Those of us who are fortunate enough to work in leadership roles in mission-driven organizations do not, in general, do so to receive public acclaim and recognition. But when it comes, it can be nice! Previously I published my final remarks during a gala to mark the end of my 18 year tenure as President and CEO of Grameen Foundation in 2015. Below are remarks (made in two parts on the same evening) when I received the distuinguished alumni award from my high school alma mater, Horace Mann School in New York City.
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Speech and Acceptance Remarks*
By Alex Counts ‘84
Upon Receiving the 2007 Horace Mann Award for Distinguished Achievement
November 12, 2007
Thank you, Tom, for those kind and eloquent words of introduction.
If I can keep my emotions under control, I am going to tell you a little about what I do and about my 19-year journey in the world of combating poverty through microfinance.
The only reason that microfinance has gained some significant recognition in recent years is that it addresses one of the critical issues of our time – the global poverty crisis. This crisis does not often appear on the front pages of our newspapers, but if you read good analyses of the crises that do reach our front pages, you will find that poverty is often an important underlying cause. When I say global poverty crisis, I am talking about the fact that three billion people, almost half of humanity, live on less than $2 per day, and that one billion of them live – if it can be called that – on less than $1 per day.
I spent a number of years living with people who earned less than $2 per day and less than $1 per day. One of the things that struck me is that these people are very entrepreneurial. They are hardly the passive individuals awaiting aid that our media often portrays them to be. Self-employment is more common amongst the poor than amongst any other slice of humanity. Why? For the poor, there are not enough jobs – during my six years living in Bangladesh, I did not see a single “Help Wanted” sign – and there is no social safety net. The choice that a poor person is left with in these conditions is stark – work for yourself, or starve. Not surprisingly, almost all of them attempt to eke out some money from what economists call “micro-enterprises.”
In this sense, they are the most rugged – not to mention desperate – capitalists in the world. Then one must ask, as I did while living in rural Bangladesh, where does the poor’s capital come from, since that is one thing that capitalism requires. I gained a significant insight into the answer to this question when I asked a street vendor in Manila how he financed his tiny business. He replied, “I get my money where everyone else does.” I said, “Where is that?” He said, “Everyone knows. I get it from a five-six.” I asked, “What is a five-six?” He answered, “It is the place where you borrow five pesos in the morning, and pay back six pesos in the evening.” I suddenly realized why so many poor people stay poor despite their hard work. Their entrepreneurial efforts are severely undercapitalized and very often financed by loanshark rates that can be as high as 20% per day. Try to get ahead paying those kinds of rates!
I often wonder why it took people so long to realize that saving the poor from loansharks represented both a terrific social impact opportunity, and also a real business opportunity. We train people at the best schools to look at social problems and also identify new business ideas, but this one was missed for decades if not centuries. The best answer I can come up with to explain this oversight is that those of us who have education, and whose ancestors emerged from poverty generations ago, grossly underestimate the capabilities of the poor – and this fundamental misjudgment hampers our ability to address poverty in a constructive manner.
Let me illustrate this with a story.
About ten years ago, Professor Muhammad Yunus, the founder of the Grameen Bank, launched a mobile phone company with a European partner. A key element of this venture was that it would set up an estimated 50,000 Grameen Bank borrowers as pay phone vendors, cellular pay phone vendors, in rural Bangladesh – places where phone service had never existed before. People scoffed at the idea. They questioned whether the poor could learn to use the phones, to make and receive calls, within a reasonable period of time. Unlike us, who often pay one penny for our phones due to the fact that we are prized consumers based on our inherited or earned wealth, the poor pay full price for their phones, and under this program Grameen Bank would finance these phones with loans bearing a commercial rate of interest. So, if the poor could not figure out how to use the phones, which after all are “simplified computers” according to some analysts, they would struggle to pay back their loans (since the phones would not be generating any income). Some predicted that the poor women who would own these phones would be scared by them when they heard voices coming out, and figure that there were ghosts in these mysterious devices.
Dr. Yunus said that in that case, he would forgive the loans, but it was worth a try in any case. About one year after launching this program, he visited a village where some of the first phones were distributed to Grameen Bank borrowers. A number of women from nearby villages had been gathered to speak to him. He asked one how many months it had taken her to feel comfortable using the phone. She stepped back, scratched her head, and said, “To ask me that question Professor Yunus, it makes me think that you have a very complicated phone.” She continued, “You see, my phone only has ten numbers. And with money to be made for my family, it took me about one minute to learn each number and I was in business in ten minutes.” She looked at Grameen Bank’s founder for a moment and added, “Professor Yunus, you should get one of these simple phones.”
