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Commentary By Howard Husock

Reclaiming the American Dream III: The CT Yankee Saving Kids In Southern Ohio

When Alice Chapman moved to Marietta, Ohio, in 1995, she had no intention of taking on the city’s social problems at her own expense. Heir to a Connecticut newspaper fortune, Chapman had lived modestly her whole life but had recently inherited family monies, making it possible to leave her office job at a private school in Philadelphia and move, with her husband, a recently-retired letter carrier, near his aged mother in southern, “Appalachian,” Ohio. Twenty years later, Chapman—one of four recipients of the Manhattan Institute’s $25,000 2014 Richard Cornuelle Awards for Social Entrepreneurship—has become one of the most-honored citizens of Marietta for her work (full-time, but volunteer) at the Ely Chapman Educational Foundation (ECEF), the institution she founded and largely self-funded.

The foundation offers intensive after-school programming, providing help especially for children of the area’s disadvantaged white underclass, where families once known for deep work ethics have been wracked by drug use, single parenthood, and dependency on government benefits. Housed in an imposing former local high school building renovated by the Chapman Foundation, the SUNSHINE Learning Center has served nearly 2,000 kids (in a city with a total population of 15,000) over 15 years of operation—with improved grades and life prospects which Chapman, a hands-on manager, tracks assiduously.

Chapman—lead teacher and chief executive officer, among many other roles—oversees a teaching staff drawn largely from the ranks of students at Marietta College, a strong local liberal arts college, as well as support staff (bus drivers, food service workers, maintenance employees) for the 65 kids who come each day during the school year, and 80 who come for a summer camp combining academics and recreation. None of it would exist without Chapman.

Chapman now contributes less than half the annual $400,000 budget, having tapped philanthropic and some (very modest) public programs, such as those which support after-school meals for children from impoverished households. ECF also requires at least some tuition payment from every family, no matter how poor. The foundation’s building has also become a hub of, and inspiration for, community life—providing space for traditional institutions (a Boy Scouts troop) and new ones (a karate program, theatre group and, for a time, a museum linked to the Ohio River city’s Underground Railway heritage). In all this, Chapman is helping a lovely, if struggling place: one filled with historic homes, a Revolutionary War cemetery, and Native American burial mounds, but also serious social problems. Through her ideas, philanthropy, and labor, Chapman has inspired a poor Ohio city.

She’s created an effective elementary and middle-school academic tutoring/enrichment program; drawn in local college education students, who earn course credit for their work; and bought and refurbished, with her own money, an abandoned former high school building, using it to host not only the Ely Chapman Foundation, but also a host of other community organizations (many bubbling up only because they could find space from Chapman). Her $2 million personal investment–drawn from an inheritance based in her grandfather’s long-time ownership of the New Haven (Connecticut) Register– makes her, in effect, the Melinda Gates of Marietta. And she is utterly hands-on, directing all aspects of her highly structured program (rooted in traditional social and educational values), while working 60-plus hours a week, as a volunteer.

Notably, Chapman follows the academic progress of those she helps. In a school system rated poorly by the state of Ohio, Chapman’s students excel—as judged by their status on honor and merit rolls in significant numbers. Chapman stays in close touch with the public schools, reporting that of the 1,900 kids who have worked with the Chapman Foundation, 375 have gone on to post a B average, or better. Indeed, of the 65 students who attended this past school year, 19 have such an average (which qualifies students for the honor roll in Marietta).

One cannot, moreover, overstate the depth of challenges Chapman and her teaching staff face, as they deal with a poor white underclass, plagued by parents on drugs, disorganized single-parent and even abusive households. In that context, Chapman’s focus goes beyond the academic; academic success, in her view, is a side effect of ingraining in her charges a capacity for “independent learning” and, crucially (and unapologetically), “restoring the work ethic”. (This from your columnist who, at the end of a long work day, volunteers with the local Boy Scout troop to teach sessions about the Constitution and Declaration of Independence.)

Toward that end, Chapman’s programs, both for elementary and middle school students, are highly-structured, with clear, routinized daily progression based on a cognizance of what students are supposed learn in school—and what their teachers tell ECF they actually learn. Chapman requires students to demonstrate that they have not just started their homework, but completed it, too. Even when not assigned homework, they are required to read for at least 15 minutes and complete two pages of math work, daily.

The importance of her work, and the seriousness of her standards, are both reflected in the sotry of a student who did not have his homework assignment because his teacher had failed to place it, as per class routine, in the student’s assigned mailbox. Chapman told him, in no uncertain terms, that the failure was not the teacher’s but the student’s, who should have assumed homework is given and approached the teacher to obtain it. Through such means are personal responsibility and the work ethic transmitted.

Alice Chapman’s presence in Marietta, Ohio, is so outsized that her impact extends beyond the actual school where her program is housed and her students served. By providing space to a wide range of other organizations—many new—Chapman is building plenty of social capital in a city which needs all it can get. It is no coincidence that, in 2010, the local chapters of the Rotary, Kiwanis, and Lions clubs jointly named Chapman their citizen of the year.

About this series

Since 2001, I’ve helped direct an annual awards program at the Manhattan Institute recognizing top social entrepreneurs: those who develop effective, original approaches to dealing with social problems and who rely mainly on private funding and volunteers to see their ideas to fruition. They are leaders of America’s civil society, doing the things that government can’t do—or can’t do as well.

We grant up to five $25,000 awards, named for libertarian thinker Richard Cornuelle (who coined the term “independent sector”), to promising, growing programs. A $100,000 lifetime achievement prize, the largest such award for an American nonprofit leader, is named for William E. Simon, the investment finance pioneer and U.S. Treasury secretary, whose book “A Time for Truth” sounded the alarm about the growing dependence of nonprofit organizations on government funding. Simon Prize winners have included Geoffrey Canada, founder of the Harlem Children’s Zone; and Brian Lamb, founder of C-SPAN. All award winners direct organizations that they founded themselves—and that rely minimally, if at all, on government funding. Winners are, however, more than just “points of light”: many seek to extend their reach, whether by growing larger and branching to other cities, or helping others start similar organizations elsewhere.

Award winners, nominated by donors who have seen the nominee’s work firsthand, are selected by a panel that has included: Les Lenkowsky, professor of philanthropic studies, Indiana University; Adam Meyerson, president, the Philanthropy Roundtable; William Schambra, director, Bradley Center for Philanthropy and Civic Renewal; Cheryl Keller, independent foundation consultant; and James Piereson, president, William E. Simon Foundation. This year’s awards presentation will take place in New York City on November 12. This column marks the third of six weekly profiles of 2014 award winners.

This piece originally appeared in Forbes

This piece originally appeared in Forbes