollar check from her father.
“I don’t think anybody in the city could hear anything more meaningful to them then to have Dick Holland say I will help you,” said Gottschalk.
Mary and Dick Holland
The CSI campus is named after Mary Holland. Dick didn’t want his name anywhere but conceded to the elevator being dubbed, “Dick’s Lift.” RDG Schutte Wilscam Birge’s redesign more than doubled the square footage, opened up the interior to create bright, spacious work areas, added multiple meeting rooms and provided vibrant colors and active play centers. The large lobby is awash in art and light.
CSI can now serve twice the number of children in its day care.
The Hollands’ generous donations launched the building-endowment campaign. A committee of past board presidents set about raising the remaining funds.
“We were very blessed with their help.” Gottschalk said. “These past board presidents obviously also had invested a lot in CSI and cared very deeply about it.”
She said donors become “total advocates” and ambassadors for CSI. As a result, she said, “we were able to raise the $12.2 million with about 30 people.” None of it may have happened, she said, had Holland not taken the trouble to see for himself why his wife was so moved.
“Mary had become an important participant and she got me interested in it,” he said. “Together we began to do whatever we could for the Child Saving Institute. It just became one of the loves of our life. It was a pleasure to work with them and we got all kinds of things done. We saw opportunities to do more things, bigger things, and in a decent environment.”
“He was truly then invested in child saving and what we do here,” Gottschalk said. “The passion that he has for kids just keeps coming through.”
The Hollands’ enthusiasm won over others.
“We got some of our friends interested in it,” he said.
Such links can pay big dividends.
“I think it’s always about the relationships,” Gottschalk said. “It’s a one-on-one relationship. It can be with any one of us on staff. A lot of times those relationships are through board members.”
CSI was delighted when Holland offered to loosen some well-heeled friends’ purse strings. Gottschalk accompanied him. “He’s very powerful. It’s very hard to say no to Dick,” she said. Sometimes the Hollands worked on their own.
“One of the donors asked to meet with just Dick and Mary,” she said. “They walked out of this gentleman’s house with a million dollar check.”
One friend the Hollands turned onto CSI was the late Tom Keogh. The retired architect volunteered there nurturing babies.
“He rocked, he cuddled, he wiped noses. He’d eat with the kids. He was phenomenal,” said CSI Developmental Child Care Director Kathleen Feller.
“It made Tom’s retirement very meaningful,” his wife Rae said.
When a weak immune system dictated Tom avoid the child care area he helped in other ways — filing, stuffing envelopes and serving on the board of directors.
“He also brought with him his architect’s mind,” said Kay, noting that Keogh shared with staff a book he read that urged connecting children to the outdoors. His enthusiasm set in motion a nature playground.
“Tom was very instrumental in helping develop that,” Kay said. “He worked with a young man he had mentored who helped design it.”
The playground became his sweet challenge.
“He solicited in-kind donations from nurseries, irrigation companies sod companies, stone companies,” Rae said.
He didn’t stop there. “Tom went out and raised a lot of money and contributed himself,” Gottschalk said.
Rae said her husband rarely approached others to support his causes but in the case of CSI he did. “It had to be something that he was truly interested in before he would ask anybody else to contribute,” she said.
That same passion got Rae involved, too. Since Tom’s death she’s continued the family’s support.
She said before donating to an organization it’s vital “you get to know what their beliefs are and how they handle things. There’s no replacement for that personal contact.” CSI won the Keoghs over. “We got to know the staff and the operation,” she said. “We were very impressed by how they treated the children. They’re very careful with the care they give. It’s a very warm environment.”
For her, as it was for Tom, giving’s return on investment is priceless: “It’s very simple,” she said, “I think you gain more than you give. The personal joy I receive in giving is important to me.”
Former CSI board member Charles Heider, who contributed to the building-endowment, was long ago sold on the agency. “I saw the mission and how they were carrying out their good work,” he said. “I was impressed by their good management. It’s a very good organization.” When the building campaign got underway he didn’t hesitate.
“I was quick to respond when they asked if I wanted to be involved financially.”
It’s gratifying for him to see CSI realize its building and endowment goals.
“The satisfaction is that they are obviously moving forward. If they weren’t they wouldn’t have the new building,” he said. “The enthusiasm they have with this new facility is very evident. They built a very attractive building.”
Heider said behind the gleaming facade is a track record of substance and service.
“Buildings by themselves don’t satisfy the mission,” he said. “CSI has a marvelous record of assisting young people. My wife and I have enjoyed giving to it.”
The Paul and Oscar Giger Foundation that Janet Acker and her two siblings administer has long supported CSI.
