Jennings reflects on his career, anti-poverty philosophy
Alan Jennings is part politician, part bouncer.
He shakes hands, but isn’t afraid to twist arms to motivate others to do the right thing. I think he’ll miss that part of the job.
At the end of May, after 41 years as an anti-poverty warrior, Jennings is retiring from leading the Community Action Committee of the Lehigh Valley.
Under his watch, the agency has made sure people are fed and housed. He’s created opportunities to buy homes and start businesses. When disasters have struck, he’s pulled together resources to rebuild lives.
Last fall, when he announced he would be stepping down because of his advancing Parkinson’s disease, I wrote that Jennings would be irreplaceable.
We all should be grateful that he isn’t going to disappear.
I met with Jennings last week to catch up and reminisce. First, we talked baseball while he almost shut me out in a game of cornhole. Then we discussed the serious stuff, his plans for the future and his thoughts on how the rest of us can carry on the battle against poverty and discrimination.
Our conversation was long and wide-ranging, so I’ve edited his comments for brevity and to organize them by topic.
Q: You’ve frequently called on the community to do more. How can the average person make an impact? A:
What do you invest in? Do you invest in companies that give or take? What are you eating? Are you eating things that sustain or detract?
Where do you live? Are you living in a gated community where you don’t have to look at anybody but people who look just like you, or are you going to live in a place where people have a little diversity and you can learn to live with others?
Do you send your kids to a school that the real world looks like, or do you send your kids to a school that is all white?
My style when I make decisions is to think about what is the impact I am going to make on others by this decision. The average person thinks, “How can I make this work best for me?” I get that. Just do all of us a favor and give a little bit of thought to what is the result
of your decision.
Q: What are some of the accomplishments you are most proud of ?
(Jennings is leaving just as Color Outside the Lines, CACLV’s initiative to unite business, community, education and religious organizations against racism and discrimination, is taking off. He looks forward to the plan being implemented by his successor, Dawn Godshall.)
One of our recommendations is that companies, employers, declare to
A:
the employees that this is a company that respects, appreciates and honors its diversity, and if you want to go anywhere in this company, you better figure out how to do that yourself.
You can hate people all you want in the privacy of your home. When you come to work, if you don’t demonstrate a respect for the fact that we are all humans and in this together, you’ve got nowhere to go here. I think that kind of a statement, getting right at their pocketbook and their career, would be powerful.
We’re asking them to develop model purchasing practices that enable companies to use minority-owned businesses.
We’re suggesting that we do routine testing of all businesses. Whether it’s going into a restaurant and noticing that you didn’t get seated as fast as the other people did, or standing in a teller line and noticing that they ignored your line. All we have to do is make the announcement, for starters, bust one, and it will shake the whole sector, the whole economy.
This is a crowning project for me.
Q: What’s next?
(Jennings hopes to teach college courses on social entrepreneurship and how to create and sustain a nonprofit. He intends to coach other community action committees around the country. And he will continue writing op-eds and hosting his radio show on community public radio station WDIY.)
I am going to be picking issues as they arise. There are always too many to take on. I’ve got to be mindful of my health. I’m just not as good as I used to be.
I don’t know how not to. When things are wrong, I can’t help but confront those.
My feeling is just about every problem has a solution. The question is: We have the way, do you have the will? If you don’t, then what does the world look like? Does it look like lots of jails that are full of people who couldn’t feed their families? Or does it look like one where everybody’s got a reasonably decent piece of the pie and can raise their kids in an environment that does indeed have love?
We have no choice but to live in a recognition that we need each other. It’s really, really simple stuff. John Lennon took the whole Bible and put it in one line: “All you need is love.”
A: Morning Call columnist Paul Muschick can be reached at 610-820-6582 or paul. muschick@mcall.com.