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A Magical Boost

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In the 1980s Magic Johnson redefined the game of basketball in glitzy Los Angeles. And since he has become an international businessman and even a host of a late-night television show. But as big as his life has been, Johnson remains connected to his hometown in Michigan. He showed it by announcing a $1 million gift to Lansing Promise at a Thursday night fundraising dinner hosted by the Lansing Regional Chamber Economic Club.

“Lansing was the greatest place in the world to grow up,” Johnson said. “Everything I am came from Lansing, Michigan. Everything I will be came from Lansing, Michigan.”

Just three years after graduating from Lansing’s Everett High in 1977, Johnson led the Los Angeles Lakers to an NBA title, ushering in “Showtime.” The rivalry between his Lakers and Larry Bird’s Boston Celtics took the sport to new heights, giving it a global reach and paving the way for a generation of superstars.

Johnson detailed the gift during the dinner, which raised $200,000. The rest came from Johnson and his friends, including a $300,000 donation from Johnson, $250,000 from Detroit Pistons owner Tom Gores and another $25,000 from his former Laker coach Pat Riley.

“I was speechless,” Lansing School Board President Peter Spadafore told Ken Palmer of the Detroit Free Press. “I was thinking it would be more like $200,000. This community is willing to invest in the Lansing School District. It makes me very proud.”

And Magic wants to make the fundraiser an annual effort. “I want to change it to a dinner dance next year,” he said. “We can bring in a big act. We can have it on a Friday or Saturday night.”

Why Is Baltimore Burning?

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By Patricia Melton

Lara Law — who oversees Baltimore’s only drop-in center for homeless youth — was not at a loss for words when her building was set aflame on Monday evening.

While tactics of the uprising in the wake of unexplained death of Freddie Gray have been roundly condemned, Law told Kevin Rector of the Baltimore Sun that “the anger is legitimate and understandable.”

“I don’t condone the violence and the destruction, the tearing down of what we need in our community, but the young people out on the streets are some of the same young people we’re serving – filled with trauma and violence and a lack of opportunity their whole lives,” Law said. “It’s understandable. We have to fix our way of doing things so they feel included and that there are opportunities for them.”

The opportunity gap in Baltimore isn’t new. A decade ago the documentary The Boys of Baraka displayed the lengths that parents would go to provide their children with a chance, in this case sending them to a Kenyan boarding school to avoid the too-oft mean streets of Baltimore.

To its credit, there are organizations in Baltimore that are working to piece together Promise opportunities and — if anything positive can come from recent developments — may those efforts be fast-tracked with an expanse of the business and philanthropic communities jumping aboard.

Can Baltimore become a place of opportunity? That depends on the will of the community. Look no further than two cities who’ve appeared on lists of America’s most dangerous cities in recent times — New Haven, Conn., and Richmond, Calif.

It’s been a long, hard-fought road of transformation. These two mid-size cities with large problems are redefining themselves and changing the paradigm that too often grips many urban cities in an ever-widening divide between the have and have nots. While neither city is yet where it wants to be, each has engaged and pledged support to its young people and each has seen decreases in violent crime and increases in educational attainment and employment. They have leveraged what they have — Yale University in New Haven and Chevron Oil in Richmond — to provide college scholarship and economic development programs for their youth.

But the story of New Haven and Richmond can’t be told in the short term. There are anecdotes and early indicators that show progress, but true assessment may take a decade or, perhaps, a generation. The key lesson is that leaders in these locales put aside impossibilities and gridlock to push anchor institutions to seed and refashion their cities to engage the citizenry and the youth in the messy — but necessary — process of democratic and inclusive change. Cities of Promise take urgent steps every day to interrupt the entrenched hopelessness that can send a city up in flames, burning for all the world to see.

May those in Baltimore establishment see past the smoke to back all of its neighbors and come together for a new future with a different outcome, one that builds and strengthens the fabric of community.

UPDATE: Within minutes of publishing this story, the Chronicle of Higher Education posted a story about Baltimore’s many colleges pondering their role in fixing the broken city.

Patricia Melton is the Executive Director of New Haven Promise

The El Dorado Way

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Arkansas Governor Asa Hutchinson visited the southern part of his state early this week to participate in the El Dorado Promise Signing Day, where hundreds of El Dorado High seniors don purple graduation gowns and purple baseball caps and sign a “letter of intent” to attend their college of choice. And the governor praised the community, recognized its 90-percent business occupancy and called the Promise the foundation for all the City’s recent success. “El Dorado is the biggest comeback story in Arkansas,” he said.