“We’re just a little foundation,” Acker said. “We can’t support everything. We have to pick and choose and do little projects. We fund a lot of programs that affect kids and music. We’ve given pianos away all over Omaha.”
For CSI’s nature playground the foundation donated an outdoor xylophone in memory of Acker’s late aunt, Ruth Musil Giger. The instrument belonged to Giger, who was a piano/organ instructor. “This was a real match with Aunt Ruth’s interests in music,” Acker said.
Previously the foundation supported CSI’s emergency respite center and adoption program. While the foundation’s support can’t compare to the mega gifts of others, Acker said, “You need a lot of little donors to pull off a big project.”
Gottschalk said CSI depends on contributions from “our bread and butter donors” to help fund daily operations. Donors who give a few hundred dollars or even at the $25 or $10 levels are vital, she said, as major funds are often restricted for certain uses. If CSI’s to remain sustainable, she said, a safety net must secure donations of all sizes, from diverse funding streams, year-round.
Everyone has their own reason for giving. What’s the joy of giving for Dick Holland? “Results,” he said. In CSI he sees an organization helping undo the damage some children suffer and an agency needing a new space to further its mission. “We were in a position to put up enough funds to make some of the ideas a reality,” he said. “It’s always great to have ideas but somehow or other somebody has to pay, and pay big, in order to get something done.”
He said he makes his donations public because “I’ve learned I actually influence a few people. I’m sure if somebody hears I’m into a thing big they say, ‘Well, he’s not just playing around.’ I hope it’s true.”
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Tyler Owen – Man of MAHA
Image by ruralocity via Flickr
UPDATE: The 2011 MAHA Music Festival lineup has just been announced and the headliners for the August 13 event are major indie artists: Guided by Voices; Matisyahu; and Cursive. The subject of my story below, Tyler Owen, is one of the founders and driving forces of this emerging Omaha festival.
One of the best parts of my job is getting to meet people who are making things happen in my community, the proverbial movers and shakers we all read about but rarely ever encounter. Well, as a cultural journalist in my hometown of Omaha, Neb. I consistently get the chance to meet all manner of individuals who are making a difference here and elsewhere. My assignments interviewing and profiling these figures allows me the opportunity and privilege of sharing their stories and activities with not only the Omaha community but with the larger community that the Web makes possible. The following story is about one of Omaha’s young professionals, Tyler Owen, now making his mark on the scene in business, the arts, community service, and leadership. As Omaha’s Old Guard begins to fade away Owen and others from his generation are poised to take over the reins, much as he’s done in his own family’s business. I look forward to Owen and his peers in the 30 and 40-something age group to continue the growth and momentum that’s helped Omaha come out of its shell the last decade to become one of the great urban success stories in America. My story appears in the March issue of Metro Magazine (www.spiritofomaha.com/Metro-Magazine/March-2011/Tyler-Owen-Cover-Story/).
Tyler Owen – Man of MAHA
©by Leo Adam Biga
Originally published in Metro Magazine (www.spiritofomaha.com/Metro-Magazine/March-2011/Tyler-Owen-Cover-Story)
Tyler Owen hails from an Omaha legacy family who has made a fortune in the steel industry and who spreads their wealth around. The Owen Foundation funds higher education, cultural programs, social agencies and the Henry Doorly Zoo. While he may not have a big red “S” printed across his chest, this fourth generation homegrown entrepreneur/philanthropist has already staked his claim as (okay, not METROPOLIS’ but MAHA’s) “man of steel”.
As a young professional, Tyler Owen carries on his family’s legacy of giving back. He’s also staked out his own territory as a volunteer with various creative and community endeavors close to his heart.
BREAKING THE MOLD
He doesn’t fit the mold of a steel executive. For starters, he’s a one-time actor and a lifelong rocker. Growing up, the Westside High graduate spent far more time practicing the piano and playing the guitar than he did grooming to be a titan of industry. He fronted his own garage band, The Bottom Line.
After graduating from the University of Colorado he pursued acting and music careers on the west coast. He parlayed his good looks, easy charm and modest talent into screen extra gigs– his credits include a minor speaking part in a Murder She Wrote– and releases of original recordings with his group, The Eye. He headed his own small record label. Along the way he wrote an unpublished novel and learned to fly.
Throughout this period of finding himself his family encouraged him.
“My parents were incredibly supportive,” he said. “They were like, ‘You’ve gotta go do whatever you want to do and you’ve got to come back to this (the family business) on your terms– not stay here on our terms.’ It’s great because I don’t have a single ounce of resentment about being in the business. If anything, it was worth leaving and maturing to the point where I accepted it, rather than being thrust [into] it.”
