A Good Circle

00:00:15
Speaker 1: Pushkin.

00:00:20
Speaker 2: Matt Skogan was working on Wall Street eighty hours a week, making good money, happily married a small town boy from Michigan, made good. When he began to have a change of heart.

00:00:33
Speaker 3: I went through a period of my life, a mini existential crisis. My dad died in twenty thirteen. He had a cancer called multiple maloma. He was only sixty and then just two years after that, my mom passed away from a different kind of cancer. She had breast cancer. And it kind of sent me into a period of life where I just felt like, I love my work. It's interesting, it's intellectually stimulating, I love the people through my work. But I also felt this sense of like, I'm at the end of the day, I'm showing up to work every day to help a bank make more money. I went through a season of pretty intense like prayer and discernment and just kind of feeling like I think I'm supposed doing something else.

00:01:10
Speaker 2: Scogan was on the board of the small Christian liberal arts school he'd gone to as an undergraduate, a place called Hope College on the shores of Lake Michigan, and just as his life was turning upside down, the school's president announced he was leaving. Scogan says that when he heard the news, he had an intense feeling that this was a job he was supposed to do. He thought of the Mark Twain quote, the two most important days in your life are the day you're born and the day you find out why. Scogan had no academic experience. He was a ridiculous long shot, but slowly he inched forward in the process, and as he did, he realized that if it was actually going to happen, if he were really going to be the president of a college, he couldn't do what every other president was doing.

00:02:03
Speaker 3: I had a couple of pretty formative experiences. There was a moment when I was on an airplane on a business trip and I was flying back to New York from California, I think, and we were flying into JFK, and I'm like half asleep on the airplane, and the pilot comes on and he says, we're at thirty three thousand feet and we're beginning our descent into JFK. Thirty three thousand at the time was the price of Hope's tuition, And I just got this visual image in my head of thirty three thousand going to zero. And then it was three weeks later and I was having dinner with a friend and we were just talking about life, and I told him that I was thinking about applying for this job, and he asked me about home college, and he asked me about what I saw is the challenges in higher ed and I've of course mentioned the cost, and he just very flippantly and without thinking, he said, well, no one should have to pay for hope. And then he repeated it, no one should have to pay for hope, and he meant it as a joke, I think, and we both laughed. But as I was laughing, like I realized, dang, he just said something profoundly true. No one should have to pay for hope.

00:03:06
Speaker 2: My name is Malcolm Gladwell. You're listening to U Revisionist History, my podcast about things overlooked and misunderstood. Over the years, on this podcast, we have talked about the strange goings on in higher education, ridiculously fancy amenities, the elsat the absurd, US news rankings, multi billion dollar endowments. This episode is about a very different kind of strange goings on, Matt Skuggan's radical experiment Nobody should have to pay for Hope. Hope is in a little town called Holland, just west of Grand Rapids, which is called Holland because Dutch immigrants settled there. The area still has a lot of tidy Dutch practicality. The big local employers are the furniture makers Herman Miller and Haworth. The campus is right in the middle of town, a big, beautiful church at the center. I got a campus tour from a towering Nigerian student with the magnificently Nigerian first name of Mark Marvelous. I sat in a campus coffee shop listening to a high spirited back and forth that began with the movies and ended with scripture. The school was having a day long conference to explain to the community what they were trying to do. A student spoke first, a young woman named Madison, a little nervous in front of the crowd. She'd made some of the art hanging on the.

00:04:32
Speaker 1: Walls around the room.

00:04:34
Speaker 4: Hi.

00:04:34
Speaker 5: Everyone, good evening and thank you for attending what I believe is a wonderful artistic representation of Hope Forward as not only a vision but a reality. My name is Madison and I have the honor of belonging to the inaugural Hope Forward cohort.

00:04:53
Speaker 2: Hope Forward was the name Skogan gave to his experiment. Madison had made a print of a willow tree that she said symbolized what the school had done for her.

00:05:04
Speaker 5: Because of this gift, I feel free to pursue any area of study without the burden excessive debt. This means I am free to care about my community here and later because I am and will be passionate about what I do.

00:05:18
Speaker 2: Then the writer Mitch album came to the podium. Album was actually the reason I was there. He emailed me out of the blue one day and told me about what was happening in Holland. He drove over from Detroit, where he lives, and kicked things off with a short talk about why he's a Hope College believer.

