A Birthday Twist

When Doug Eaton turned 65 recently, he asked his Facebook friends how he should celebrate. One person suggested that Eaton perform sixty-five random acts of kindness.

Photo 9WSYR.com

So Eaton made a handwritten sign, the kind you often see homeless people holding up at intersections and freeway exits. But his sign read, “I have a home and a car and a job. Do you need a few bucks for some coffee?” Then he headed to a busy intersection in his hometown of Oklahoma City, where he handed out $5 bills to the first sixty-five people who stopped and accepted his generosity.

“It’s just been fantastic,” said Eaton, about his birthday experience. “Some people who don’t take the money say, “Man, I love what you are doing. I won’t take it but give it to someone who needs it.’”

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The Empowerment Plan

When Veronika Scott was a junior at Detroit’s College for Creative Studies, a class assignment called for designing a product that would fill a need. Her classmates focused on trying to create the next electronic sensation, but Scott set about meeting the needs of Detroit’s 20,000 homeless people.

Scott spent time talking with the city’s homeless population, and what she learned set her on a path to meet two of their urgent needs. First, Scott discovered that people living on the street need a way to stay warm during the winter. So, for her class assignment, she created a self-heated, waterproof coat that transforms into a sleeping bag. Made of Tyvek®—DuPont’s lightweight construction membrane used to insulate houses against the elements—and wool army blankets, the coat works by keeping in body heat while keeping out cold air. Scott called the coat “Element S,” with the “S” standing for survival.

And with that, Scott completed her assignment. But rather than stopping there, she then spent $2,000 of her own money to produce prototypes of the Element S coat and find ways to get lots of them produced. One big break came when she convinced the CEO of Carhartt, the Michigan-based clothing manufacturer known for its durable workwear, to donate materials and equipment. Then all she needed was workers.

Scott approached the officials of a Detroit homeless center, called Cass Community Social Services, with a plan to pay homeless people to make the coats. Today, Cass Community employs a group of once homeless women to construct the coats, in exchange for a place to stay, food, and a minimum-wage pay-check.

“The Empowerment Plan,” as Scott calls it, not only gives warm coats to people living on the streets, it also teaches them a trade that could ultimately get them off the streets forever—and give them back their pride. And with that, Scott filled the second essential need of Detroit’s homeless.

“The importance is not with the product,” Scott is quick to point out, “but with the people.”

68 Hours of Compassion

Claire Bloom was surprised when a friend mentioned that there are children going unfed on weekends in her hometown of Dover, New Hampshire. “How can that be?” the retired Navy Lieutenant Commander wondered.

Inquiring into the issue, Bloom learned that school cafeteria workers were noticing some students arriving for breakfast on Monday mornings and devouring their government-provided meals. Teachers and counselors were also spotting children who were lethargic after weekends, and prone to misbehavior. These are all signs of hunger.

So in 2011, Bloom started a nonprofit organization called End 68 Hours of Hunger. The name refers to the span between school lunch on Fridays to school breakfast on Mondays, a time when many students reliant on government-sponsored free or reduced school meal programs have nothing to eat. She modeled the program on so-called “backpack models” popping up around the country. There are now End 68 Hours of Hunger programs in eight other cities.

Every Thursday, volunteers get together to fill the backpacks with food and ready them for delivery to schools on Friday morning. School staff members distribute the ordinary-looking bags to previously identified students.

The key to the program’s success is identifying the children who need it, says Bloom. “A child may be ridiculed for saying, ‘Daddy lost his job and we don’t have any food,’ and they quickly learn not to say anything. So the only way you know is by being vigilant and watching these kids.”

One in six Americans suffers some form of hunger, including a quarter of the country’s children. End 68 Hours of Hunger is meeting that need in a spirit similar to Franciscanomics.

Keeping the Wolf at Bay

Of the many stories describing the life of Saint Francis of Assisi, perhaps the account of his encounter with the Wolf of Gubbio is the most popular. Francis was living in the Italian city of Gubbio at a time when a savage wolf roamed the countryside, attacking anyone who ventured away from town. Residents were fearful, and many wanted to hunt down the wolf and kill it. But Francis had another idea. Ignoring warnings from his neighbors, Francis set off to chat with the wolf. This excerpt from Franciscanomics explains what happened next:

When Francis came face-to-face with the ferocious animal, it leapt toward him “with gaping jaws.” Francis made the sign of the cross while commanding the wolf to stay, and the fierce creature tamely bowed at his feet. After explaining to the wolf that his brutal behavior had caused Gubbio’s citizens to fear and despise him, Francis offered the animal a deal: if the wolf would stop terrorizing the people of Gubbio, Francis would arrange for the townspeople to keep him fed. Nodding in agreement, the wolf gently laid his paw in Francis’s hand as if the two were sealing their pledge with a handshake.

From then on, the wolf and Gubbio’s residents kept the pact that Francis had negotiated. Not only did people feel safe to travel outside the city again, they also welcomed the wolf into their town. When the animal died two years later, it wasn’t his savage acts that people remembered most, but his role in helping Francis teach this lesson in kindness.

Franciscanomics is about the compassion of current-day heroes, so it seemed fitting for the Great Recession to serve as a metaphoric wolf. After all, few Americans escaped the “gaping jaws” of the recession, or avoided the downturn’s vicious bite.