UP FROM THE ROOTS
Tyler and his wife Lisa returned to Omaha for good in 2001 to start a family. Following tradition, he began at the bottom of Paxton & Vierling Steel, a steel processor, in order to learn the operation from the ground up.
Today, the 38 year-old is the fourth generation of his family at Owen Industries, of which the Carter Lake, Iowa-based P & V is one of several divisions. He heads day to day operations at Lincoln Structural Solutions, a Lincoln, Neb. supplier of nuclear grade construction materials. Playing to his creative strengths, he handles marketing and branding for Owen Industries. P & V’s “iron is in our blood” tag is his.
As businessman, husband and father of four, Owen’s not so much abandoned his free-spirited ways as settled down to focus on a few key passions.
In 2009 he helped found the local MAHA Music Festival, a one-day phantasmagorical immersion in rock. The free, nonprofit event takes place at the Lewis & Clark Landing on the downtown riverfront. The fest’s expressed aim is “community building.” MAHA 2011 is set for August 13th.
He served two terms on the City of Omaha’s Human Rights and Relations Board. His tenure coincided with the public flap over the police auditor office. He fought hard to retain the auditor but in the end the post was eliminated by the city.
The self-described “bibliophile” is in his fifth year on the Omaha Public Library Foundation Board, a period that’s included the resignation of library director Rivkah Sass, the hiring of her successor, Gary Wasdin, and staving off budget cuts.
Owen’s steeped in the local philanthropic community through his and his family’s long involvement in Ak-Sar-Ben, which he calls “a great organization.” He and Lisa have also helped organize major fundraisers for the Omaha Boys and Girls Club.
The example of being a good steward has always been there as expectation and obligation. Whether donating time or money, he learned it’s the right thing to do.
THE SPIRIT OF OMAHA
“There seems to be an overwhelming sense of giving back in this community and of our being greater than the sum of our parts. There’s this kind of bonding together into making something bigger,” Owen said. “I think that comes back to an Omaha thing. I don’t think people in Omaha suffer a lot of grandiose, inflated egos, so there is this spirit of– let’s actually create something, rather than bluster about something.”
The Omaha work ethic of getting things done is one his family’s exemplified. Now that he’s in a position to lead, he finds few things as satisfying as giving back.
“I think any time you serve something outside of yourself it’s a satisfying experience. People may quibble with where donor dollars go, but in the end,” he said, “it’s not important how you give, it’s only important that you give.”
An advantage Omaha offers, he said, is that it’s still small enough for an individual or an organization or a small group of philanthropists to make a big difference. “One person can change the world from here,” he said.
Social media is only helping Owen (and others like him who want to make a difference) in their efforts to communicate and collaborate. “People are more connected and more aware of what other people are doing,” he said, “and so that offers more opportunities for overlap.”
THE SOCIAL NETWORK
MAHA’s an example of a few kindred spirits joining forces to launch an event that depends on social media for its traction. Owen, together with Tre Brashear, Mike App and Mike Toohey, made MAHA happen after years of kicking around the idea.
Owen’s smart enough to pull in some veteran live music promoters, including Jeff Davis the first two years (and now Marc Leibowitz) to lend their expertise. “I’m surrounded by incredibly bright guys,” he said. A team of volunteers stages and manages the event, with sponsors underwriting and promoting it.
All that help and experience, he said, has helped MAHA go off without any major hitches. Attendance grew from year one to year two. The goal is to evolve it into a multi-day fest with various arts offerings. Festival planning goes on all year.
MULIT-DIMENSIONAL
For Owen, there’s no conflict jumping from his music thing (he still writes, plays and releases his own music and he’s reunited with his band from high school) to his corporate thing.
“I’m pretty balanced between left and right brain, so I have this ability to switch back and forth. I don’t really see them separately.”
Whether rocking in his basement or strategizing a P & V campaign or designing MAHA T-shirts or playing with his kids, he’s feeding that same seeking spirit that drives him. “Life is about taking advantage of opportunity,” he said.
Tyler Owen may not follow his old mantra of “you’ve got to try everything once,” but he’s still burning to make his mark on the world.
