Empathy

When I was a child growing up in Deerfield, Illinois the ancient saying “Money is the root of all evil” still held currency in the culture.  People actually thought that way, but now, decades later, that quotation seems less often spoken.  An AI search reports that the phrase is popular on social media, but I would not know this since I do not frequent those haunts.  

The sentence is a misquote from the Bible 1 Timothy 6:10 “For the love of money is a root of all kinds of evils.”  So money itself is value neutral, while its craving and lust are the stuff of sin, a defining trait of this dark age of Mammon. 

When I was a child growing up in Deerfield, Illinois there lived a young woman, whose father was from Guatemala and her mother an Anglo, a bi-racial family in a very caucasian Judeo-Christian small town.  When her father died young, her mother’s strength held them strong and taught them to take pride in their work, meager as it may be.  When that young woman came of age her work ethic and ambition lead her to food service, and eventually to found a catering company – with $300 dollars – called “Food For Thought.”  

I worked with that company at its beginning, serving endless platters of Chicken Dijonnaise and Phyllo-wrapped Baked Brie, in the era when the Silver Palate Cookbook was changing the rules of the game, and American Cuisine was taking root.  “Food For Thought” grew over the decades to become Chicago’s leading provider of corporate, social, and cultural event services with revenues now exceeding $22 Million per year.  

In our Wise Women writings, we have discussed the “Commanding Intellect” – which this young woman had in abundance – but more fundamentally her’s is the gift of “Empathy” which is “the ability to understand and share the feelings of another.”  Empathy’s first cousin “Forbearance” is “restraint and tolerance” by “demonstrating patience and showing tolerance toward others who are imperfect or have wronged you.”  This woman built Food For Thought but what she did next is the story that bears mention, that demonstrates her wisdom.  Commanding intellect built her first business.  Empathy expanded her reach.  

$80.7 Billion dollars are spent annually in the United States on public prisons and jails.  Approximately 4,000 companies work in the for-profit prison industrial complex generating $5.2 Billion dollars in revenue annually.  It costs more to send a teenager to a correctional facility than to put them through Northwestern University.  Our Heroine reasoned that she could give the “throw away kids,” the gang-affiliated, the pregnant teen mothers, the dispossessed, the least among us a chance, to learn a trade through food service, at a cost less than $10,000 per child.  She leveraged her food service savvy toward social justice by opening Curt’s Cafe, in Evanston, Illinois.  

Curt’s Cafe (Cultivating Unique Restaurant Training) works to “improve outcomes for young adults (ages 15-24) living in at-risk situations through work and life skills training.”  Over 650 students have completed the Cafe’s work and skill training, learning how to prepare and serve a full menu of breakfast and lunch items, how to work the cash register, how to do basic accounting, how to open a checking account, how to find an apartment.  Nationally, the recidivism rate for ex-convicts returning to prison is 86% but at Curt’s Cafe only 1% having returned to prison.  1%!  The average wage of incarcerated workers is $0.86 per day, but Curt’s Cafe provides its workers a living stipend and hope.  These numbers only scratch the surface.  The human stories are richer, deeper, and more meaningful.  

It is best now to let Susan Trieschmann tell her own story:

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In other news, this week I helped install a sculpture down in Kennebunk. Jesse Salisbury is the esteemed maker of this seat carved from Basalt, a hard black volcanic rock. Heavy lifting 1.5 tons up that hill, but well worth the effort in the end. Ars long, vita brevis.