For Robert Woodson, self-help begins in the neighborhood

0 Comments | Insight on the News, August 4, 1997 | by Stephen Goode

Personal Bio

Robert L. Woodson Sr. credits the Air Force with giving him the confidence and discipline to succeed.

Born: April 8, 1937, Philadelphia.

Family: four children; two grandchildren.

Education: B.S., Cheyney State College, 1962; M.S.W., University of Pennsylvania, 1965

Books: On the Road to Economic Freedom; A Summons to Life; Youth Crime and Urban Policy and, to be published in January, The Triumphs of Joseph: How Today s Community Healers Can Revive Our Streets and Neighborhoods.

Entertainment: "I started playing golf two years ago. It is mastery over yourself. That's what I like about it getting over the jitters, being able to perform in front of people."

Favorite Reading: Emily Hahn's Happy People Don 't Make History--"One of my favorite books. Years ago I loaned it to someone who never returned it."

The executive director of the National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise is convinced the war on poverty only can be won by relying on grass-roots foot soldiers who know what strategies work.

In recent months, the Benning Terrace neighborhood in Northeast Washington has been quiet. One of the most violent parts of the nation s capital, a city known for its high rate of crime, Benning Terrace has been stilled by a treaty between rival street gangs negotiated by Robert L. Woodson and his National Center for Neighborhood Enterprise, or NCNE, an organization active in several American cities as well as in South Africa.

The NCNE's social and economic philosophy is market-oriented and emphasizes self-help. A conservative, Woodson once worked for the liberal Unitarian Service Committee. He jokes: "They drove me to the right." But Woodson doesn't like conservative "solutions" if they are handed down from on high by policy wonks who know only theory. "Low-income people not only have solutions for their own plight," Woodson tells Insight, "but have acquired insight into the human condition and devised remedies for ills that infect our society."

Insight: What's on your agenda right now?

Robert L. Woodson: I think it's what we've been trying to do since I started this place. What the National Center is attempting to do is demonstrate that there are alternatives that work more effectively than the discredited poverty program.

Poor people get a bad rap. There is real hostility toward low-income people. It's fed by elitism on both the left and the right. People feel profound distrust toward uneducated people without economic means, and we make many generalizations about them. It burns me inside.

First, I thought it was just white liberals who were hypocritical. But all this concern about "effective compassion" you're hearing on the right is missing it, too. Volunteerism: it's schmaltzy, sentimental, a pacifier.

Our policies ought to be informed by practice and they ought to be shaped by practice, rather than the other way around.

We're trying to say to conservatives, "it's not enough to state your opposition to what liberals have proposed. You've got to come up with superior alternatives because people need to be helped."

In some cases, it is government. We want government intervention that is temporary and with the intention of restoring people so they can take care of themselves. Government of course has not done that, so what's on our agenda right now is to act as a Geiger counter that goes around the nation and detects what's working and why it is working. Then we hope to construct a policy based on our understanding of what it is that makes it work.

Insight: Your family has been important in setting you on such a course?

RLW: I was raised by my mother. My dad died when I was 9 and she had to raise five kids by herself. She didn't have time to pamper us. She had to rely on the older boys to act as guides. My brother two years my senior was one. We beefed all the time, but he was always there for me. If something went down in school, the gang was after me or something, he was always there. He took a gun from me one time. That's the only time I did anything crazy.

Insight: How did you come to see yourself as a conservative?

RLW: You know, my mom helped to mold that because she said, "You don't have to be rich to be clean. You can be poor and clean. Soap only costs a nickel." She also taught racial tolerance.

Sometimes in those days when people had to preach to you they didn't say very much, but what they said, you remembered. When I came home from the military for the first time after a year, I spent my carfare at a party and I asked her to borrow money to get back. She said' "No, you get back the best way you can. Next time plan better." So I hitchhiked three days going back to Florida and I didn't speak to her for two months. But you know what? To this day, I carry my own weight. I guess I started becoming a conservative on that very day.

I was a "Ban the Bomb" liberal. Conservatism to me was synonymous with racism because everybody I met or heard about who was conservative also opposed civil-rights legislation, so I defined myself as a liberal Democrat and was for those causes unthinkingly.