00:05:37
Speaker 6: Yeah, I guess I'm here in multiple capacities. I'm sort of like a parent and proud to be And I'm going to share with you for a couple of minutes how that came to be and why I do believe that this model works because I have seen it in action many times in my life, and in fact, the latter part of my professional life has kind of been dedicated to this.

00:05:59
Speaker 2: The model he was referring to was President Scogan's hope forward, his grand experiment.

00:06:06
Speaker 6: So honestly not been that charitable a person in the first part of my career, not because I was against it.

00:06:17
Speaker 1: I think I was just like many young people.

00:06:18
Speaker 6: I was very wrapped up in my own success, of my own ambition, and then I got involved with some of you were probably aware with an old professor of mine who was dying from lu Gerrig's disease named Mary Schwartz, and I visited with him every Tuesday.

00:06:34
Speaker 2: Tuesdays with Maury was album's most famous book. It came out in nineteen ninety seven. It's one of the best selling memoirs of all time.

00:06:42
Speaker 6: I noticed that when people would come in and visit with him, very quickly the conversation would change. They would come in trying to cheer him up because he was dying from this terminal illness, but within a couple of minutes he would start asking them about their work, their love life, whatever, And an hour later they'd come out in tears and they'd say, you know, I try to cheer him up, but next thing I know, I'm talking to him, and he's asked me questions, and then he's really asking me questions, and I'm really then and as I'm I'm crying, I.

00:07:10
Speaker 1: Tried to cheer him up. He ended up cheering me up. He ended up comforting me.

00:07:13
Speaker 6: And I asked him finally, after witnessing this so many times, I don't get it. You know, like you're the one who's dying. Why don't you just say, let's not talk about your problems, Let's talk about my problems. And he said, Mitch, why would I ever take from people like that? Taking just makes me feel like I'm dying. Giving makes me feel like I'm living. It's a profound little sentence and also rhymes, so it's easy to remember. Giving makes you feel like living. And I have never forgotten that moment, nor have I ever forgotten that sentiment.

00:07:50
Speaker 2: A small Christian college, a student talking about a willow tree. A best selling writer of inspirational books, introduces the rhyming catchphrase giving makes you feel like living. If the cynic in you is bubbling to the surface right now, I understand because these aren't the kinds of things we expect to hear on college campuses. What about the fancy new building opening, the expansion of the endowed prestigious center for this and that, the glittering credentials of the incoming class. But by the end of the evening I kind of wished every school sounded like this. Imagine that you had never heard of higher education before, you had been living on a desert island somewhere, and suddenly, once you finished desert island high school, your parents decided what you needed was an American college degree. So you show up on this thing called a campus and you ask your hosts what am I to you, and they say, we think of you as a student kind of, but also as a customer, because this whole thing is going to cost you a lot of money, and we need to get paid. How much you ask, well, it depends like whether you're good at things like fencing or rowing and how much your parents make. But chances are you'll have to borrow a lot to pay for your education. So you say, oh, so I'm really like someone with a big mortgage. I'm a debtor, and they say sure, but once you've graduated, we're going to call you every year to ask for donations on the grounds that you are now a member of our community. Your head is spinning at this point. Oh really, what are those donations for. Well, it's for this thing we invented called an endowment, which is a big pile of cash that sits with a money manager in New York, which we use as a symbol of how important we are. So you say, wait, I'm a student, a customer, a debtor, and an investor in a Wall Street hedge fund. Are all businesses in the United States? This complicated? And they say, no, just higher education. This arrangement struck Matt Skogan as deeply weird. He was a banker. He came from a world where financial arrangements had precise definitions gross sales, net revenue, IBITA earnings before interest, taxes, and amortization. He was an outsider to this world. He didn't think like a college president. He doesn't even look like a college president. He was thirty nine when he was hired, but looks even younger. I'm short and skinny. He's shorter and skinnier. He has red hair and oversized ears and looks and this reference would be lost to all of you under the age of fifty A little like Ron Howard in Happy Days Later when we were chatting with a group of students. I asked what they call him.