The El Dorado Promise — through the generosity of the Murphy Oil Company — funds up to 100 percent of tuition and the recipients can attend any accredited two- or four-year institution in the United States. The Class of 2015, which has now had about 300 “signers,” will be heading to at least 35 different colleges and universities, including out-of-state options like Baylor, Carnegie-Mellon, LSU, Nebraska, Texas and Texas A&M.

So impressed was Governor Hutchinson, he had First Lady Susan Hutchinson fill in for his weekly address and she began with this:

As executive director of Main Street El Dorado, Mark Givens, fields a lot of calls from people asking about his town. He’s happy to talk.

He tells them about the El Dorado Promise scholarships; the revitalization of Main Street; the plans for a one-of-a-kind arts-and-entertainment district; the new Murphy Oil headquarters; the music festival; and the upcoming renovation of the Municipal Auditorium.

Hearing all that, some folks are skeptical. After all, El Dorado is a small town in south Arkansas built on a 1920s oil boom. So Mark keeps a file of internet links about all the progress and sends them to the skeptics. Otherwise, he says, “they think I’m making all this up.”

Sometimes the truth is better than fiction.

Should ESPN Fund A Bristol Promise?

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By Brett Hoover

When former New England Patriot Aaron Hernandez was found guilty and sentenced to life in prison this week, it was another blow to Bristol, Conn., a city of about 60,000 which sits about 20 miles west of the state capitol, Hartford.

Hernandez is not just a son of Bristol, he was both a prep star and honor student at Bristol Central High. Two years ago — just three weeks before the murder of which he would be convicted — he was given a Pop Warner Inspiration to Youth Award.

“He was Bristol’s golden boy. People had a lot of hopes and dreams on his shoulders,” J.R. Rusgrove, owner of the city’s Parkside Cafe, told Don Stacom of the Hartford Courant. “Some people are shocked. I think everybody is really sad.”

While the outside world has come to know Bristol as the home of ESPN, the self-appointed “World Wide Leader in Sports,” insiders must recognize that — despite the massive infusion of tax dollars from the network and its countless spinoffs — the former factory town is struggling with little sign of a turnaround.

While its minority and low-income student populations nearly tripled in the last 15 to 20 years, the school district’s workforce lacks the diversity of its learners. And in just the last seven years the district has experienced a double-digit percentage decrease in enrollment.

What does that mean for the next decade? Researchers from the University of Connecticut and officials from the school district disagree. Both recognize that enrollment will continue a downward trend, but the debate is simply its rapidity.

While ESPN’s sprawling campus with more than 4,000 employees has been a tremendous asset, not all of the attention has been positive. Some of ESPN’s best-known figures have been sarcastically critical of the city and the perception is that a significant number of employees swing through the empire’s gates to and from work, never stopping to support Bristol.

This is not to say that the corporate executives have not helped city officials improve the community. Not long ago, ESPN donated $1 million to the Bristol Boys & Girls Club and many employees do volunteer their time. Yet the question remains — is it enough?

Is it ESPN’s responsibility to make a real commitment to Bristol in the form of a Promise program which makes college affordable for those who achieve? Probably not. Would it be wise for ESPN to make that commitment to the place where it has continuously constructed its campus for more than three decades now? Surely.

Within the last year Forbes reported that ESPN’s value had eclipsed $50 billion. Located within a school district of fewer than 8,000 students, ESPN could easily fund a $1 million-a-year program similar to the one in nearby New Haven and another starting in Hartford in 2016.

After all, a $1 million gift from ESPN is equivalent to a man with $500 sparing a penny.

ADDENDUM (10:50 AM): A December 2013 New York Times story about ESPN indicated that the company has received more than a quarter-billion dollars in state tax breaks and credits little more than a decade, including “savings of about $15 million a year since the network successfully lobbied the state for a tax code change in 2000.”

Brett Hoover — who formerly served as the Associate Director of the Ivy League — convinced ESPN to bring its live College GameDay Show to an Ivy League venue, Harvard at Penn, in 2002. That show — which drew a record audience — opened the GameDay tour to the full spectrum of college football.