Skip West:  What a difference a year makes

Sitting in Kennedy Airport waiting for a flight to Dakar, a nervous and barely twenty-year-old Skip West ticked off the reasons why actually boarding the plane would be ridiculous. His parents thought he was crazy, and his row-mate on the flight to New York, “a state department kind of guy,” couldn’t hide his shock. “You’re doing what?” he said, when West explained that he was headed to Africa with no place to stay, and not knowing where he would go, nor exactly what he would do.

Thankfully, says Skip, he beat back his fears and got on the plane. Four months of traveling in Senegal, Mali, and Ghana followed by a year of teaching in a rural Kenyan high school altered the course of his life. He scrapped thoughts of becoming a doctor or an attorney, finished up his studies at Haverford College, then headed to the Stanford GSB, hoping to pursue a career in international development. Although his post-MBA path veered in a different direction (Skip put in six years at AT&T and founded two consumer electronics companies) the experience inAfrica was nonetheless embedded in his psyche.

Over the years, Skip sponsored two Project Redwood grantees, Rural Agency for Development (Rafode) and Titagya Schools, both based in Africa. He met Rafode’s Chris Khan more than a decade ago through the Ron Brown Scholar Program, which provides college tuition grants to outstanding African-American students. Skip hired the young engineer, who he calls “brilliant,” for some part-time work. At about the same time, Khan started the microfinance non-profit in Kenya. “I’ve watched him take this thing and develop it from scratch,” says Skip, “he’s created this amazing organization there.”

Skip connected with Andrew Garza, one of the founders of Titagya Schools in Ghana, through his on-going involvement at Haverford. Skip has long been bringing students from his alma mater into his business to learn about product design and development, and Garza was one of them. When the former intern decided to start a kindergarten in Ghana after also spending some time there, it seemed natural for Skip to take part. He’s on the Titagya Board; it’s been great fun bouncing around ideas with its dedicated and energetic team, he says.

Skip hasn’t lost the leanings that got him on that plane to Africa over thirty years ago; Skip’s innate interest in people and relish for chasing down opportunity are partly what got him involved in Project Redwood, too. “There’s all these great things,” he says, “sometimes something comes up, and it feels right.”

 

Maren Fristrup Symonds:  Business skills are weapon of choice

When Maren Fristrup Symonds started out on the Pilgrimage of Hope and Pain to Uganda and Rwanda in 2007, she wasn’t completely prepared for what she learned. As an alumna of the three-year Master of Divinity program at Duke University, she was able to get a spot in the annual trip that is normally reserved for faculty, staff and current students. Through the school’s extensive network of in-country relationships, “we were able to enter deeply into the history of the land,” says Maren, “we went to meet with people, bear witness to their stories, and find kernels of hope.”

Violent histories and extraordinary poverty have left indelible marks in both Uganda and Rwanda, but two stops along the 15-day tour were particularly compelling. In Pabo, Uganda, roughly 60,000 people lived in seemingly endless rows of small mud huts at the Internally Displaced Persons camp. As subsistence farmers scattered out across the countryside, they’d been vulnerable to kidnap and murder by the brutal Lord’s Resistance Army; the government gathered them into camps.  “The living conditions were appalling,” says Maren, and “thousands perished from disease and malnourishment.”

At the Murambi Memorial in Rwanda, one of eight survivors of the slaughter of nearly 50,000 Tutsi spoke with the Pilgrmage group about the genocide there, and his painful loss of family and friends at the hands of his countrymen.

What Maren took away from the life- changing trip was a sense of the connection between violence and privation, and the urgent need to do something about it. “I hope that Project Redwood can be a venue for people to get engaged in addressing global poverty,” she says, “we have the means to find solutions.”

Over the years, Maren has volunteered with various organizations. The computer and the telephone, as well as skills she’s honed in a thirty-year career in marketing and consulting, have been her primary means for contributing to Project Redwood. She helped two grantees, Care to Help and Village Enterprise Fund, with marketing programs.  She’s sponsored a number of Project Redwood applicants.   And, for years, Maren maintained the Project Redwood website. While she prefers face-time, she’s been able to do it all via conference call and email.

“Mission work isn’t limited to building schools or plowing fields,” Maren says, “the organizations we support can readily avail themselves of the managerial and administrative expertise a business person can bring.”