00:10:50
Speaker 3: The summer I got here, I started saying, you should call me Matt because my name is Matt. And then there was like an intervention. The dean of students came and a couple other people came into my office and they said, you can't have the students call you by your first name. It's disrespectful to the office of the president. So I said, okay, so they call me presidents go again to my face, they call me who knows what they call me? Yes, daddies, Yeah, daddy, Sco.

00:11:13
Speaker 1: Again, Sco daddy.

00:11:16
Speaker 2: There aren't a lot of Sco daddies in the ranks of America's college presidents. When they picked you, was there a sense that they were taking a chance.

00:11:25
Speaker 3: Yes, well, there was definitely, since they were doing something unconventional, so they were hiring a young non academic, But it was coming from this premise of the board wanted to, you know, a recognition that something needs to be done in higher education. We need to try something different, and so they hired me and basically said you can do anything you want except the status quo, Like we're hiring you to do something different.

00:11:48
Speaker 2: He took the job, moved into a big house near the church in the middle of campus, and started going to the cafeteria and talking to students student, customer, debtor, investor what effect he wondered did this have on them?

00:12:02
Speaker 3: And I have a handful of questions that I love asking students. I like asking the same questions over and over again because I get compare and contrast answers. And one of the questions I always ask is what do you want.

00:12:12
Speaker 1: To do after you graduate? And I always use the word.

00:12:15
Speaker 3: Want, And what I get often as a response is what I want to do is different than what I feel like I have to do. And I'll get students say I want to do Doctors without Borders, or I want to do teach for America or the Peace Corps or some ministry. But I've got fifty thousand dollars of student loan debt, so I'm going to become a whatever consultant to pay off my student loan debt, and then I'll pursue the impact I feel like I want to have.

00:12:41
Speaker 2: It seemed to Scogan that you can't do both. You can't ask a student to engage in the pursuit of truth and at the same time have them wake up in the middle of the night with a sense of dread. Hope has an accounting program, and Scogan was a big fan of accounting, but he felt the way things were accounting would always win out over philosophy, which didn't seem right.

00:13:04
Speaker 1: I actually think.

00:13:07
Speaker 3: Students don't come to college with a life plan. They come to college with questions, lots and lots of questions about their purpose. And it might be the case that studying philosophy or studying the classics is precisely how you're going to find your purpose. And yet if you're coming with fifty thousand dollars of debt, you might get skewed into or you might get you might feel nudge into studying accounting, and therefore maybe miss maybe miss something that's in your purpose.

00:13:34
Speaker 2: Okay, back to your college search. After Desert Island High, you come to America, and what you discover on your college tour is how strangely similar a lot of colleges are. William's College looks like Amherst, which in turn looks like William and Mary, which looks like a smaller version of the University of Virginia. Everybody wants to be the same thing, the same look, and the same business model, find as many full paying students as they can and charge you as much tuition as they can get away with. Why are all the colleges the same? My dad taught at the University of Waterloo in southern Ontario, and they had what they called a co op program, with a college arranged with local employers to hire students join their off term. Everybody was on co op. To give you a flavor of how it works, I asked a student named Spencer who just graduated from Waterloo to give me a break down of his finances. This is what Spencer told me. Total for year costs tuition plus room and board were a hundred and twenty two thousand dollars. In that time, he did six co op terms working with a government organization and several firms in his field, and they paid him a total of eighty one thousand dollars. So his overall cost out of pocket for getting an engineering degree was forty thousand. That's not bad. Plus, and I'm quoting here from his email, I'll add that a good thing is that the majority of my classmates were graduating with a job lined up due to the co op program and industry connections. Now, do I think co op programs could work everywhere and solve every problem? No, of course not. But the University of Waterloo has been running this program for almost seventy years. It's a huge success. You would think, wouldn't you that versions of the idea would have spread everywhere by now that every school that has a problem with students graduating with lots of debt, which by the way is nearly every school would have experimented with ways of connecting with local businesses to give their students work experience enlighten their debt burden. Has it happened?

00:15:43
Speaker 7: No?

00:15:44
Speaker 2: Why Because college presidents have their heads in the clouds.

