CHAPTER 12
Who Am I to Step Up?
There are no extraordinary people, only ordinary people who do extraordinary things.
Mother Teresa
When people think about stepping up and creating change, they often ask, “Who am I to step up?” Of course I could easily turn that around and ask, “Who are you not to step up?” As I interviewed people who had stepped up, I increasingly was struck by the fact that stepping up is not about being extraordinary. In fact, I found that often those who stepped up were unlikely candidates.
Homeless to Hero
Ken Lyotier is a case in point. By his own admission, at the time he began a recycling revolution and later created jobs for hundreds of homeless people, he himself was an alcoholic Dumpster diver in Vancouver making his living by salvaging discarded bottles. Just how he got to that state of affairs and how he stepped up to create change is the stuff of urban legend.
Ken was raised just outside of Vancouver and had a pretty normal upbringing in a working class family during the 1950s and 1960s. When he was seventeen years old, he went to study at the University of British Columbia. At the same time he began to take ill. By the time he was diagnosed with severe Crohn’s disease, a form of inflammatory bowel disease, the illness had wreaked havoc with his health, his social life, and his studies. He never finished his degree.
“They didn’t know what was wrong with me, and it took a very long time to diagnose it,” he said. “For a decade I was sick, diarrhea all the time. It was very isolating. I simply could not commute to school any longer, so eventually I had to drop out. I sold real estate for a while, was involved in land title, basically had a good life but also discovered alcohol and drugs. It is a long story, but I wound up homeless and a Dumpster diver. I lost my job and eventually the money ran out. For some time I was homeless.”
He was not exactly on the most-likely-to-step-up list. His description of life as a homeless person is riveting and heartbreaking. He told me stories of the daily indignities homeless people had to face to scrape together a meager existence. I also learned that the stories of how people fall on such hard times are very human and unique to each person.
Yet his life rummaging in garbage bins gave him a unique vantage point both on the amount of waste that people create as well as on the indignity that the indigent people face daily. Ken told me this story: “At the time there were very few products in the recycling deposit system—Pepsi, Coke, and a few beer companies. So to make a living you had to really work hard to find enough to live. Even worse there was the indignity of it all. Stores had a limit on how many bottles you could bring in at one time, and they did not like having these dirty, smelly street people in their stores. People were treated so poorly and often manipulated. For example, store owners would make the homeless buy something from the store in order to give the deposit money. A lot of people who live a normal life have no idea how hard many homeless people work to get a few dollars. This image of a lazy bum is far from reality.”
In 1991 while still diving Dumpsters for a living, Ken and another homeless man, Williams Tremblay, had a chance conversation in a coffee shop with a United Church of Canada minister about the problems and daily challenges the homeless binners faced. The United minister said he had access to a little bit of money if Ken had an idea on how to make things better. Although that minister would not be central to the story that evolved, his willingness to put forward $1,500 to a pair of street people was an act of great faith.
Ken came up with an idea. “As binners, we had a close-up view of people’s garbage, and I was amazed at how much was being thrown out—tons of bottles and cans that could not be recycled. So we had this idea of a one-day event where people would be invited to bring any nonrecyclable bottles they could find to a particular place on a Sunday morning, and they would get paid for the bottles that were not in the deposit system.” Ken hoped it would raise awareness about both the plight of the so-called Dumpster divers as well as the sheer amount of waste people were creating. They advertised the event by posting fliers on Dumpsters, offering ten cents for small bottles and twenty-five cents for the big ones. Ken had no idea how many people would show up.
When the day came, Victory Square in Vancouver had a line that wrapped several times around the block. Hundreds of homeless people showed up, and by the end of the day there was a huge mountain of garbage. Of course most of the street people came for the prospect of earning ten dollars, but Ken was overwhelmed.
“People were lined up, and I thought, ‘We did this!’ It was so energizing and profound, like the loaves and fishes in the Bible, they just kept coming. It made us want to do more. I thought, ‘Wow, if we can do this, then I wonder what else we can do?’”
