A few years before I stopped working for that grantmaking foundation in NYC my boss decided we’d try taking a summer intern from one of our grantee organizations, and I’d do the training and supervision.
Andy sent us Mona.
She was vitally attractive—not pretty—in every possible way. The organization served poor Hispanic and black kids in upper Manhattan and Mona was the type you know could make something of herself if you managed to keep her out of trouble in the neighborhood.
My boss loved her and I liked her too, though I was horrified when she showed me the tongue piercing she’d just gotten. As I recall her mother was pretty mad about it.
Anyway the experiment worked out well and the following year my boss asked Andy to send us another candidate.
He sent us Betty.
She was a very neat very quiet very black girl. She was so quiet she was just the other side of mute. She was the sort of girl who’d be overlooked everywhere but she paid careful attention to everything I said as I explained what the expectations were and I said goodbye to her very warmly at the end of my part of the interview.
Afterwards my boss said she really wasn’t suitable and one of us—I don’t remember now which one of us it was—told Andy to send us someone else.
I was almost sick with anger over it. Even now, more than a quarter-century later, I can feel that anger starting up all over again. We were exactly the experience a girl like Betty needed and was otherwise extremely unlikely to ever get. The hypocrisy of it made me so angry I had to use unusual degrees of self-control to tamp it down. I felt so vicariously shamed about my boss’s rejection of Betty I could hardly bear it.
Andy sent us a teenage boy, tall and good-looking and knowing it and used to using it to snow people in charge of things. My boss thought he was adorable. He had one of those pocket toys popular in those days that gave you a virtual pet to take care of. He kept taking care of it while he was supposed to be working and after I caught him the second or third time I told my boss and she dismissed him and I really can’t remember, now, if we ever took another intern while I still worked there.
I asked Andy a few years later about Mona. He’d gotten her into an upstate community college and convinced her mother to let her go, and when she graduated she came back to the city and got a job and did some mentoring at Andy’s organization, and then after a couple of years she decided she wanted to go back upstate where life had been much better, all things considered.
Andy was very bitter about that. He was an Ivy League grad from a very comfortable family but he’d founded this organization and moved his wife and baby into an apartment in the neighborhood which was such a crappy neighborhood that he’d wanted to help Mona escape it for at least a little while.
Eventually the board of the organization pushed him, the founder, out, because he wasn’t Hispanic or black but just another privileged white guy thinking he knew what Hispanic and black kids needed. I think it was a big shock to him, the way they treated him. He was a very sincere sort of person.
Recently I looked Mona up online. She’s got that same vitally attractive face, just a few decades older now. She married a guy from up there and they have kids and they’re very active in community advocacy and I’d say she’s proven to be a real success for Andy’s vision except for not sacrificing herself to stay in the old neighborhood.
I know nothing about what might have happened to Betty. I don’t think I’m necessarily a deeply insightful predictive sort of person but I thought there was so much in Betty that could be encouraged to grow and flower and that she was exactly the reason my boss had been so enthusiastic about Andy’s organization and gave it so many renewal grants.
But Betty was the type you just can’t show off to colleagues and peers as the reason you give out so much money. You’d need years to know if there’d’ve been any return on the investment; it sure wouldn’t’ve been obvious from the start that you had a fighter and a thriver who’d go out into the world afterwards, always a credit to your foresight in taking a chance on her.
I think it stayed rough for Andy. It’s hard to go from being a founder to being someone else’s employee, and to endure the slap in the face his board gave him. I’d feel worse for him if he hadn’t made his family live in that place so he could fulfill his noble dreams. In that, even with her mere community college degree Mona had proven herself a lot smarter.