00:15:49
Speaker 3: If you kind of look at the trajectory of higher education, it's just not going to end well. This trajectory of like tuition goes up by three to five percent every year, it's just not going to work. And so this sense of like somebody has to do something at the end of the day. The thing I love most about this place is our name Hope. Hope by definition means that we believe problems are solvable, and that's what we try to prepare our students to be Hope bringers, people who go out in the world and run toward not a way, but run toward the biggest challenges they can find. And that's why we exist. And we felt like and the board felt like, who better than a place called Hope to run toward this big societal challenge which is the funding model of higher education.

00:16:30
Speaker 2: So Scogan made a radical decision, Let's make it so students don't have to think about money at all during their four years of college and put in place a pay it forward model. Will you give back to the college after you've graduated. That's the program that Scogan calls Hope Forward. To apply, you write an essay describing an area of hopelessness to which you want to bring hope. They started small. After the first two years they have a total of fifty eight students in the program. The goal is to enroll one hundred freshmen annually within the next few years and keep the program growing until it covers everyone.

00:17:09
Speaker 3: And you don't pay anything. You don't pay anything for tuition. Sign We call it a covenant. It's basically a commitment. I sign it on behalf of the college and then the student signs it, So we're entering into this sort of covenantal relationship, not a transactional agreement. It's not a contract, it's not a legal contract, but it's this relationship with mutual commitment. And the commitment we're making as an institution is we're saying we're going to give you a great education and then launch you into a life of impact afterwards. And the commitment the student is making is they're going to take their education seriously and then they're going to give something to the college every year after they graduate. We don't specify an amount, we don't suggest an amount, nothing like that, because we want it to truly be a gift, a gift that's given out of generosity, and we don't want it to feel like it's a different flavor of a student loan bill. Like we're trying to move away from a system that's based on bill paying and replace it with a system that's based on gift giving, so that the relationship with students is not a transactional one at all, but rather a relationship based at its core around generosity and gratitude.

00:18:08
Speaker 2: The math behind it pay it Forward system is, to say the least daunting. Problem Number one is the transition period. A school like Hope takes in about fifty five million dollars intuition. If you say to your students, don't pay anything until later, then you have to come up with fifty five million dollars every year until the pay it forward money comes trickling in. If Hope Forward covered everyone, the school would need about a billion dollars to handle that transition period. Problem number two is what happens after the transition period. How do you know that Hope Forward graduates will give back an amount equal to the cost of their education? Scogan freely admits he doesn't.

00:18:50
Speaker 3: Some may give far less than that, some may give way more than that. I think that's another reason why we decided to not put a specific amount on it. If we say you've made a commitment to give, and we suggest this amount in order to pay off what you would have paid through tuition, well then people give that amount, presumably. But by not putting an amount, some people may give way more than they would have paid through tuition, and others will give less. And I think what this model does is it gives us as an institution, we're highly incentivized to help our students be successful. The more successful they are, the more opportunities they'll have to give. And likewise, for our students, you know, it's kind of like the onus is on them when they're in their earnings years. Then it's up to them to determine how important their education was in launching them into their career, and they're sort of then paying them what they think this was worth. And it's you know, I think it's up to us then to make the education so valuable that they're grateful for it after they graduate.

00:19:42
Speaker 2: You are stealing into the unknown.

00:19:44
Speaker 1: Oh totally.

00:19:46
Speaker 2: Is Matt Skogan crazy? Maybe, But I have to say that I'm an optimist on Hope Forward. First, I think that Scogan is right that the success of the program depends on the school convincing its graduates that their education was worth something. Although it's early, the evidence so far is encouraging. The students admitted into Hope Forward as a group have slightly lower academic credentials coming into the school than the rest of their freshman class, but after their first year they're outperforming their non Hope Forward peers. There's something different about your attitude towards school once you're inside the gratitude generosity loop. Second thing, most of the students at Hope grew up in the church, and this is how a church works, right. You don't pay church tuition at the door. Sometimes churches encourage you to tithe a tenth of your income, but most times you just give whatever you can and the congregation and the preacher trust in God that whatever comes in from the offering on Sunday morning will cover the expenses for the rest of the week.

00:20:54
Speaker 8: I remember one of the things that presidents going inside was that we're trying to fund higher education than way that we fund churches, which is through craft funding, And I felt like that metaphor helps it make a lot more sense to me.