Another woman told Professor Yunus that after a few months, she had memorized the country codes of all the nations in the world. Many Bangladeshis live overseas and called her village, and her pay phone, from countries across the world at all times of day and night. She sensed that Dr. Yunus did not believe her, that he still doubted that they were competent users of their phones, so she issued a challenge. “Dr. Yunus, you can give me the name of a country and the phone number, and I will dial it – blindfolded – and if I don’t get the line of the first try, the phone is yours. Since you seem to need one of these simple phones.”
Professor Yunus had this insight, into the unappreciated and untapped capabilities of the poor, and turned it into an incredibly successful bank – the Grameen Bank – and family of companies. His work spawned a movement, and it was rightly recognized by the high honor of receiving a Nobel Peace Prize in 2006. His bank provides capital to more than seven million Bangladeshis, mostly women, and surveys show that about 60% of them are able to overcome poverty within four years, while most of the rest take somewhat longer.
At this point, I’d like to tell you a little about my personal journey in the microfinance movement, or industry as some prefer to call it. The seeds of my work in microfinance and social justice can be traced back to Horace Mann, where my involvement with The Tutoring Project, which I understand continues at HM in some form, and the Oxfam Fast for a World Harvest gave me a sense of my responsibilities to the wider community. At Cornell, I sympathized with those who were protesting against the wars in Central America and apartheid, but I did not join their protests. Rather, I yearned to figure out what I was for, rather than focusing on what I was against. I went on a journey to find something that was not only cutting edge in terms of delivering social justice, but that was fundamentally positive – something that could be done, ideally on a wide scale, when things like needless war and the embarrassment of apartheid were in retreat.
This led me to the work of Professor Muhammad Yunus, and the Grameen Bank he had created in 1976. At the urging of a mentor, in 1987 I wrote Dr. Yunus a letter with an idea that had all the naiveté one would expect from a 20-year-old. I proposed to come to Bangladesh in order to help him spread the Grameen Bank’s strategy for addressing poverty through micro-loans to other Third World countries. Six weeks later – remember, this was long before the Internet made these kinds of communications almost instantaneous – I received a reply from Professor Yunus. He encouraged me to come to Bangladesh and work on the project I described. He said that he could not guarantee that his colleagues would like me, or that I would like the work. As something of an afterthought, he said that I should try to learn some Bengali before arriving.
I think I surprised him when, 18 months later, I arrived as a Fulbright scholar and was speaking passable Bengali – a beautiful language that I would go on to speak fluently in time. He took an interest in me and made this HM graduate feel like his idea has some merit and could make an impact. That gave me enormous energy and a sense of purpose. I wrote about my experiences and sent many long letters to friends, who passed them around to people I knew, and many whom I did not. I tapped into what I learned about writing from people like the late Mr. McCardell and Mr. Castleman , my 10th grade English teacher whom I am very pleased has joined me here tonight. In writing those letters, I found my voice as never before. In fact, a few of these outpourings found their way into the hands of a producer at “60 Minutes,” and led to a segment on Grameen Bank that brought its hopeful message and practical approach to millions of Americans.
After ten months I returned home and began giving a series of eight talks in eight cities about my experiences. The first one I gave was, frankly, a disaster. I was all over the map, unable to drive home any point convincingly. My approach to communicating was much too theoretical. The evening after my first speech I regrouped, just like a poor woman would if her business had a bad day. I radically simplified my presentation for the next day, talking for almost a full hour about the life of one woman.
A few weeks earlier, I had translated for two journalists from Germany who interviewed Hamila Begum, a Grameen Bank borrower, for about ten hours over three days. In my revamped presentation, I explained how Hamila had struggled to improve her economic conditions but had seen her situation deteriorate until, during the 1974 famine, she hit rock bottom when she sold her rice pot. For a poor woman in Bangladesh, if you can at least hold onto your rice pot, you know that if you are able to buy or grow rice in the future, you will be able to cook it. If you sell your rice pot, destitution and begging are the next logical step.
Somehow, Hamila survived that harrowing time and in 1982, she heard about something called the Grameen Bank and struggled mightily to form a solidarity group, which enabled her to borrow $40. Forty dollars. She used her loan to start a business selling flour from her home and the local market. Later, this grew to a grocery stop, and in time she bought a bicycle rickshaw for her son.
