Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SATURDAY, January 7, 1995 TAG: 9501090024
SECTION: EDITORIAL PAGE: A-7 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE:
DATELINE: LENGTH: Medium
Limousine liberal. Gullibly buying some cockeyed Great Society scheme. Ego trip, setting up this Total Action Against Poverty thing. His interest won't last much longer than it takes to get his name in the newspaper as its founder.
They didn't know Brand very well. Not the intensity of his interest in helping people much less fortunate than he. Not his determination to find solutions for problems that keep people in impoverished hopelessness. Not his abiding optimism that individuals can and will pull themselves out of despair if given a hand.
For 30 years, Brand has devoted as much if not more of his time to this cause as to his business, family and social interests. During that period, Total Action Against Poverty has become one of the nation's premier community-action agencies - actually a network of 39 initiatives grappling with multiple aspects of poverty and reaching far beyond the Roanoke Valley.
In these 30 years, thousands of individuals have been given a hand up by TAP and programs it has launched - some it still operates; others it has turned over to public-private partnerships.
Head Start, CHIP (Comprehensive Health Investment Program), Project Discovery, Virginia Cares, the Virginia Water Project - virtually all bear Brand's fingerprints. Over the years, this entrepreneur has strived constantly to envision new ways to overcome barriers that block escape from poverty.
He was determined to keep TAP vital: through its rocky early years, before court-ordered school desegregation, and through racially tense years that followed when, because of its involvement in the black community and the large proportion of blacks on its staff, it was viewed with resentment. (A cross was once thrown onto Brand's lawn, and his children were threatened.) And through countless threats of cutbacks in government funding - a threat that hangs especially heavy over TAP today.
Serving as TAP's chairman since its beginning, Brand announced this week that he will step down in September. It's time for new leadership, he says, and he is surely right. A new era looms for TAP.
But if Brand is stepping down, it is unlikely that he will step back from the fight for the principles in which he believes. Plain and simple: that America's free-enterprise system should work for as many people as possible, that it's in everyone's interest to bring the disadvantaged into that system, and that an affluent society owes the have-nots an opportunity for good education, health care, housing and other privileges that middle-class Americans take for granted.
Brand has worked hard for these beliefs. Call him a limousine liberal, if you will. But it can never be said that he's a do-gooder dilettante. The Roanoke Valley, and not just its poor, owes him a wealth of gratitude.
by CNB