00:21:09
Speaker 2: I met with a group of Hope Forward students at one point. This was a sophomore named Olivia. Pay it Forward made sense to her conceptually, the.

00:21:18
Speaker 4: Maybea the church is like you give what you can when you can, and you give because you want to and because you believe in the mission of the church. And I feel like that's a really great metaphor that helps me understand like what we're doing here and want a purpose of it is. So it's the same idea.

00:21:38
Speaker 2: Madison was part of the group too, the same Madison who spoke with the Mitch album reception.

00:21:44
Speaker 9: I feel like, once you're given someone's generous towards you, it is so much easier to be generous towards others. And that's also how I think of God's love. When I experienced God's love through other people, it's so much easier for me to share that love, like with some other people, with other people. And I just feel like it's the whole thing. Is can be that it's meant to be contagious, So generosity is easier when someone has shown generosity towards you.

00:22:14
Speaker 2: Third thing, and maybe the most important thing, Why do we assume that giving out of the spirit of giving is hard? This is a little bit of a tangent, but those of you who are regular listeners to revisionist history will know the special antipathy I have for Princeton University, a school with eight thousand, four hundred and seventy eight students and an endowment of thirty six billion dollars. Princeton's endowment is so large that in nine of the last eleven years, its investment earnings had been greater than its entire operating budget to give you a flavor of this, and forgive me because this gets me so riled up. In twenty twenty one, Princeton made a three point seven to seven billion dollar return on its endowment, but the school's annual budget was just under two billion, meaning they could cover all their expenses just on the check they get at the end of the year from their wealth managers on Wall Street and still have two billion dollars left. In the previous episode, I handed out the first of the Revisionist History Prizes, which honor extraordinary performances by elite college administrators. The inaugural prize was the George Santo's Memorial Award for Egregiously Deceptive sell Promotion, which went to Columbia for their brazen manipulation of their US News rankings. Well, I have yet another prize to award, the Perpetual Motion Award for the school that comes closest to running on its own power forever, and the clear winner here is Princeton. I did a little blog post about this, and let me quote from myself here. Princeton could let in every student for free. The university administrators could tell the US government and all of its funding agencies. It's cool, we got this. They could take out the cash registers in the cafeteria, hand out free parking to all visitors, give away Princeton sweatshirts on Nassau Street, and fire their entire accounts receivable staff, and their entire fundraising staff. Tomorrow, they could say to every one of the hard working professors on their staff, you never have to spend even a second writing a grand proposal. Again, free at last, Free at last. But here's the thing. Even though by any rational measure, Princeton no longer needs to raise any more money, the alumnia of Princeton still give money to Princeton. A higher percentage of Princeton graduates give money back to their school than any school in the country. A Wall Street guy named James Ya, in fact, just gave Princeton so many millions of dollars that Princeton opened a brand new residence hall called, wait for it, Yay College.

00:25:09
Speaker 10: Yay College will help advance the expansion of the student body so that additional high achieving students will realize the benefits of a Princeton education, enhance the diversity and vitality of our campus, and go on to contribute to society after graduation.

00:25:25
Speaker 2: This is complete gibberish. The sense of community that a college gives to its students has nothing to do with the architectural design of the dorms. This is the way the Four Seasons talks about a new hotel. But here's the thing. Mister Yea, a very very smart man who graduated with a physics degree from Princeton and went on to make many, many billions on Wall Street, believes it to be true. So true in fact, that he got into his Bentley, loaded up the trunk with coals and drove them down I ninety five to Newcastle. And if you don't understand that reference, may I refer you to mister Google. My point is, we have plenty of evidence that smart people will give huge amounts of money to their alma maters for the stupidest of reasons. Why do we find it hard to believe smart people will give small amounts of money to their alma maters.

00:26:21
Speaker 1: For the best of reasons.

00:26:23
Speaker 2: Or, to put it a little more charitably, maybe Mitchabolm was right. Giving makes you feel like living. Matt Skogan was sitting in on my meeting with the students he didn't speak until the very end.