This story touched the people I spoke to on that second attempt to share my experience. It gave them a real sense of what Grameen Bank was about. And it gave them hope. My story-telling approach to describing microfinance grew into a book called Give Us Credit that was published by Random House in 1996. With the attention that the Nobel Peace Prize has brought, John Wiley and Sons has agreed to republish this book with updates next March, under the title Small Loans, Big Dreams.
By 1997, when an aggressive global goal was set for expanding the reach of microfinance to all corners of the earth, I was ready to move from writing to action. With the full and active support of Professor Yunus, I started Grameen Foundation. Among many other things, he provided me with $6,000, which was part of a cash award that came with one of the prizes he received that year. Fortunately, I was too naïve to know that $6,000 is not a lot of money with which to start an organization. Still, it was enough to get the ball rolling.
I’d like conclude my remarks tonight by sharing with you four stories from the ten years since Grameen Foundation was launched.
Grameen Foundation, at its core, is about finding people and institutions around the world that have the potential to impact poverty in their country on the scale that Professor Yunus and the Grameen Bank have in Bangladesh – and then doing everything we can to help them realize that vision. In early 2000, leaders of three microfinance institutions in India that had been trained by Grameen Bank came to me with a proposal. They wanted to grow their collective outreach from 46,000 poor women to 165,000 over thirty months. The cost of that expansion was estimated to be $8 million. They said that if Grameen Foundation could provide $1 million by the end of the year, they could leverage that and mobilize the other $7 million from local sources. We had never raised that kind of money for a single project in a single year, but I felt energized by the prospect of having this kind of major impact. So I called on Steve Rockefeller, who would later be a Grameen Foundation board member, and we blitzed everyone we knew who had money (Steve knew a lot more such people than I did) and we asked them to contribute to our $1 million target.
It was May 2000, and not everyone realized that the stock market was not going to roar back, though some sensed that their 401-Ks were in the process of becoming 201-Ks. We got most of the commitments we needed within a few weeks, and delivered the money by the end of the year. And then something very exciting happened. These three organizations undertook their expansion programs and reached the 165,000 family target – six months early! This gave us confidence that big impact was possible outside of Bangladesh, and that Grameen Foundation and U.S. philanthropists could help make it happen. We were exhilarated, and this proved to be the springboard that put us on course to mobilizing $100 million during our first decade of existence. One hundred million dollars – anywhere except New York, that sounds like a lot of money. Well, when your “product” is life-transforming loans of $100, it really is a lot of money. Earlier this year, I looked at how these three organizations were doing, and I noticed that they had collectively passed the milestone of reaching two million families. I was amazed, and very proud to have played a role in making that happen. The dream that I outlined in my 1987 letter to Professor Yunus, when I was not even twenty years old, was coming true.
The year after we raised the first million dollars was tougher, with the economy in its post-9/11 doldrums. Still, we mobilized $260,000 for our work in India that year, and in an effort to do more with less, we used it to provide partial guarantees for loans from Indian banks to our microfinance partners. The good news was that we were able to multiply the amount we raised by ten times, due to the fact that we convinced the local banks to accept a guarantee amounting to 10% of their loans made to our Indian microfinance partners. This enhanced impact and excited people even more. We began to see opportunities to use philanthropic grants to partially guarantee local loans, but it was a bit cumbersome, since a deal would be negotiated requiring, say, $200,000 as a partial guarantee, and by the time we raised the funds, the local bank often lost interest in the deal. (Many traditional bankers, as I was to learn, had short attention spans.) So this set the stage for another program of Grameen Foundation.
To understand this second story, I need to give you a sense of the first half of November 2004, which was the most emotional two weeks of my life. It began with my 20th Horace Mann reunion, which was terrific. Like many others perhaps, I thought of not going until the last minute, but when I did I enjoyed it immensely. The opportunity to reconnect with lapsed friends and a wonderful period of my life was very soulful.
A few days later, my father passed away. The following day, a certain individual was elected President of the United States, a development about which I had strong feelings. And a few days later, I went to the west coast to participate, with Professor Yunus, in the most significant gathering of philanthropists to focus on microcredit in history up to that point – an incredible event that was organized by my friend and former colleague Barb Weber, who is here tonight.
