Transcription of Billy Shore for the show Trailblazers, #101
Lisa: We are very fortunate in Maine to have connections to people that spend time in other parts of the country and come back and enjoy our beautiful state with us, and not only enjoy our beautiful state with us, but make it a better place to live. One of these people is Billy Shore, who is the founder and CEO of Share Our Strength, which is a national nonprofit, which is ending childhood hunger in America. I specifically say, “ending childhood hunger in America” because I know your goal is to end childhood hunger by 2015?
Billy: That’s correct. That’s correct. We actually started with a goal of ending … and a real strategic plan to end childhood hunger by 2020, and then when candidate Obama back in 2008 was running, he embraced our plan, and in the chaos of the campaign, something got transposed and it turned into 2015. We weren’t going to quarrel with him because it was the first time a president-elect had embraced what we were doing. We got stuck with 2015, but we’re actually going to be very close. We may need a little bit more time, but if so, I think we’ll be able to make the case that we’ve earned it.
Lisa: Well, yeah, that’s five years shorter.
Billy: That’s right, that’s a big difference.
Lisa: Yeah, and you only started doing this in 1984.
Billy: We started Share Our Strength in 1984 and we didn’t start the No Kid Hungry campaign until about 2007. For many, many years we were a grant-maker to other organizations, which we still are. Then about, I guess, about six, seven years ago, we developed this very specific campaign of our own and it’s very kind of concrete stake in the ground said we’re going to do this by a certain time.
Lisa: This is one of the things that I was interested in when I was reading the article and, of course, reading more about you because you’ve written four books. You’ve put plenty out there for people who are interested to find out more. That is that you went from largely thinking about hunger relief as food banks and smaller efforts and then you realized you had to do something more systemic. I’m reading this article by Jen Coffin, which is in the June 2013 issue of Maine Magazine, and you called it a naïve notion that raising money and sending it to food banks could somehow end childhood hunger.
You then realized your approach wasn’t systemic and didn’t address the symptoms of the deeper issue. How did you come to that place?
Billy: Well, I think when we started the organization back in 1984, we did have not as deep understanding of the issue of hunger as we do now. We’ve come to understand that hunger is really a symptom of a deeper, more complex problem which is poverty. Poverty is hard to solve and poverty is complex, but feeding a child is not. We try to strike this balance between … even if you can’t end poverty, can you address hunger and can you address it effectively and actually end it at least in certain segments of the population?
As we thought about what we wanted to accomplish, we really took to heart the words of a writer named Jonathan Kozel, who said, “You should pick battles that are big enough to matter, but small enough to win.” Which I really liked because there’s kind of these large campaigns that we would all look to wage and different ways we’d like to change the world, but when it comes to big enough to matter small enough to win, in our world we asked ourselves what was that? We realized that when it came to children in this country, in America, who are hungry on a chronic basis, that was actually a winnable battle.
We got very refocused around not just making grants to other organizations which we continue to do, but to see if we could use our vantage point, our experience, to some degree exert some leadership to see if we could get people to pull in the same direction. Ultimately, that’s what we’ve tried to do around childhood hunger and the effort to end it.
Lisa: What you call it triggering event in one of your books was, I believe, the famine in Ethiopia in 1984, and I believe someone argued that that is an event that was really not easy to win.
Billy: Yeah, for sure. Ethiopia continues to struggle with famine and hunger. In 1984, it was just that kind of serendipitous nature of when things happen. I had worked in government for about eight or nine years at that point for Senator Gary Hart from Colorado. He’d run for president and come in second in the democratic nomination contest to Walter Mondale. This would have been in August of 1984.
I’ve had this very intense period of working with him, traveling throughout all 50 states, sometimes four states a day, then decompressing after that. I was literally stuck in a traffic jam on Interstate 270 outside of Washington, D.C., and probably doing something I shouldn’t have been doing, which was reading the Washington Post while I was stuck in traffic.
There was this story about 200,000 to die this summer in Ethiopia and it just seemed, for me, it was this drawing juxtaposition between all the issues you talk about in a campaign from the kind of the antiseptic venue of a stage and then in the bubble of the limousine and the Secret Service motorcade and so forth, and then thinking “boy, there are real life and death issues at stake in the decisions we make as I learn more about the Ethiopian famine.” For me, that was the catalyst.
Our focus initially at Share Our Strength was international. We quickly realized that there were significant issues here in the United States as well and that a lot of our stakeholders and supporters would want us to focus on those and that we could actually probably realistically make more progress dealing with hunger here in the United States. We continue to make grants to a few places overseas, but most of our focus is here in the US now.