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A Magazine and a Mission Founded on a Spirit of Giving: Metro Magazine Publisher Andy Hoig Celebrates Philanthropy
Image by herzogbr via Flickr
As a contributing writer to newspapers and magazines for going on 25 years I’ve had about every kind of assignment imaginable. However, there’s always room for a new first. The following story is just such a case. Metro Magazine publisher Andy Hoig asked me to write a story about her publication, which is celebrating 20 years in print. I’ve been a regular contributor to the mag for a couple years and I appreciated her thinking of me for a project that meant a lot to her. As a freelancer I don’t usually get to know very well the publishers and editors and staffers at the various pubs I contribute to because I essentially work out of my home and the vast majority of my contact with these clients is by email and phone. It’s the same with Metro, though in working on this assignment I do feel I got to know Andy and her team a bit better. Of course, there’s something to be said too for keeping a professional distance in these matters. In preparing the story below I felt like a distant third cousin writing a family history I was only dimly aware of before, and that is I think how it should be. I now feel more invested in that family, an apt word for Metro because it was actually started by Andy’s father, veteran newspaperman Bob Hoig. I first met Andy while working for her father’s Midlands Business Journal and for what was originally called the Omaha Metro Update, later known as the Metro Monthly. And so, you see, I’ve always been a part of the family, though there was a 20-year interruption in our relationship while I went off to pursue other freelance options and Andy grew the publication in wonderful new directions. We’re together again and I value the reunion.
A Magazine and a Mission Founded on a Spirit of Giving: Metro Magazine Publisher Andy Hoig Celebrates Philanthropy
©by Leo Adam Biga
Published in the January/February issue of Metro Magazine (www.spiritofomaha.com)
2011 finds the intrepid creatives behind metroMagazine releasing a collective sigh of relief after the tumultuous events of last year.
What was to have been a celebratory milestone marking the magazine’s 20th anniversary became a time to regroup and express gratitude. A January 7, 2010 middle-of-the-night fire destroyed the offices of ALH Publications along with three neighboring businesses in the Boardwalk mall. No one was hurt.
Ironically, a magazine whose niche is chronicling the charitable scene suddenly found itself in need. With the community rallying behind it, Metro continued publishing without interruption. After 10 months in temporary digs Metro has a new home and a rededication to fulfill its mission to “inform, educate and inspire.”
The night of the fire was one of the coldest on record. Publisher Andy Hoig and creative vice president Rob Kilmer arrived to survey the smoldering devastation as firefighters pumped water. Hoig saw everything she had built up being lost.
“I was crying,” said Hoig. “It wasn’t really crying for me. Fire is such a powerful thing and when you’re watching it burn your stuff there’s an emotional connection.
“I just remember laughing and saying, ‘You know, this would be a really respectful way to end this if I wanted to. I’ve been doing this for 20 years, maybe this is a sign.’ Well, within 24 hours I knew this was not one of the reasons this happened, because people just started coming out of the woodwork.”
The outpouring of support began while the fire still raged and news reports leaked out.
“It wasn’t an hour after the fire started I started getting text messages,” said Hoig. “I got phone calls and emails. People genuinely wanted to help.”
Detailing how the giving community addresses myriad needs is what Hoig does for a living. Being on the other end things of took some getting used to.
“It was something I didn’t really know how to handle at first,” she said. “I’m used to being the one who says, How can we help? Now I was on the flip side of having people reach out to me. I actually learned that by receiving gracefully is a gift you actually give people. By not receiving we’re denying the person who’s giving to us.”
The expressions of concern gave her a new perspective on the value of her work.
“You know, you do what you do and you do it every day, and you get so far into it you don’t see outside of it. I often times wondered, Does anybody really even care about this?”
A tangible demonstration of how much metroMagazine matters came at a Feb. 22 Omaha Community Playhouse event that raised funds to assist Metro.
“Some friends of the magazine put on this event,” Hoig said, “and all these people showed up because they actually cared about what the publication’s doing. I remember mentioning that I thought about discontinuing it and people were like, ‘No, you cant do that,’ and I was like, OK, so we have been doing something here.
“It’s funny how it takes a catastrophe to affirm what you’re doing has made a difference. Out of this whole situation that was the biggest gift I could have ever received.”
Veteran Omaha charitable professional Ellen Wright was there. She said the event was a show of appreciation.
“When you pick up the Metro you know you’re going to be reading about the nonprofits in the community and the community leadership,” she said. “It’s become THE source, THE number one place you go. It’s an opportunity for nonprofits to talk about what they do. It gives people a chance to read about agencies and their missions. It lets people see how rich the community is with volunteer and charitable opportunities to give your time and treasure to. It fills an important niche. It’s something we didn’t have before.”
Hoig said, “The vision has always been to inspire people to make a difference, whether you look at something and say, ‘I want to be a part of that,’ or, ‘That looks like fun,’ or reading stories about people who are doing inspirational things.
“I look at the magazine as having this ripple effect. I want people to have an emotional experience reading it and when they’re done to kind of sit back and self reflect. It’s really about who’s getting involved, how are people getting involved, and how can you get involved.”