We had agreed that the seminar was to be educational, with no overt fund-raising in the group setting. However, by the early afternoon of the second day, several of the people said they wanted to “do something” and they felt the group wanted to leave with a sense of accomplishment. So, in one of those hallway conversations that bends the arc of history, a Grameen Foundation board member and I presented a strategy to a few of the attendees, a strategy that had languished because it would have required such a large amount of resources to launch. In its essence, the idea was that if wealthy individuals pledged a small portion of their assets into a pool, those assets could be used to guarantee loans from local banks to local microfinance institutions (MFI), who would in turn lend to the poor. Only in the case of an MFI defaulting on a loan to a bank would the philanthropists have to part with any money. But the catch was that to make such a facility possible, at least $15 million in pledged assets would be required, since the time and expense of setting up such a structure – which had never been tried before to our knowledge – was significant.
Our host asked us how much we wanted. We hoped for something on the order of $25 to $30 million, which we estimated could leverage $150 million to $160 million in local loans, generating 1.5 million micro-loans averaging $100 each. He asked us what the combined net worth of the people in the room was. Based on publicly available information, we thought it was about $30 billion – an amount that sounds like a lot, even in New York! The meeting resumed. It was awkward because I realized that those of us who met on the break had not agreed who would formally propose the idea to the larger group. It seemed that the donors wanted the Grameen Foundation staff to do so; I thought it should come from the group. It was nerve-wracking as the end of the day neared. Finally, Susan Davis, our board chair, suggested in general terms something along the lines that had been discussed on the break. After some discussion, our host got behind it, and asked if people could commit at least 0.1% of their net worth to the proposed pool. At one point, a participant said he thought the idea was not quite “cooked” or ready enough for them to commit resources to, even verbally. In my depleted emotional state, with my father’s death still weighing heavily on me, I somehow summoned the energy to say to this individual – who probably earned more that month than I will ever earn in my lifetime – that this was an idea that we could make happen, if the group was willing to commit to backing it. Fairly quickly, people fell into line. I was intensely relieved, but I also felt the burden of making it happen.
Well, due to the hard work of many of my colleagues, eleven months later we launched the facility, and it was capitalized with $31 million – almost exactly 0.1% of what we estimated the combined net worth of the attendees to be. That was two years ago. Just last week, I was informed that the amount of resources leveraged by this facility had reached $108 million with the closing of two transactions in Pakistan, a troubled country where microfinance is quietly having a big impact on poverty. We are on course to fully deploy the pledged resources by early next year, which will leverage more than $150 million in loans for poor women. There have been no defaults, so not a single dollar of the $31 million pledged has been called. Building on this success, and seeing increasing demand all over the world, we have just begun mobilizing a second round of guarantees to increase the pool to $60 million.
The third story I would like to tell is related to the cell phone anecdote I told earlier. Five weeks after Grameen Foundation had been launched, Professor Yunus asked my assistance in mobilizing $10.6 million for the accelerated expansion of GrameenPhone, which included setting up 50,000 Grameen Bank clients as pay phone vendors. Having just moved back to the U.S. after spending five years overseas, all I could think to do was to ask people who might have such a sum to provide as a grant or low-interest loan. Within days I was describing this project to the head of George Soros’s foundation. At a crucial moment, he asked me how much was needed. Every bone in my body told me to somehow apologize for the amount I was to ask for, or to vaguely allude to it. I worried about the risk of offending this person by asking for such an outrageous amount in our very first meeting. But in an instant I concluded that if I was not direct I would come off as amateurish and the request would likely be dismissed. So, channeling the courage I had seen in women like Hamila Begum, I said, in a matter of fact way, that we needed $10.6 million. He wrote down the figure and the conversation continued. I did not know what that meant.
Well, it took 18 months of negotiations, the complexity of which effectively gave me an MBA and more knowledge of telecommunications in Bangladesh and project finance than anyone should ever have to learn, but we got the $10.6 million.
Predictably, Professor Yunus had used it to work miracles. Today there are 300,000 women pay phone vendors in Bangladesh, six times the original target. These are profitable businesses, or micro-franchises as they are sometimes called. GrameenPhone has 10 million subscribers overall and is the most profitable company in all of Bangladesh, and the largest taxpayer. The original $10.6 million loan allowed another Grameen company to retain a significant ownership stake in GrameenPhone (a European telecommunications company owns a large part as well). The loan from the Soros Foundation* has since been paid off, and the shares it enabled Grameen to buy are now worth around $250 million. If there is an IPO next year, those shares could be worth three times that amount. Now, here is the best part. Early on, Professor Yunus stated his intention to hold these shares for Grameen Bank’s borrowers, who will be able to buy them at the original price and see their asset increase by 25 or even 75 times. This would represent by far the biggest “sweetheart deal” in history where the beneficiaries are poor village women. Amazing!