Lisa: Hunger relief and specifically ending childhood hunger is something to you that’s deeply personal, and it’s something that also seems to have some linkage back to a sense of faith. In one of your books you actually write about, I think it was something about the Jewish faith and sort of the points of right idea. Is this something that was hard for you to reconcile working in politics over here and then thinking over here about the bigger picture?
Billy: Well, a little bit. I learned a tremendous amount doing the political work that I did and got to work on a whole variety of issues and thought it was … I would have never done it any other way. At the same time, it did feel removed from a lot of the way people really live their lives. Probably the most personal part of it for me was I had … my father was a district administrative assistant to a congressman from Pittsburgh.
My father was this very unpretentious guy, very casual all the time, never wore a watch, never carried a pen, was not a very meticulous person, but this was a time back in the ’60s and ’70s when members of Congress … Congress wasn’t televised, members of Congress didn’t come home that much. For all intents and purposes for most people my father was the congressman from Pittsburgh, and if we walked two blocks down the street to get a pizza, which we would do typically on a Friday evening, it would take us about two hours. So many people would come out of their houses and say, “Mr. Shore, my aunt lost her social security check.” Or, “My uncle needs to get into the veterans’ hospital, can you help him?”
It was just what my dad did. He did it 24 hours a day in the most relaxed way and kept track of it all somehow. I just grew up thinking this is what you’re supposed to do with your life. You’re supposed to help the people in your community. He never preached about it. He wasn’t a preachy kind of guy, and I don’t remember him ever saying this is what’s expected of you. He just kind of modeled the behavior. In that sense, it was very personal, as you say.
Lisa: Is that somehow part of the reason why you ended up going to Washington initially and being a part of this social revolution that was happening at the time?
Billy: I think so. I was fascinated by Congress, I was fascinated by using public policy to create change in some ways that I’m really, I think, only just beginning to recognize and understand and start to reflect on. Share Our Strength has kind of come full circle that way because we started purely doing private sector work and funding emergency food assistance programs and community efforts, but have more recently come to realize that there is a way that organizations like ours can intersect with public institutions with state governments with the federal government.
There are programs like school breakfast and summer feeding and the food stamp, SNAP, what we now call SNAP program, that private organizations like ours can have a big impact in shaping and making more effective. I think there’s … if you think of kind of a three-legged stool with government, the private sector, and the business community all working together, you can get some pretty big things done that way.
Lisa: You talked about in one of your books your son, Zack, getting on the bus himself. Actually I believe he was striking a pose with two other young men as … well, tell the story about this.
Billy: Well, this was, I think, on Zack’s field … I think it was on his field trip to New York I think you’re referring to when he was a, I think, an eighth grader and I remember it just being this very kind of poignant moment for me as understanding that one of my sons was kind of growing up and was kind of on his own. I remember the kids getting on the bus and all the parents being very anxious and waving to them and trying to get their attention. The minute they stepped on the bus, none of them were looking out the window. They were paying no attention to us. They had really just kind of grown up.
I think there was also a time I wrote about after 9/11 where he had gone down to the mall in a show of just kind of support for the nation on the national mall by the Washington monument, which a lot of people did. Again, I started to realize at that moment though like my father I had not been particular preachy to Zack and not said kind of this is what’s expected of you. Some of that kind of social change work and that notion of being engaged in your community had seeped through and he started to make his own decisions. I was, as a dad, excited and proud to see that he was getting engaged in that way.
Lisa: I’m sure it was exciting for you because you also talk a lot about some of the misadventures of Zack and Molly, especially in one of these books, which is interesting for me because I have children of this age and I definitely have been involved in overseeing some of their misadventures. That interesting contrast between going out into the world and doing something larger and also kind of retreating into your own individual world and doing something equally important, but somehow on a smaller scale with your own children, perhaps even having less control over them, what was that like for you?
Billy: Yeah. Well, that’s the toughest job any of us have, I think, is parenting; there’s no question about it. I’ve had three kids now. Zack’s now 28, and Molly’s 24, and I’ve got an 8-year-old son, Nate. With Zack, in particular, I was probably traveling way more than I should have been. I probably … I think I was a very good father and I think he thinks I was a very good father, but I think I also missed a lot of things that as you get older and wiser you would not do again. You wouldn’t make those kind of sacrifices again.
Zack had a little bit of a rocky path to where he is today. He’s incredibly successful, actually works for a radio station, the all-news station in Washington, D.C., WTOP, and is a father himself, married and with a baby. I think kids have to find their way and I think you have to, again, model it to the degree that you can. At the end they find their way in their own timetable. There’s such pressure, I think, today among so many young people to feel like the parade is marching by and they better get in it in just the right place where or they’re going to have failed.