If you’d like to read a longer excerpt from the book – and about two people who are bravely reasoning with the beast of unemployment – click here.

Turning Points

When he was a young man, the future Saint Francis of Assisi made a pilgrimage to the Church of Saint Peter in Rome. Inside the church, Francis joined the throng of people there to see Saint Peter’s burial crypt, and he watched his fellow pilgrims make monetary offerings at the saint’s tomb. Born into a family of wealth, Francis couldn’t help feeling that many of the people were leaving rather small donations. Certainly, he thought, the Prince of the Apostles deserved a greater show of reverence.

Trying to make a point, Francis tossed a handful of coins onto the saint’s altar. As the money clattered to the floor, the noise caused people to turn in curiosity to see who the donor was. Hopefully, Francis thought smugly, his conspicuous act would inspire the masses to be more generous with their gifts.

Back outside, a flock of beggars had descended upon the church’s portico. They mobbed the visitors in desperation, tearing at their clothing, and pleading for money. The sight unnerved Francis, and he wondered how the rich and holy citizens of Rome could leave their poor neighbors to beg.

Francis noticed a lone man who, rather than approaching pilgrims in the frantic manner of the other beggars, stood quietly off to one side, holding out his hand. As he watched churchgoers walk obliviously past the man, Francis tried to imagine being dependent on handouts from strangers, and the sense of helplessness as people pretend not to notice. But at this point in his life, Francis was still a wealthy man – who just moments earlier, had tried to demonstrate his righteousness by tossing a fistful of money onto Saint Peter’s tomb. How could he ever begin to understand a beggar’s plight?

Acting on impulse, Francis approached the poor man and proposed a trade: his own fine clothing in exchange for the man’s torn and dirty rags. Then, for the rest of the day, Francis took up the beggar’s role on the portico of Saint Peter’s church. Dressed in tattered clothes and standing with his hand held out, Francis did not look like the man of wealth that he was. And for the first time in his life, Francis experienced the indignity that people forced to beg for help must suffer. And it changed him — forever.

Franciscanomics is a book about everyday people who imagine themselves in the positions of desperate strangers — and who, while often acting on Francis-like impulses, decide to do something to help. And in the process they, too, are changed.

I can’t wait to introduce you to them.

The Story Behind The Book

When I tell people the title of my latest book, Franciscanomics, many get a puzzled look and say something along the lines of, “Francis who?” Their confusion is understandable. After all, the name seems to imply that the book’s topic is a cross between economics and religious icons. So let me explain.

For over four years now, the country has been stalled in a lingering economic recession. Employers have shed millions of jobs. The auto industry is in a momentous slump. Our largest financial institutions required government bailouts to stay afloat. And a volatile stock market wiped out many people’s retirement savings. Some economists were calling it the worst economic conditions since the 1930s. Former Fed chair Paul Volcker called it the “Great Recession.”

While all that was going on, big corporations with household names were mixed up in scandals involving everything from falsified earnings statements to backdated stock options. Not surprisingly, Americans were not only losing confidence in the financial system, but their trust in those business leaders on whom they relied to orchestrate a recovery.

It was amid this gloomy economic backdrop that Lourdes University alumni officer Shannon Polz handed me a seemingly impossible task: she asked me to deliver a speech at my alma mater’s annual alumni dinner that would make us all feel more positive about the economy.

Fortunately, it was around this time that I’d been reading news stories about ordinary Americans who were weathering the recession by quietly doing good deeds. There was Clemson University’s faculty who, though facing unpaid furloughs, donated part of their salaries to protect the wages of their lower-paid co-workers. There was the bank CEO who made a fortune selling his company and — in a gesture uncharacteristic among today’s greedy top executives — shared his millions with current and former employees. And there was the tech-savvy human resource consultant who found ways to use social media to help thousands of out-of-work strangers find jobs. Whereas news headlines focused on economic misery and high-level corporate misconduct, these uplifting stories received relatively little media attention. So I decided to incorporate them in my speech as a way to counterbalance all the downbeat economic news.

Here’s where the title of the book comes in. Lourdes University, you see, is a Franciscan institution, with values attributed to Saint Francis of Assisi. Noticing an obvious similarity between Franciscan values and the actions of those current-day unsung heroes — the charitable faculty members, the generous CEO, and the tweeting HR consultant — I decided to call my speech “Franciscanomics.”

Afterwards, many of my fellow alums thanked me for the heartening perspective on the economy. And, I thought, that was that.

But word of the speech soon made its way around campus, and I was invited back to present it to the entire administrative staff. And then to a group attending a leadership summit. Before long, companies and nonprofit organizations began hiring me to give the talk to their employees. Franciscanomics was striking a chord among those who heard it. And that inspired me to search for more stories of people selflessly helping others deal with the recession’s fallout. The abundance of those stories prompted me to turn Franciscanomics into a book.

Franciscanomics is not an economic theory, nor is it a book about religion. It’s a simple lesson derived from the life of a humble man who chose sharing over hoarding, purpose over reason, and love over hatred — and stories about current-day people who are making those same choices today. But more than anything, Franciscanomics is about a change in mindset. It’s about the realization that a recession is not a time to dwell on our own hardships, but an opportunity to help others face theirs.

I hope you'll join the movement.