I should note that Grameen Foundation, through its Seattle-based technology center, has been at the forefront of bringing the Grameen Telecom model to countries as diverse as Uganda, Rwanda, Cameroon, Indonesia and the Philippines.
The fourth and final story I will tell is much closer to home. In the early days of Grameen Foundation, there was vigorous debate about whether we should try to bring microfinance to poor people in the United States. Perhaps surprisingly, the strongest advocate of us acting locally was our lone Bangladeshi board member, Professor Yunus. He said that it would be contrary to Grameen philosophy to ignore the needs in our own backyard. So we joined forces with a newly established organization that was providing microfinance to low-income people in New York City, called Project Enterprise. I would like to take this opportunity to introduce the co-founder of PE, Nick Schatzki, and the executive director, Arva Rice, who are here with us tonight.
Grameen Foundation got behind PE and I was elected Chairman some years back. It has been a privilege to serve in that role. PE has provided loans averaging $2,000 to more than two thousand micro-businesses here in this, the world’s greatest city. It has a plan to scale up and have much bigger impact in the next five years.
I’d like to conclude by telling the story of one of its clients, a woman who had struggled to put food on the table after she lost her job. She had taken a class in photography and noticed that in a working class neighborhood near hers, there were a series of beauty parlors within a two block radius. These aren’t Fifth Avenue spas, but they represented a small splurge by people of modest means. This woman took a loan of $1,000 to buy a good quality camera and began taking photos of women as they emerged from the parlors, and they were more than happy to pay for the pictures. She used the income to pay off the loan and stabilize her family’s economic situation. There are many other stories like this, and more in the future of PE if it can scale up its operations to meet the demand.
Ladies and gentlemen, some of my classmates at HM and Cornell set a goal to one day become multi-millionaires, and many have achieved that status. Others just became multi-millionaires, even though it was not their goal. I respect those choices and achievements, though I set myself on a different course. I committed myself to helping as many poor families as possible to become multi-hundredaires, through microfinance.
You see, when you closely observe a woman increase her net worth from, say, $50 to $350, you come to realize that this is more transformative than any wealth increase anyone in this room is likely to experience in their lifetime. And when you know that the woman has the satisfaction of feeling that the achievement was something she made happen, and that this is happening in thousands of households around the world due in part to your efforts, it is deeply satisfying. These are my “stock options,” my “year-end bonuses,” and from where I am sitting, they are more valuable than anything else I can imagine having.
Thank you very much.
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Post Dinner Acceptance Remarks
Thank you for that generous introduction and for this humbling award. I would like to express my heartfelt appreciation to the entire Horace Mann Alumni Council for selecting me for this great honor. In particular, I would like to acknowledge Alli Baron, who just introduced me and is the chair of the Council, and to Sari Mayer, my classmate who also serves on the Council. And I would like to extend my thanks to the entire Horace Mann community, and especially to Melissa Parento and her team who did an utterly professional job on this event, from beginning to end.
Frankly, if someone told me that I had somehow distinguished myself among those in my class with last names started with A through D, I would be impressed, given the talent in that group alone. To be honored among all living alumni of Horace Mann, well, it is barely believable. But I’ll take your word for it!
I am very conscious of the fact that many people have contributed to me and my career, and quite a number of them are here tonight. First, there is my family. My mother, step-mother, step-father and wife Emily are all here tonight and they have given me so much at each step of the way. Thank you all!
I would like to especially thank my Aunt Pat for being here tonight. Aunt Pat, it means a lot to me. Thank you!
I am very pleased that so many of my HM classmates, including our student body president Paul Hillel, are here tonight. And my classmates from Cornell have come out in force – thanks to Rob Bakshi for bringing this group together, and for Michael Stafford coming from the West Coast and Alex Badia from Miami. It means the world to me that you all came!
A group of my colleagues and former colleagues from Grameen Foundation and Project Enterprise are here tonight as well. So many of my accomplishments are just as much theirs, if not more so.
And I would like to recognize John Gelinas, a Horace Mann alumni who I got to know long after we both graduated. He played an important role in this process. Thank you, John!
And I have some of my oldest and dearest friends here tonight, from Howie Erichson to Karen O’Malley and many more.
I’m overwhelmed.
I would like to conclude by giving special acknowledgements to one institution and three individuals.
The institution is, naturally, Horace Mann School. It was during these years that my social conscience began to develop, through participation in some extracurricular activities such as the tutoring project. HM allowed me to stretch myself intellectually, through courses such as honors physics, the most difficult class I have even taken. Finally, HM allowed me to put my ideas into practice and gain self-confidence not just in my intellect, but in my ability to make things happen.
