Oprah_ A Biography - Kitty Kelley [196]
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