A Lesson I'll Never Forget

“Change is the law of life. And those who look only to the past or present are certain to miss the future.”
—John F. Kennedy

Have you heard of the Central Oregon Partnership?” my friend Jim Lussier began, as soon as we sat down, he sipping a latte, me a hot chocolate. It was late January in Bend; you did what you could to stay warm.

“Sure,” I replied, “they’re the poverty-reduction nonprofit in the region. They’ve been in the news recently. And not in a good way.”

“So true,” Jim said with a frown. He’d been a business consultant for the past few years, after retiring as the iconic CEO of our local hospital. “Well, as a result of their troubles, the Minnesota-based foundation that funds them has hired me either to shut the organization down or find someone to clean it up and start all over again.”

“And the reason you’re telling me this?”

“Of the two options, I’d prefer the start-all-over-again one, our region can use the million dollars the foundation invests in us every year. I’d hate to see it go away. As a result, I’ve terminated the old executive director, and I’d like you to become the new one. I know you can fix the damn thing.”

“But…but…I’m seventy-one years old, for crying out loud,” I replied. “No nonprofit hires a seventy-one-year-old Executive Director. Especially one who doesn’t know diddly squat about what the nonprofit does. I know as much about nuclear fusion as I know about poverty.”

“Knowledge is not the problem here,” Jim shrugged, “Execution is the problem. Between Googling the research being done on poverty and interviewing the people who are veterans in it, you’ll learn all you need to know. It’s not about knowing, it’s about doing. We could be changing a lot of lives with a million bucks a year.”

“Hmmm,” I mumbled, he got me with that last one. Besides, it sounded interesting. “Well,” I said, throwing up my hands, “sign me up.” We bumped fists.

It was 2007, and so began a three-year project that would change my life.

What happened over those three years turned out to be hugely insightful and rewarding. While the organization I led – we changed its name to The Partnership to End Poverty – didn’t exactly end poverty, we did make a healthy dent in it. I learned about why those people who are buried in poverty can’t dig themselves out. I’d known little about the root causes of poverty, but I quickly learned what it was that had pushed 40 million Americans into it and wouldn’t let go. I also learned what our region was doing to help them. Or wasn’t doing.

Most of those people who are in poverty aren’t there because they’re unmotivated or lazy; rather, they’re there because they were either born into it and can’t extract themselves or their family, or they fell into it through no fault of their own. Excessive health care costs are often the culprit.

Today, when I see a man on a street corner begging for money, I’ve learned to scuttle the anger I used to feel and pull up empathy instead. I feel for that person, I’m sure he’d rather be at home, watching TV, petting the dog, mowing the lawn. For most folks, poverty isn’t a choice, it’s an inheritance. They play the cards they were dealt.

Before I did that three-year stint, I’d had no exposure to parents who hadn’t graduated from high school, who were addicted to alcohol or drugs, or who didn’t love their kids. There’s a long list of reasons why the children of those parents are going to follow them into poverty. It’s a cycle, a rut; once you get in it, it’s nearly impossible to get out.

It’s been 18 years since I shared that hot chocolate with Jim (sadly, he passed away earlier this year). Looking back, I know now that on the surface his invitation was a challenge to fix a struggling nonprofit, but to me it turned out to be an opportunity to fix something in myself that I didn’t know was broken. For me, those three years were an opportunity to revise an uneducated opinion of those people who are less fortunate than I.

I used to view poverty as a statistic, a problem that could be solved by a formula. Now, I see it as a collection of stories, faces, and struggles by a subpopulation of unlucky folks who need understanding and empathy, not anger and disgust. That lesson has remained with me throughout the years, reshaping the way I view my community – and the world – and how I respond to it.

Accepting Jim’s offer not only transformed my understanding of poverty but also taught me that stepping out of one’s comfort zone is the scariest, and most rewarding, way to learn.

About the Author: Jim Schell is a longtime Bend resident; in 2019 he left in search of warmer, smokeless weather. He’s written 18 published books, six of which are from his Old Guy series. This excerpt is extracted from “An Old Guy’s Perspective on Just About Everything,” his sixth Old Guy book, to be published in June. For info, you can reach him at jim.schell5@gmail.com.

This article appears in Source Weekly April 24, 2025.