I think, in particular, so many young people think that a successful life is an unbroken string of successes, when usually it’s just the opposite. Usually it’s your failures that you learn from and it’s your mistakes and the bad luck and the misfortunes, some of which are just unavoidable in life. Sometimes they’re married to bad judgments, but those are the things that if you talk to a lot of successful people about how they became successful, it wasn’t because they never had a misstep; it was just the opposite.
Lisa: There’s the sense of always going from the internal to the external to the internal to the external. When I’m looking at two of your books, The Cathedral Within and A Light of Conscience, there is the sense that there has to be something in you that you return to in order to know that you’re heading in the right direction, that you’re building this cathedral. This book, The Cathedral Within, I think that it was called initially … you proposed it as something else?
Billy: Yes. Gosh, I’m trying to remember what I even thought about calling it. I think it was something about cathedral building, but what I do remember is meeting with this really wonderful editor at Random House named Ann Godoff, who’s now an editor somewhere else. As she was hearing my kind of pitch, my 30 seconds what this book was going to be about because it wasn’t written yet, she said to me, “Well, if it’s the cathedral within that you’re writing about, then that’s a book that I want to publish.” It really affected my thinking because I realized that she was helping me kind of, again, make this bridge between the book that I wanted to write and the book that she thought people would want to read and how you make it more inner-directed.
At the end of the day for Share Our Strength that’s certainly when you look at who are the most effective supporters and stakeholders are. They’re all people who have been affected and impacted internally, have changed in some way. I always think it’s interesting when people say they been moved by something. Because when you say you’ve been moved, that means you started one place and you ended somewhere else. That’s what all social transformation is really about. We try to create experiences where people have that sense of being moved where they have that sense of being transformed even.
I call it bearing witness, going to places and letting yourself see and feel and share what you felt in ways that you almost kind of sneak up on you that you weren’t expecting.
Lisa: Is it also possible that what you’re doing is connecting them with something inside themselves that already existed so that they aren’t really changed so much as just connecting with that still small voice that people talk about?
Billy: Well, I think that’s a great point. That’s a great way to put it, the fundamental conviction that runs through the whole idea of Share Our Strength is that people … that everybody does have a strength to share. That everybody does have something within them that they want to give, that people are looking for a meaning. This is not an original idea on our part. We all know this, people are searching for meaning all across our society. To create vehicles in which they can access that, and I guess access that part of themselves to your point, I think, has been … whether we were always doing that at the conscious level or not, I think, that’s really what the work has been about.
Lisa: We’ve had multiple people on our show who are working towards the ending of childhood hunger. We’ve actually had John Woods on very early who is with Maine Share Our Strength. We had most recently Kristen Miale from Good Shepherd Food Bank here in Maine. Early on we had Mark Swann from the Preble Street Research Center here in Portland, and a lot of listeners have known him for the last 20 years doing this good work that he does with homelessness and feeding the hungry and teenagers and the new teen shelter that they have.
He was on the Share Our Strength bus just the other day going on Taste of the Nation, and he said to me, “I read Billy Shore’s book. It changed me. It’s something that I’ve kind of held onto and I can’t tell you how many copies I have given out to other people.” It is actually important that you’ve documented in some way your own journey starting in your book 1995 to now, because it gives other people hope.
Billy: Well, I hope that’s the case. I always think of the words the writer and the director, Elia Kazan, who is a movie director, and he once wrote that, “The more personal something else, the more universal that it is.” Usually I find … in my first instinct when I’d start to write a story about my children or something like that I would think like why in the world would anybody care about this? Those types of personal stories really do have … they strike the universal cord and people get them.
Lisa: Is there also the possibility when you put yourself out there this much, when you make it so personal, that you could be more easily hurt when things don’t go your way or when people don’t see what you’re trying to put across or maybe misinterpret?
Billy: That’s a really good question. I don’t know, again, I think vulnerability is kind of an effective place to lead from for those same reasons. I think making yourself vulnerable, because we all are, is really saying that is making yourself authentic and I think authenticity is the key to leadership.
When people lead from this kind of I don’t what, whether it’s a man or woman, this kind of macho sense of having all the answers and having done everything right, I think that doesn’t ring true to people. I think that’s not authentic. I think the idea of being a little bit vulnerable and being a little bit personal, it’s a little bit of risk, but I don’t think it’s a big one because I think, again, people know that basically all of us are like that.
Lisa: You spent a lot of time traveling to different places and you’ve talked about this in the books that you’ve written, and working with the leader of a children’s choir or a group that employs people who are released from prison, and meeting with other people who are involved in social change. What are some of the common denominators that you’ve noticed amongst the other people who are really doing something in the world of social justice?
