Oprah (54 page)

Oprah promised there would be no government red tape involved in her Families for a Better Life program, to be run by Jane Addams Hull House Association, one of the oldest settlement houses in the nation. She also said she would use her considerable influence to get other corporations, institutions, and foundations to follow her example.

“It’s a war zone,” she told
Entertainment Weekly.
“We have to get them out. We’re giving them bootstraps.” Within months, Random House, Inc., and Capital Cities ABC each contributed $500,000 to Oprah’s foundation.

“No one makes it alone,” she said. “Everyone who has achieved any level of success in life was able to do so because something or someone served as a beacon to light the way. What seems to be an endless cycle of generational poverty and despair can be broken if each of us is willing to be a light to the other. When you learn, teach. When you get, give. That is how you change the world. One life, one family at a time.”

She had arrived at this momentous decision after filming
There Are No Children Here,
based on the book by Alex Kotlowitz about a family who lived in one of Chicago’s most violent housing projects. “Originally ABC wanted Diana Ross to play my part [but] Diana said she didn’t want to do it because it didn’t offer enough hope. I felt the book was reality,” said Oprah, who canceled her vacation in the south of France to assume the role. “There’s always hope,” she said. “I didn’t grow up in the projects, but I am the perfect example of someone who came up from zip. I mean zippola. Mrs. Outhouse herself here.”

During filming she met a youngster named Calvin Mitchell, ten, who captured her heart. He lived in the projects with his four brothers and sisters and their mother, Eva, who was on welfare. After the movie, he visited Oprah at her office every week, and she took him to her farm on weekends, buying him clothes and shoes. Finally she asked her fiancé, “How would you feel about Calvin moving in?”

“If you are willing to move in the whole family,” said Stedman, a board member of the Jane Addams Hull House Association. He explained that such a commitment had to be for the entire family, not just for one family member.

“Although I thought about it, Calvin did not move into my house,” Oprah said. “We got his mother a job. We’re teaching her life skills like
opening a bank account, living on a budget and we moved them out of the project.”

Together Oprah and Stedman worked on a plan for Families for a Better Life Foundation that they believed would eradicate the welfare dependency of the country’s most impoverished families. “Stedman was the catalyst for this,” Oprah told
People.
“He is a systems man and I was inspired by his guidance. And this project together, it’s like we sing. We just really sing.” Their approach relied on the tenets of self-improvement guru Stephen Covey, whose leadership center helped train the Hull House staff. Covey later wrote the foreword to Stedman’s self-improvement book,
You Can Make It Happen.

Having lifted one family out of the projects, Oprah now wanted to lift one hundred families out, but by calling so much media attention to her announcement she had conveyed the impression to Chicago’s welfare recipients that she was going to buy their way out of poverty. Hull House received more than thirty thousand calls, which were winnowed to sixteen hundred applicants, but the misconception of a free house remained so prevalent that application forms had to be rewritten to specify, “We will not buy a home for you.”

Having started at the same time the Clinton administration was trying to reform the welfare system, Oprah’s experiment was watched closely and with great hope. She became actively involved in every aspect, helping to select the participating families and develop their eight-week curriculum. She participated in the counseling sessions and closely monitored their progress. But after spending $843,000 over eighteen months and seeing only paperwork, she abruptly folded the foundation and issued a terse public statement: “I felt myself turning into government. I spent nearly a million dollars on the program, most of it going to development and administrative costs. That was never my intention. I now want to figure out, with the help of people who understand this better than I, how to directly reach the families in a way that allows them to become self-reliant.”

She refused to give any interviews about why she’d canceled the program and she demanded absolute silence from everyone associated with it, including personnel from Hull House and the participating families. There was never a report issued or a cost analysis published,
and for this she was severely criticized by philanthropists who prize accountability as a curative force. “The problem with Families for a Better Life was not that it failed but that it was a wholly unconstructive failure that provided no systematic knowledge about the transition from welfare to work,” wrote Peter J. Frumkin in
Strategic Giving: The Art and Science of Philanthropy.
Formerly with Harvard, the professor of public affairs at the Lyndon B. Johnson School of Public Affairs and director of the RGK Center for Philanthropy and Community Service faulted Oprah for being so secretive and protective of her image. He felt her welfare-to-work experiment was too important not to be shared with those who remained committed to making progress on the issue. “There should be no stigma attached to constructive failure that builds knowledge…[but] heavily funded initiatives that end in unconstructive failure like Winfrey’s deserve all the criticism they presently receive and more….There is no excuse for being both ineffective and unaccountable.”

Oprah did not feel she owed anything to anybody. With the exception of the donations from Random House, Inc., and Capital Cities ABC, she had funded Families for a Better Life Foundation by herself, and she was not about to finance a public report on its failure. As she had earlier told the graduates of Miss Porter’s School in Farmington, Connecticut, in her commencement address, “Know this—if you make a choice and come to realize that that choice is not the right one, you always have the right to change your mind, without guilt.” She folded both her foundations, There Are No Children Here and Families for a Better Life. Then she started another one, named For a Better Life. She put Rufus Williams, a senior manager for Harpo, in charge of its operations. In the years between 1996 and 2000, she changed For a Better Life Foundation to the Oprah Winfrey Foundation, to encompass most of her charitable giving, and her largest contributions went to the Oprah Winfrey Scholars at Morehouse, the Oprah Winfrey Boys and Girls Club in Kosciusko, and Oprah’s Angel Network, which she promoted on her show for viewer donations. She had no intention of throwing off the humanitarian mantle of Princess Diana, and despite Professor Frumkin, she was not about to acknowledge any mistakes that might diminish her role as an inspired leader.