The mountain of garbage and the march caught the media’s attention. The idea that two binners had organized such an event captured the imagination of the public and the government. As a result of publicity from the event, the provincial government promised to bring scores more products into the recycling program. Even though it took years to fulfill that promise, Ken and Williams helped spawn a recycling revolution. These two Dumpster divers helped set in motion a chain of events that led to scores of additional products being recycled over the next twenty years. The mountain of garbage they helped prevent is almost unfathomable.
Ken told me, “It was a kind of protest that day against what was being thrown out and the indignities faced by the homeless, but most protests are people with signs marching against something. Instead, we did a good thing and just said, ‘Come and look at how things could be.’”
If the story ended there it would be inspiring, but Ken’s story of stepping up was far from over.
If anger is one thing that spurs us to step up, then seeing how powerful we are is another major stimulant. When Ken saw what could be accomplished by posting those fliers on the Dumpsters, it made him want to do more to make a difference. That compounding effect is why it is important to take that first action: once we see how powerful we really are, it becomes much harder to stay on the sidelines. As the Coldplay lyric says, “If you never try you’ll never know / just what you’re worth.”
Emboldened by the experience from Victory Square, Ken became an advocate for his fellow Dumpster divers. When the government started hiring consultants to research the implementation of the new recycling deposit system, Ken pushed for a series of town hall–type sessions to get input from the homeless and binner community. He told the government that the homeless people were consultants just as much as the high-priced advisers the government had hired, and he cajoled the government to pay ten dollars to each person who attended the meetings.
Partly as a result of those town hall meetings, Ken hatched a larger idea. He recalled, “People came to those meetings, and I remember one woman who had all kinds of problems and addictions talking about how she was treated at the stores, how they made her buy gum with the money or they would not give it to her. She told us, ‘I have no dignity.’ So I had this idea to create a bottle depot of our own, a depot where the homeless could come and be treated with dignity.”
More than that, Ken envisioned a place where all the employees would be Dumpster divers. When he first started talking to people about his idea, people thought he was nuts. “The idea kept bubbling along for a few years,” he said. “Honestly, I was still making a living with bottles so I had to do this in my spare time.” But Ken kept pushing until finally a window of opportunity opened when the city was building a new sports arena and made a commitment to employ poor people from the downtown eastside into the workforce. Ken told the government that his bottle depot could serve as a test lab for training street people to enter the workforce. His years of hard work and persistence finally paid off, and the bottle depot was born.
“It was hard. We became a nonprofit and even had a board, but I was still fronting the money for the pizza. The idea of the homeless working at the arena never came to pass, but the depot opened. Early on, I needed to get a line of credit, and I didn’t even know what one was at the time. Imagine the banker’s face when I came in asking for one!”
Today, United We Can continues to run a bottle depot and an urban farm called Sole Foods in Vancouver, right in the heart of one of the poorest neighborhoods in the developed world. United We Can eventually came to recycle millions of products a year, turn a profit, employ scores of homeless people, and contribute to a recycling revolution. Ken is retired and on the organization’s board, and, with the exception of the executive director and the manager of the urban farm, the staff is made up entirely of binners, some homeless, who have found a place of dignity through work. Some gave up their addictions, some did not, but all found something at the depot. Every day hundreds of homeless people bring their bottles and cans to the depot and are treated with respect. The homeless Dumpster diver had become an entrepreneur and an activist. He had raised awareness in the Victory Square rally and persevered until he created a thriving enterprise.
When I asked him to tell me a few stories about the difference the depot has made in people’s lives, he told me about the first Christmas after it opened.
“We had been open for about a year, and we had a party for the staff and whoever wanted to come,” he said. “People came to that thing, and we sat around and drank and talked. These folks had no place to have Christmas. They came, and it was not a bar, not the street or a hotel room. There was this sense of community. I remember the laughter, people talking to each other about memories of their Christmases past. They so needed that. It gave me a lot of comfort and hope, seeing people so alive and engaged. To be reassured that they somehow knew there was hope, that no matter how miserable their lives can be they can still find a place to connect.”
And then there were the stories of those individuals whose lives changed.