Billy: Yeah, well, I think that’s a great question. I think often people are leading from a place that relates to where their own need is and I think that’s one common denominator. I think to do this work that usually the odds are so formidable when you’re trying to change something, whether it’s hunger or the environment, climate change, poverty; that you have to have a little bit of a sense of being willing to break the rules as well. If you just do things in the conventional way, you’re probably going to get conventional results.
When people ask what we hire for at Share Our Strength, my first response always is J-walkers. I don’t want people who are just going to stand and wait at the light. I don’t want felons, either. We want people who are going to really do what they have to do to get the job done. I think you see that certainly in a lot of the entrepreneurs that we’ve worked with.
I guess finally where it relates to this idea of bearing witness, people who really put themselves close to the issue. One of the reasons I think we’ve stayed fresh at Share Our Strength is we force ourselves to get away from our desk and get out into the community and see and feel things that we know are going to move us.
My wife, Rosemary, always talks about how if you go to Ethiopia once and then you talk about it the following year and the next year and the next year and you never go back, it becomes what she calls like a Xerox of a Xerox of a Xerox. It starts to fade, it gets a little bit pale. I think you’ve got to reconnect to that.
Lisa: As you’re talking, it’s kind of interesting. I’m looking at the title of your latest book, “The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men.” That’s what you’re describing. This is the quest and malaria. You’re describing people who have just said, you know what? We’re not going to go with the status quo. We’re going to believe that something like ending malaria, ending childhood hunger is possible.
Billy: Yeah. You’ve got to be a little bit unreasonable, I think, because when people hear it on face value they say things like, “Well, that’s not going to happen. That’s too big of a goal.” It does take people who push, I think, maybe unreasonable in terms of their goals, even unreasonable in terms of their tactics or strategies sometimes. Still somehow stay within at least enough within the mainstream that they can build the support they need and the constituency they need to get that done.
That book takes its title from a George Bernard Shaw passage in play, Man and Superman, in which he says, “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world around him. The unreasonable man tries to get the world to adapt itself to him; therefore, all progress in changing the world depends on the unreasonable man.” I got stuck with that gender bias which was George Bernard Shaw’s, not mine, but I’ve heard about in a few places.
Lisa: At the end of the article that Jen Coffin wrote in Maine Magazine about you, she asked you, “What is the universe trying to tell you?” and your answer was that, “All of us, no matter what we do or where we are, can and want to contribute. All of us have the capacity to share our strength in our own best way.” People who are listening who want to be part of this effort, how do you suggest that they connect back in some way to that still small voice that we were referring to and somehow help you?
Billy: Yeah. Well, I think listening to that voice doesn’t necessarily have to be by helping us, although we would love to have people’s help. I think finding what it is that you care most about, what it is you’re most passionate about. Not just in terms of external issues, what’s going on in the world, but things that you most enjoy doing. We work, as you know, with a lot of chefs and restaurateurs and we do food and wine events here in Maine and around the country. The most common response I get back from chefs is, “I never knew I could make a difference in this community just by being a chef.”
They think of this as their work and as their vocation and their trade, but then when we create this vehicle to say … and also by cooking, also by teaching nutrition education and things you might take for granted, you can actually affect other people’s lives. That’s kind of an epiphany for them. Our intellectual challenge, our design challenge, is how do we do that with other communities? How do we do with architects and writers? At Share Our Strength we’ve had more than 15 books published by Random House and other publishers, where writers donated original work to us.
Actually this is kind of a Maine connection, but back in 1987 when Gary Hart’s presidential campaign came to a very sudden end, I was trying to figure out, okay, how does Share Our Strength go next, and I’ve got two checks in the mail on the same day. One from Stephen King and one from a writer named Sidney Sheldon, who’s no longer alive, but it was one of those moments where I was asking myself what’s the universe trying to tell me? Why did these two checks came from these two writers?
I realize that we need to find ways to get others involved in what we do. I would hope that people would … a good place to start would be our website at Share Our Strength nokidhungry.org and just go to that website and we’ve got a specific kind of a section on how to get involved and we’ve got people who participate in what we call the Great American Bake Sale or the Bake Sale for No Kid Hungry, and we have thousands and thousands of school-age children across the country and others who do bake sales and contribute money to us.
We have people who participate in our events. We have people who are involved in contacting their schools to see if their schools offer the school breakfast program and they’re helping us do a crowd source to school breakfast map. There’s so many ways for people to get involved. Again, what you call that still small voice within, is really the key to it.
Lisa: I appreciate your sharing your voice, not even the still small voice, but the larger, louder voice. It’s really a privilege to be sitting with you, Bill Shore, the founder and CEO of Share Our Strength and I really wish you all the best in your quest to end childhood hunger. I know that you will.
Billy: Thanks. Well, have me back on after 2015 and we’ll see where we are.