Hal and Mary Daub are big fans. The couple consider Metro a lifeline to happenings.
“My wife and I like the current events nature of it,” said Hal. “It keeps us up to speed on what’s going on. It gives us a great deal of pride every time we finish reading it about how much is going on in our community we want to be sure to catch up to. It always portrays Omaha in such a positive way — the volunteers, the organizations. We love the volunteerism of this town. The magazine captures all that.”
Wright said the way the philanthropic community responded to Metro’s setback was an expression of how much it would be missed if gone.
“I think the fire shook us that this precious little jewel could have been lost, but Andy wasn’t going to let that happen. People recognized how she’s extended herself to so many and how she’s filled a huge gap for us and how we are so incredibly fortunate to have this vehicle.”
Methodist Hospital Foundation president and CEO Cynthia Peacock said Metro “is a champion of collaborative community betterment. They are to be applauded for their continued commitment.”
As Wright sees it, Metro reflects Omaha’s famous generosity.
“People in Omaha care so greatly. I feel philanthropy makes this city, makes this state function. Business and philanthropy are intertwined, and Andy’s been able to mirror that. Her motivation is sincere. She wants not only to do good but she sees the importance of these agencies.”
Although there’s always been a philanthropic focus, it took Hoig some time before she felt invested in the giving culture herself.
“Eventually over the years it became a passion,” she said. “I myself personally started getting involved. The business got more involved.”
What many don’t know is that Metro was launched by her father, Midlands Business Journal publisher Bob Hoig. Originally a tabloid-format newspaper, it began as the Metro Update in 1990 and became the Metro Monthly. Andy got her start as a Metro photographer and later learned layout and other production skills.
By the mid-‘90s the paper struggled enough that Bob was about to shut it down. That’s when he got his first glimmer of his daughter’s ambition and grit.
“She asked if I would consider letting her take it over. My answer was, ‘Sure, I’ll sell it to you for a dollar.’ But I required she sign a small piece of paper I drew up on the spot agreeing to refund subscribers any money coming to them if the Metro later folded. She was to take over full legal ownership.”
What happened next both surprised and pleased him.
“Andy had practically no business experience at the time and I doubted she could make a go of the Metro. I hadn’t counted on her determination and her putting in whatever time and energy it would take to succeed as an entrepreneur.”
He added, “Andy gave new life and direction” to the enterprise by focusing on “charities and causes she believes in” and by transforming the newsprint tabloid into a glossy magazine.
As she matured as a publisher, Andy branded Metro as not just a magazine but a resource. She launched the Big Event Book, a comprehensive annual directory of nonprofits, and the Big Event, an awards recognition gala for area charities. More innovations followed: The Spirit of Omaha website; the weekly INSIDER e-newsletter; and the FACES – Omaha’s Model Search.
The Journeys series features in-depth profiles of inspired doers and givers.
“There has been growth. It’s been a trial and error evolution,” she said. “Part of it is reaching out to different demographics. We have an incredible YP (young professionals) community here that looks to get involved and that has been contributing to our growth.”
The event book and web site offer links and referrals to guide people’s giving and volunteering.
“We should not underestimate Metro’s potential as a connector — making a difference in the lives of nonprofits, donors and beneficiaries of the generous, caring community we call home,” said Methodist Foundation’s Cynthia Peacock.
Community volunteer Cheryl Wild said Metro’s coverage of fundraisers, particularly small grassroots ones, draws crucial interest and support: “I attribute so much of my success with events to the great coverage.”
The full-color magazine’s look and feel get ever more sophisticated.
“I think Andy’s really intuitive and I dare say a little bit cosmopolitan,” said Data Media Solutions CEO and president Jeff Wilke. “She gets the fact that if she’s not changing she’s probably going to be left behind and she’s always looking for the next opportunity to make sure she’s evolving with her clients.”
Hoig also surrounds herself with dedicated staffers and interns and a stable of top freelance writers and photographers.
“One of the things I’ve discovered about myself, especially this past year, is that I love creating and visioning,” she said. “Then I’ve got great people that take that vision and make it a reality. Starting the creation process is what I absolutely love to do and I look forward to the day when that’s what I do all day long, and that day will come. I want to get Metro to a place where it is rock solid and running on its own so I can go make a global impact someplace.”
On the fire’s one-year anniversary the Metro team uncorked a bottle of champagne that survived the blaze, raising glasses to a trying but growth-filled period and toasting the start of the mag’s next 20 years. Having experienced first-hand the Spirit of Omaha, the Metro family is poised to take things to a whole new level.
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