Alan Jennings: How do you replace the irreplaceable?
Alan Jennings is one of the most pragmatic people I’ve run across in my 16 years of writing about the Lehigh Valley.
The champion for the less-fortunate recognizes reality — much of it sad reality — like few people do, and fights like hell to change it. Ironically, the one reality I don’t think Jennings has grasped is how much of a difference he has made to his community. Maybe I can change that. Jennings told The Morning Call’s Kayla Dwyer last Wednesday, after announcing he would retire in May, that he knows he made a difference: “I just didn’t make anywhere near the difference I intended to make.”
As executive director of the Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley, he’s spent a lifetime fighting the causes and effects of poverty. Yet he said if he were to be judged solely on that, his efforts failed because the poverty rate has increased.
The reality is, the rest of us failed Jennings.
That list is long. At the top are the politicians who have the power to change the uneven playing field but don’t.
Tax laws are written to enrich the rich. The minimum wage remains insultingly low in Pennsylvania. Cost of living adjustments to Social Security payments are a joke.
School funding is inequitable. Substandard and unsafe hous
ing is allowed to exist. There are few incentives to build affordable housing.
Everyday folks, including me, could be doing more as well.
I could write more columns calling out the powerful for
refusing to address the problems. While many people volunteer to help those in need or advocate for change, too many others sit at home, too well-off to be bothered or too defeated to bother trying.
Parents refuse to parent. And
too many people refuse to vote, or vote wisely, to put people in power who might shake things up.
One person can do only so much, and Jennings did more than his share. What more could we have asked him to do?
He joined CACLVin 1980 as an employment counselor, fresh out of college. Twoyears later, he was second-in-command, helping to rebuild an agency that had a poor reputation for assisting the poor and was marked for shutdown unless it could raise more money and spend it more wisely. In 1990, he became executive director.
After 30 years with him at the helm, the agency has a $30 million-a-year budget. Its Second Harvest Food Bank has distributed 150 million pounds of food since it opened in 1982. About 3,500 homeless families with children have been sheltered. About 25,000 homes have been weatherized. About 4,000 people got help to buy their first home, and another 200 got help to start a business.
Asmall army of employees and volunteers run those programs, and they will continue their good work under the next director.
Jennings’ combination of passion, fearlessness and compassion make him one-ofa-kind. That can’t be replicated.
Nonprofits such as the Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley typically go about their business quietly. Not Jennings. He makes it a point to publicly call out the wrongs he sees and challenge those in power, regardless of whether he may need a hand from them in the future, or received their hand in the past.
This summer, he took on District Attorney Jim Martin for his refusal to release data about the criminal justice system, data that Martin said can’t be released legally. Jennings has questioned whether Lehigh Valley Health
Network does enough charitable giving. He’s tangled with landlords about shoddy properties and with bankers about lending to minorities.
Years ago, he took on a former Morning Call columnist, Paul Carpenter, challenging his opinion about the welfare system.
“I’ve made a lot of people mad as hell. That’s OK because I’ve always said that I want to be judged at least as much by who myenemiesareaswhomyfriends are,” Jennings said last Wednesday during his agency’s annual meeting, held virtually, where he announced he was leaving.
If not for the advancement of the Parkinson’s disease he was diagnosed with 15 years ago, he would have stayed longer.
In announcing his departure, Jennings noted his agency’s accomplishments but called for all of us to focus on the challenges that remain.
“Don’t think for a minute we are good enough. We aren’t. We can do better,” he said.
He also implored people to recognize the role that luck plays in their lives.
He noted how lucky he was to have been born a white man to a mother who loved him, and married to a wife who loves him. He didn’t have to say why that made him lucky, because he’s spent a lifetime helping those who came into this world under different circumstances they’ve never been able to overcome.
Not many of us would ever consider that reality. We should.