“There was a guy who had been fostered out and adopted many times as a child,” Ken said. “He had drifted from place to place and finally was working with us at the depot. He had taken on some supervisory responsibilities, but there was a street altercation and he was beaten up badly. He told me, ‘That’s it. I’m gone.’ He just wanted to move on, the way he had probably done all his life. I said, ‘You have some vacation time—take it.’ I let him know he was valuable and there was a place for him here. ‘We are not letting go of you even if you leave.’ Later on, he said to me, ‘I don’t want to move on, I am tired of moving on.’ That guy stepped up more and more and eventually became a very valuable person taking on lots of responsibility. In time he got his own apartment and settled down.”
For every victory there have been defeats, but Ken has no doubt that the depot has changed lives.
Skill Is Not as Important as Passion
Ken’s story reminds us that position or even skill, per se, are not the prime attributes of those who create change. To step up does not require being extraordinary or having extraordinary means. It is about having the heart, the perseverance, and the desire to make something happen. It is about having a vision. Once you step up, somehow that act of taking initiative drives you to find the resources you need inside and outside yourself. If Ken had worried about whether he was the right guy or whether the resources would be there, he never would have accomplished so much. Instead, he had a vision, and the resources somehow materialized.
Perhaps what people responded to in Ken was more important than intelligence or resume. Study after study shows that the one quality all great teachers have is passion. We are attracted to passion and to vision. Think of the stories of those who have stepped up that have been told in this book. All of those who made something happen had two things in common, passion and determination. These qualities are infectious and make others want to help us.
It may be that almost every person who has ever stepped up doubted that she had the resources, talent, and skill to do so. You may doubt that you are the right person to step up. Yet what I learned in this research is that skill, talent, and resources are overrated compared with drive, determination, and vision.
Helping Women Out of Poverty, One Bead at a Time
Devin Hibbard is the CEO and cofounder of an organization called BeadforLife. Over the last sixteen years, the organization has helped over ninety thousand women in Uganda escape the cycle of extreme poverty by starting their own businesses. BeadforLife began because of a chance meeting in 2004 that Devin Hibbard and her BeadforLife cofounders, Torkin Wakefield and Ginny Jordan, had on a visit to a refugee camp in Kampala, Uganda. The camp was filled with women, many of whom were HIV-positive or AIDS widows who had fled a civil war in northern Uganda. A woman named Mille showed the three the jewelry she had made out of beads created from recycled paper. She told them that she worked all day crushing rocks at a quarry for one dollar per day. Her beads were beautiful, but she said she had no market to sell her work. Devin and the others bought some of Mille’s jewelry, not realizing that their lives and the lives of thousands of women were about to change.
When they came home, the three women showed the beads to friends and told the story of the Ugandan women’s lives. In September 2004 they invited friends to a bead party, and the guests loved the jewelry. An idea began to hatch in the women’s minds: maybe they were being called to create a market for these Ugandan women’s work.
“The funny thing is that at New Year’s we had set some intentions together for the year, and one of those intentions was to do something for the world,” Hibbard told me as we sat in her humble office in Kampala, Uganda’s capital city. Hibbard is a deceptively powerful and magnetically attractive woman who runs a tight ship but is deeply loved by her Ugandan staff. When I met her for the first time, she had just returned from a month in the United States, and the offices were filled with notes and pictures about how much she had been missed. Her style is matter of fact, but her passion for this mission and for life is contagious.
“Frankly, we did not have a grand plan, or any real credentials to do this,” she told me. “We had no marketing experience, no retail experience, and no grand plan, but we felt like the universe was knocking at our door and figured if the universe was knocking who were we to say no! We just kind of leapt into the unknown and took it step by step.”
Within a few years, bead parties were happening all over the United States. In Uganda, BeadforLife took in groups of women who were in desperate poverty and trained them to make the beads and jewelry. The organization stabilized the women’s lives with a steady income from the beads, trained them to start more traditional businesses, and gave them a grant if they had a solid business plan. Eventually, BeadforLife bought a large piece of land outside the city and created a community called Friendship Village where women and families could buy modest new homes with the beads they supplied to BeadforLife.
When I visited Uganda for a month in August 2010, I visited the homes and businesses of many women who had been through the BeadforLife program. Again and again I heard stories about how making these beads had changed these women’s lives. What I learned is that BeadforLife was not just eradicating physical poverty but also poverty of the spirit. BeadforLife had helped women believe in themselves and in the possibility of dreaming again.