In fact, Oprah considered herself and Stedman to be such enlightened leaders that they teamed up to teach a course at Northwestern University’s Kellogg Graduate School of Management, titled Dynamics of Leadership. “It has been a dream of mine to teach,” she told
Jet,
“and Stedman and I share the same beliefs in the importance of dynamic leadership in this country.”

The university was thrilled by its new adjunct teacher. “The feedback we’re getting from MBA students has been phenomenal,” said Rich Honack, assistant dean and director of marketing and communications in 1999, “because she is truly admired, especially by the women and minority students, who see her as someone who has made it.” Oprah insisted that no press be allowed on campus during her weekly Tuesday night classes, and each of the 110 students selected for the course had to present a special identification card and be checked by four security guards before he or she was admitted to the classroom. University officials warned that any student talking to reporters would be subject to disciplinary action, which could lead to expulsion. The extreme security precautions prompted the student newspaper, also barred admission, to accuse the university of censorship. Oprah arrived on campus each week in her own black security van with bulletproof windows, accompanied by her own bodyguards.

She and Stedman taught their leadership course for two fall semesters, and Oprah sent her plane to bring in guest lecturers such as Coretta Scott King, Yahoo’s Jerry Yang, Jeff Bezos of
Amazon.com
, and former secretary of state Henry Kissinger.

“I was Stedman’s guest the evening Kissinger spoke to their class,” recalled Fran Johns, a Chicago businesswoman. “Kissinger had come as a favor for Oprah….We were sitting behind the students when Oprah came running up the steps. ‘Wait. Wait,’ she yelled to Kissinger. ‘I can’t see.’ She sat down next to me and kept saying throughout his lecture, ‘Isn’t he great? Isn’t he great?’ I’m thinking to myself, ‘Great? He’s a murderer, a creep, Machiavellian…but he’s an interesting speaker because he’s got all these incredible inside stories about things.’ ”

Oprah was so grateful to Kissinger that she commissioned an oil painting of his Labrador and flew to Connecticut to personally present it. “The dog unveiling took place one weekend when Isaac and I were
in the country [Connecticut] and the Kissingers invited us over,” recalled Mrs. Isaac Stern, widow of the famed violinist. “Isaac went and met Oprah. I stayed home and took a nap.”

Having steeped herself in the legacy of slavery to film
Beloved,
Oprah now became even more committed to helping African American children. Years later she explained her commitment: “The reason I spend so much of my money on educating young black children—$10 million to A Better Chance, which takes inner-city children out of the ghetto and puts them in private schools—is because I know that lives will then forever be changed.” While heavily publicized, Oprah’s giving in the early years of her career was minimal—less than 10 percent of her incredible income. In 1998 she began increasing her charitable contributions and making more sizeable donations to her charitable foundation:

Oprah’s polestar for giving was Nelson Mandela, whom she had met through Stedman after he accompanied Mandela’s daughter and
son-in-law to South Africa for her father’s release from prison on Robben Island. Although she had financed that trip in 1990, she did not meet Mandela until 2000. By then he had received the 1993 Nobel Peace Prize with Frederik Willem de Klerk for their efforts in uniting South Africa after years of apartheid. The following year, Mandela was elected the first black president of the country and served until 1999. When he left office he toured the United States to raise money for the Nelson Mandela Foundation, dedicated to educating his country’s children. “It’s not beyond our power to create a world in which all children have access to a good education,” he said. “Those who do not believe this have small imaginations.”

During his U.S. visit he appeared on Oprah’s show, on November 27, 2000, and when he arrived for the taping, all three hundred employees lined the hallway at Harpo to shake his hand. “It was the interview of a lifetime,” Oprah said later. When she visited South Africa she asked Mandela what gift she could give him and his country. He said, “Build me a school,” and she agreed. His gift to her was a drawing of hands that he had done in prison. “She has lots of art in her home,” recalled former Supreme Court justice Sandra Day O’Connor. “When I was visiting my friend Mary Dell Pritzlaff, her next-door neighbor in Montecito, Oprah heard I was there and insisted we both come for dinner….It was a wonderful evening and Oprah was delightful….What I loved most were the four hands she had framed and hanging on one wall. They were drawn by Nelson Mandela during his time on Robben Island.”

Before Oprah embraced the project that would lead to the Oprah Winfrey Leadership Academy for Girls, she embarked on another project for Mandela and began planning “A Christmas Kindness” for fifty thousand South African children. She assembled a team of staff members from the Oprah Winfrey Foundation and Harpo, and a few personal friends, and they worked with the Nelson Mandela Foundation for a year to make Christmas 2002 memorable for youngsters who had never received presents. She said she did this because she remembered when she was a child and her mother, on welfare, could not afford to provide Christmas for her children.

“My sadness wasn’t so much about not having toys as it was about
facing my classmates,” recalled Oprah. “What would I say when the other kids asked what I’d gotten? That Christmas, three nuns showed up at our house with a doll, fruit, and games for us. I felt such a relief that I’d been given something, that I wasn’t forgotten. That somebody had thought enough of me to bring me a gift.”

Oprah spoke with orphanage caretakers in South Africa about gifts that would be culturally appropriate. “I was told none of these children had ever seen a black doll—most were dragging around blond, naked Barbies. Wouldn’t it be a wonder if each girl could see herself in the eyes of a doll that looked like her? It became my passion and mission to give a black doll to every girl I met.”