00:26:38
Speaker 3: There's this Lylan Matthew whit says, freely you have received, not freely give. And this is where I think there's this crazy sense in higher education where most people know that not everyone has access to a great education, but there's this sense in which it must be the case that ultimately those who do get access to a great education somehow deserve it, like this meritocracy. And it just feels like that's like meritocracy gone totally off the rails. At the end of the day, a Christian does believe that anyone deserves a good life, like if we really got what we deserve, we'd all be s crude. A Christian believes that anything we have that's good is a gift of unmerited favorite from God. And I think what you're hearing from these students is like this profound sense of we're ready to just live into that. I heard somebody once to describe generosity as this mindset of circulation, like you take a book out of the library and you know it's not yours. You're just going to read the book, and then you're going to give it back to the library so that somebody else could read it, And I think that's the way a Christian ought to think about everything we have, everything we own, like God gave us stuff just so that we could circulate it. When God God blesses Abraham and the Old Testament, and he says very clearly why he blesses Abraham. He says, I've blessed you so that you can be a blessing. And I think that's the way Christians out of you. Everything we have, like everything we have is this unmerited gift, and then we're just gonna radically give it to the world so that we can be a blessing with the ways we've been blessed. And I'm putting words in your mouth, but I feel like I heard that from your stories in a pretty powerful way. You guys are amazing.

00:28:10
Speaker 4: Thanks.

00:28:11
Speaker 1: Here.

00:28:12
Speaker 2: By way of contrast, is a passage in the commencement speech of the President of Harvard Jue Faust in twenty eighteen. She has the entire graduating class in front of her. Her goal is to give them words to inspire them on their journey into the greater world, and then she starts listing the unprecedented headwinds at Harvard. The institution had faced. As it sought to educate the very best and the brightest.

00:28:40
Speaker 7: We have faced a political and policy environment increasingly hostile to expertise and skeptical about higher education. The unprecedented endowment tax passed last December. Will we estimate impose on us elevee next year equivalent to two thousand dollars per student?

00:29:03
Speaker 2: Holy Toledo, they have dared to tax our fifty six billion dollar endownment. I don't know under the circumstances. I'd rather ride with Skodaddy. I want to play for you. The end of Mitch Album's speech at the Hope College reception. He stood at the front of the room, slight and unprepossessing, big head of black hair, casually dressed. People are standing and milling around and eating canopies. And he starts to talk about how this whole idea of giving makes you feel like living, taught to him by Maurice Schwartz, slowly took over his life. He started a scholarship fund that grew and grew, then a charity to work with the homeless, and then finally the project that has occupied him ever since.

00:29:57
Speaker 6: And in two thousand and ten, h I heard about the earthquake in Haiti, and I'd never been to Haiti, probably couldn't find it that easily on a map.

00:30:09
Speaker 2: He heard that the earthquake had destroyed an orphanage, so he got on a plane and flew to Haiti.

00:30:16
Speaker 6: And what I saw there will never leave my mind. I'm sure many of you remember that earthquake. It was devastating. In forty five seconds, it killed nearly three percent.

00:30:26
Speaker 1: Of Haiti's population.

00:30:28
Speaker 6: Of its population, can you imagine in America that would be about nine million people dead and left about ten percent of its population homeless.

00:30:39
Speaker 2: The orphanage was in ruins.

00:30:41
Speaker 6: And the toilets were a little bit more than holes in the ground, and just behind them were fields. Prior to that were fields where kids would use rocks to bang on other rocks so that the rats would run away if they had to go to the bathroom at night, and then they would use the rock for toilet paper. So we had our hands, our work cut out for us, and I began to go back with some guys from Detroit, and we had an idea to fix the place up.

00:31:09
Speaker 1: Now. The thing is what stuck with me the most, with.

00:31:12
Speaker 6: The kids, the kids that were there and their smiles and their joy, and their faith and their belief that things could get better. Those kids were the reason that I came back and came back, and came back and came back. Every single month since February of twenty ten, for the last thirteen years, I've been in Haiti at that orphanage, and we began to build it up with guys I brought down from Detroit again. All I did was ask they didn't have to pay anybody. They all came as volunteers, and we built the first kitchen and the first showers and all things that didn't exist there before, and we began to grow. We got bigger, and we got bigger, and we got bigger.