One young woman named Fiona is in her late twenties. She was an AIDS widow at a very young age, destitute and with children. Other women in her neighborhood nicknamed her Old Young because she looked so very old for being so very young. “When I passed the cemetery,” she said, “I envied the dead.” Then she told my companions and me what happened when she met the people from BeadforLife: “They taught me how to make beads and jewelry but more importantly they taught me to believe in myself.” Today, Fiona lives with her two children in a home she owns in Kampala, and stores in Seattle and Vancouver sell her jewelry. She is independent of BeadforLife, leaving room for other women to join the program.
Today, Devin leads an organization with more than sixty staff members and interns, almost all Ugandans in Kampala. Every year, several hundred more women and families are lifted out of poverty, all because three women with few credentials but lots of heart decided to step up. Devin gave me a great definition of stepping up: “Stepping up is seeing a need and deciding you are the right person to do something about it!”
“You have to step out of your comfort zone. I mean, we had very little experience for doing what we did, but the resources came to us once we stepped up,” she told me. When I asked Devin about advice for others, she gave me some important counsel. “To step up you need patience. We are so wedded to instant gratification, but if you want to change things you have to know it won’t happen right away.”
It is an important lesson. It took years before Rex Weyler’s picture led to the banning of the whale hunt. Ken Lyotier stepped up and the government promised to recycle more, but it took years of persistence to make good on that promise and begin the bottle depot. BeadforLife is a thriving organization that is making a huge difference in Uganda and is part of a much larger movement to empower people in the developing world. BeadforLife has an inspiring and simple mission statement: BeadforLife creates sustainable opportunities for women to lift their families out of extreme poverty by connecting people worldwide in a circle of exchange that benefits everyone. To learn more about its work or to host a party, go to www.beadforlife.org.
The Two Voices
What I learned is that many of those who stepped up had this thought: who am I to do this? Devin Hibbard started BeadforLife with no marketing or retail experience but a great desire to get something done. Joanne Beaton had never run operator services but wanted to create a thriving business. Rahul Singh was a paramedic, not a fundraiser. Ken Lyotier was diving in Dumpsters but stepped up anyway. The Starbucks manager in Santa Monica was not a marketing guru, but she knew a good thing when she saw it. Mike Feinberg and Dave Levin were brand new teachers, not entrepreneurs, but started an alternative public school system. David Shepherd and Travis Price were just normal twelfth graders when they began a pink shirt revolution.
So maybe the question really is: who are you not to step up? Whatever reasons you have to say you are not the right person, you can be sure that someone else had those same thoughts and stepped up to get something done. Mike Feinberg, one of KIPP’s cofounders, put this in perspective: “There is often a voice inside of us that says I am not good enough or qualified enough to do this, but there is another voice that says we can do it. Too often we give that negative voice too much power.”
Ken Lyotier knows that negative voice all too well, but he also heard another voice. His parents died while he was living on the streets. Some years after his mother’s death, he was diving in a Dumpster one day in Stanley Park in Vancouver when he came upon an urn used for human ashes. “Someone had probably put the ashes in the water at the beach and then thrown the urn away. As I handled the urn I could hear my mother’s voice saying, ‘Ken, there must be something more you can do with your life than dive in Dumpsters.’”
A few weeks after I met Ken, he learned that he would be receiving an honorary doctorate—a distinction given to very few—from the University of British Columbia, the school he had dropped out of because of illness forty years earlier. Life had come full circle. With tears in his eyes he said, “I just wish my parents could be alive to see this.”
Ways to Step Up
Remember what matters. Whenever you are tempted to step up and think you don’t have the talent, skill, or qualifications, remember that vision, determination, and perseverance are the most important qualities of those who step up. When that voice says, “Why me?” replace it with, “Why not me?”
Do something! Take a step you don’t think you are qualified to take to try to change something.
Embolden others. Always encourage someone who says they want to step up, even if you think they are not qualified. Your word of encouragement could make a big difference. Remember the United Church minister is the one who encouraged those two homeless men to take a step. Imagine if he had not done so.