 

Mike Watt:  An epiphany in Costa Rica

Back in the mid 1970s, Mike Watt led a double life. On weekdays, he was a history student at the University of Illinois Chicago studying colonial America. But he’d run out of money and his parents couldn’t help out. So at night, and on weekends, he was a collections supervisor at an academic medical center in a city neighborhood still scarred from the 1968 riots that followed Martin Luther King’s assassination.

Mike’s education about the challenges of providing health care to the urban poor may have been born of necessity, but what he learned from his inner city workforce and patients while managing receivables and converting computer systems spawned a lifetime avocation, and occupation. After Mike wrapped up his undergraduate studies he contemplated going for a masters degree in history or heading off to law or divinity school. Instead, he stuck full time with the medical center. When he arrived at the Stanford campus four years later, he was fully committed to a career in health care services.

Decades of working with teaching hospitals to organize and finance care for the poor played into Mike’s decision to get involved with Project Redwood. And, if he needed one last push to jump in, it was provided by an epiphany of sorts around the time of Project Redwood’s inception.

Mike was in Costa Rica visiting his daughter while she spent an academic year there. His family watched a parade for the national holiday, Dia de Juan Santamaria. Looking around in sea of humanity where almost all of the faces belonged to people under twenty-five, Mike thought about the immense upside of channeling all that youthful spirit and vigor into economic opportunity. But the flipside, the idea of that energy transformed to rage by indigence and despair, unnerved him. “The whole idea of progress out of poverty for me has an important moral dimension,” Mike says, “but there’s also a part of it that is enlightened self-interest; either we expand hope worldwide or we’re going to be in for a century of [trouble].”

Mike has been Project Redwood’s treasurer since day one. He’s fit tracking the fund’s cash flows in between the demands of putting three children through college and working to maintain his independent consultancy. But he loves it. There’s the camaraderie of collaborating with former classmates. “Even more important,” Mike says, “is that [with modest individual contributions] we can collectively do some things that produce real results.”

 

Rich Jerdonek:  A doyen of getting-things-done

When a job involves coordinating with dozens of government departments, hundreds of their major contractors, and thousands of small businesses to evaluate and spin-off projects from immense portfolios of technology-rich programs, management processes are not just important, they’re vital. So Rich Jerdonek, who for several years was been a keystone on a team that oversees the United States Air Force’s part of the Small Business Innovation Research (SBIR) program, might aptly dub himself a guru of decision-making or a doyen of getting-things-done.   Rich learned a lot about evaluating projects and shepherding programs in his SBIR role, and in a career of planning and managing large multi-technology systems. That’s good news for Project Redwood, because for the last many years he’s brought his skills to our Grant Review Committee, which he now co-chairs with Rick Agresta.

Rich studied systems engineering as an undergraduate at Case Western Reserve University, and when he matriculated at the Stanford GSB in his early thirties, he already had a vitae loaded with work designing electronic intelligence gathering systems, naval weapons instrumentation, and chemical plants. In his post-graduate years, he carried his interest in technology-driven projects to consulting, first with AT Kearny, and later on his own.

SBIR is Federal government-sponsored program designed, in part, to spawn innovation and stimulate private sector commercialization of technologies initially funded by Washington. “The Air Force sponsors several hundred projects a year,” says Rich, “they range from materials to software to microelectronics. In almost any area of technology you can imagine, there is something probably going on.”

And while the management skills he honed in projects like SBIR have benefitted Project Redwood, Rich’s attraction to our grant-making foundation came from a fundamental desire to help people. “I reached a point in my career and with my family and I felt, gee, I have to get involved more with the community and get outside my comfort zone,” he says.

About twenty years ago, Rich and his wife Julie started working with a homeless shelter in Cleveland; they started as occasional volunteers, eventually became board members, and a few years ago spearheaded a successful effort to raise $3 million for expansion. What he learned about poverty (Cleveland is by some measures one of the poorest cities in the United States) fueled Rich’s desire to also looks for ways to be involved in addressing privation internationally, and that brought him to Project Redwood. He just showed up at an annual meeting, and was promptly put to work reviewing grant proposals. “I’m really glad that happened, it’s been very broadening to get an on-the-ground perspective of what it is like in Central America, Africa, India, Burma,” he says, “For me, it has been kind of a little window into the world.”