00:32:02
Speaker 2: One of America's most successful writers has been going to Haiti, a place that the rest of the world has all but given up on. He's gone every month for thirteen years with a group of his friends from Detroit, driving back and forth from the airport in an armored car. Because much of the country is controlled by criminal gangs. And why does he keep going Because he discovered quite by accident, that giving makes you feel like living. When album heard about Matts Coogan's experiment, he told some of the students at his orphanage about it, and they applied answered the same essay questions as everyone else.

00:32:42
Speaker 6: Our kids, with these new facilities have learned from the very beginning that they are there to help one another, and so we found it funny when in the application process they ask what is your community involvement? And the kids who filled out the application said, mister Mitch, you know, like, what are we supposed to put? What does this mean community involvement? And I said, well, what do you do for others? And I said, let's talk about what you do for others, And fifteen minutes later we were still listing things because every day our kids take care of the other kids. Our kids are there big brothers and big sisters. They are their sources of carrying and food and cleansing and washing and feeding and dressing and taking to school and watching out for one another. And we go out into the community and help with the streets. Or when we used to be able to travel around, our kids would go to a place where they had premature babies were born and they would hold the babies because nobody ever held these children and they had no human contact. And our kids, most of whom have no parents, come from places where in many cases we have to invent birth certificates because we literally don't know where they came from, how old they are, or who their parents are. And these kids are holding other little babies to make them feel welcome in the world. I have seen their ability and their desire to give back, so when they filled out that application, it was easy to say what they've done for others.

00:34:17
Speaker 1: All of our kids know.

00:34:19
Speaker 6: They don't even have to agree to it, because it's part of our DNA that when they're done with college and we send all of our kids to college or a graduate school. Our first one just got accepted to medical school last month.

00:34:30
Speaker 1: And we're going to have our first doctor.

00:34:33
Speaker 6: So if you can be like Jewish dad, proud of a Haitian doctor, there we are and we find money to pay for it. But they know that the first thing they do when they graduate is they come back to the orphanage and they work for two years giving back at the orphanage from the place that gave to them. That is the concept, that is the concept of hope forward. So our kids were living this concept. They hate to break it to you, met, but it ain't original. Our kids have been living this concept from the very beginning. And speak of kids, I can't see so well, but you may have noticed some of those pictures.

00:35:13
Speaker 2: A little earlier on the screen behind album was a series of photographs. There were two teen girls together, and then a boy, and then another teenage boy flexing his muscles.

00:35:24
Speaker 6: All of them last June graduated from our school and what is always the best moment that we have at our orphanage. And all of them now are right here at Hope and they're in this room right here. They're already gonna kill me for showing those photos, so I'm not gonna make them come up and be acknowledged in the front. But they're here, Samenza and Kiki and Teta and JJ and if we have any luck, we'll have two more or maybe even three more coming here next year.

00:36:06
Speaker 2: So is Matt Skogan crazy? I don't think so. I think everyone else is crazy for giving up on the idea that giving makes you feel like living. I wish you could have been there in that room listening to Mitch Album and Madison and Matt Skogan and all the other revolutionaries in Holland, Michigan who believe that gratitude and generosity can help us rebuild what is broken.

00:36:33
Speaker 6: So we're very proud to be associated with a program that is embodying the very belief that we teach at our orphanage to have faith eighty orphanage, that you are responsible for one another in this world.

00:36:47
Speaker 1: And from the.

00:36:48
Speaker 6: Minute our kids arrive, they know that somebody has taken responsibility for them, and from the moment they leave us, they know that they have to take responsibility for somebody else. That is a good circle and we're proud to be a part of it.

00:37:07
Speaker 2: This episode of Revision's History was produced by Bend, Daph Haffrey and Leeman Gistoo. This is actually Lee's last show with us, as she's moved on to the world of audio fiction. If you want to hear one of Lee's great accomplishments on Revisionist, check out our Little Mermaid series. Lee. We will miss You. Jacob Smith, Kr Powell make up the rest of our producing team. Our showrunner is Peter Clowney. Original scoring by Luis Garra, fact checking by Kishelle Williams and Tali Emlin, mastering by Flon Williams, and engineering by Nina Lawrence. Additional recording by Jonathan Fagel and Ben Ugama. Special thanks to Matt Skogan, Jason Cash, Mary Remen Schneider, and everyone who welcomed us at Hope College. I'm Malcolm Glaba.