I was talking with Paul Hillal during the reception about how we started an intramural sports league for the lower school. I can’t remember whether we asked for and received permission to do this, or whether we were allowed to move forward without the school’s formal blessing. In any case, we organized a league for the seventh and eighth graders to play on flag football teams and the like (since they could not play on teams against other schools until ninth grade). I remember, like it was yesterday, standing on the field – if we were on campus right now I could walk you all to the exact spot – and watching what seemed like hundreds of students playing. I was awed by the fact that an idea that had been hatched by Paul and me at a lunchroom table had impacted the lives of so many people after we made a decision to implement it. It gave me a feeling that I could positively impact the lives of many other people, if I choose to do so.
I feel indebted to Horace Mann in so many ways.
The first individual I would like to recognize is Professor Yunus. The interest he took in me at such a young age – even then he was something of a world figure – would scarcely be believable to me if it had not happened to … me.
The second person is my father, Robert Milton Counts, who was a physician and teacher. He was unique in so many ways. As I finished sixth grade at P.S. Six, he short-listed four schools for me and then allowed me complete freedom to choose the one I would attend. When I came to Horace Mann for a visit, it was not so much them interviewing me, but me interviewing them. HM passed! This gave me a sense that I could be in the driver’s seat of my life earlier than most others, if I choose to put myself there.
Even before that, I recall a conversation with my father about what career I might choose. I said that I thought I would like to be a sportscaster, as I lacked the natural athleticism to be a professional athlete. Rather than dismiss these musings of an eight year old, he said something I will never, ever forget. He said that I could choose any profession I wanted – including being a sportscaster – and he would be proud of me, as long as I did my personal best at what I chose. So, that was the beginning and end of the expectations he had for me – do my personal best, at … something. Anything I chose and loved. So a career in microfinance, which is what I chose, was as valid as any other profession in his eyes. And mine.
When I told my father I wanted to go to Bangladesh to get involved with the Grameen Bank, he was initially skeptical. He asked hard questions. But when he realized that this was not some fad but something I deeply believed in, he backed me 100%. When it looked like I might not receive a Fulbright fellowship, he began sending me money – cash! – in the mail so I could build up the resources to travel to Bangladesh. Dad, you don’t send cash in the mail! No matter. He wanted to see me pursue my dreams, and I did. Thank you, Dad!
The final person I would like to recognize is Mr. Castleman. When I went to HM, he was the librarian but he also taught one 10th grade English class. He taught it with such devotion, it is difficult to describe. I have never taken a better taught course in my life, and I doubt I ever will. He put so much of himself into it, and his effort showed. It inspired me. You see, I had come from the public school system to HM in seventh grade. It took me some time to catch up with those who had been in private schools from kindergarten onwards. By tenth grade, I had caught up in all subjects, except English. I figured that I would always lag in that area. One day, Mr. Castleman gave us an assignment, and I wrote the paper and put it aside. Something about how hard he worked, and how much he seemed to believe in each of us, prompted me to re-write the paper later that night, so I could give him an essay that was at least a bit better than my first attempt. When the assignment came back, it had a grade on it that I would never have imagined I would get in English – an A minus. I remember to this day where on the paper he wrote that grade, what his hand-writing looked like. Frankly, it shocked me. I realized that I could be a competent English student, and from that point on during my time at HM, and well beyond those years, I cultivated a love of writing. At various points in my career when I was stuck, my writing helped take me to the next level. Mr. Castleman, thank you for making that all possible through your incredible efforts that changed my life, and those of many, many others.
Ladies and gentlemen, three weeks ago yesterday I ran my first marathon. It might very well be my last! Completing it was one of the hardest and most satisfying things I have ever done. In the Detroit marathon, they have something called “spirit stations” every three or four miles. These are areas where uplifting music is played, and where crowds of people wildly cheer the runners on. It made such a difference to all the marathoners, and especially to me.
In my life’s work to facilitate social justice, I suppose I am now at mile eight. Tonight and this magnificent award represent a “spirit station” for me that I will never forget, as long as I live. For that, I am eternally grateful.
Thank you very much, and good night.
* The speech and acceptance remarks were delivered extemporaneously, with reference to a few hand-written notes. This is a reconstruction based on the notes and the honoree’s memory.
* It was actually made by an affiliated entity called the Soros Economic Development Fund.