Roanoke Times
Copyright (c) 1995, Landmark Communications, Inc.
DATE: SUNDAY, May 28, 1995 TAG: 9505260035
SECTION: HORIZON PAGE: G-1 EDITION: METRO
SOURCE: LESLIE TAYLOR STAFF WRITER
DATELINE: LENGTH: Long
But Brand ignored the opponents. Or rather, he took them on - from the Bedford County Board of Supervisors to former President Richard Nixon. He battled slash-happy legislators, bent on cutting program funds.
As soon as the dust would settle, another attempt to dismantle the program, one way or another, would disturb the temporary calm. Each time, the doubters would predict TAP's imminent death. And each time, Brand was prepared, armed with a convincing argument - sometimes, a lawsuit.
Brand persisted, determined to prove the naysayers wrong. And in part, he has. Yet he believes the public still doesn't understand TAP, that they equate it with welfare. Yes, the audience is the same, he says. But "we try to help the welfare recipient and try to prevent people from ever having to go on welfare," he says.
In January, Brand, 72, announced that he would not seek another term as chairman of TAP's board of directors. On May 16, the mantle was passed to Edwin "Ted" Feinour, an investment banker who will assume the chairmanship in September.
Two weeks ago, from his office in Salem, Brand sat down with staff writer Leslie Taylor and reflected on 30 years of working to cure what he calls the "cancer of our society" - poverty.
WHY A POVERTY AGENCY?
I've always been interested in poor people, from early on. I was on the oversight agency set up by United Way to look at the way the United Way spent its money locally. This director at one meeting stood up and said he wanted to make a motion that we vote not to participate in the Economic Opportunity Act of 1964. He said that it had just been passed in Congress and it was a boondoggle and a waste of federal money and we didn't want any of that money here. Well, I knew instinctively that if this fella was against it, I was for it. So I said 'Well wait a minute. Let's get a copy of the bill and read it and discuss it.' I started researching it. I took a couple of months and wrote this paper in 1965 which outlined the concept of TAP. I went to local governments and they set up committees of six people, in Roanoke city, Roanoke County and Botetourt County. Eighteen people, and I was elected chairman. That's how it started.
What were the obstacles? How receptive were people to your efforts?
I didn't meet any resistance in Roanoke and Roanoke County and Botetourt. But I met a lot of resistance in Bedford. I went there because we wanted to include Bedford in Head Start. We'd already started TAP and already gotten a grant for the first Head Start, subcontracting to the local schools. I went down to Bedford, before the Board of Supervisors and told them what we were doing and invited them to participate. "Mr. Brand, you go home. We don't want your federal dollars. You don't live here. You don't work here. You've got nothing to do with Bedford. You just leave."
I couldn't believe it. I said "May I ask why?" They said "Just get out of here." So I did. I just couldn't understand it. And I finally figured it out. They knew that the Head Start school was integrated, the first integrated school in the Roanoke Valley.
That began the first animosity. Suddenly people realized that TAP was a social activist organization. That was the year that Prince Edward County closed the school rather than integrate. Bedford is next to Prince Edward County. That was the culture. We found out that we didn't need the permission of Bedford to open a Head Start school. We found an old school building, down there at Montvale, right across the line at Bedford County. They couldn't do anything about it.
The Ku Klux Klan was big there. We had neighborhood Head Start workers down there to get parents to send the kids to the program. We had a couple of them shot at at their homes. I had crosses burned on my yard in Salem. We went through that for three to four years. There was a radical element. It wasn't the majority, but it was tough.
There were bumper stickers, "I fight poverty. I work." I remember the head of a grocery store had it on his car. This was in the next year or two after TAP was founded, because there was resistance building to this.
Has it been a constant fight?
Sure. I've always been fighting somebody. A lot of people the whole 30 years. It's such a fight because the culture of this country unfortunately is that middle class people do not care about poor people. That's the problem. The [former President Ronald] Reagan philosophy is this is a great country and that poor people are shiftless and lazy and if they want to go to work they can go to work and he holds up the want ads and says "Look at the jobs." Remember? That's the culture.
It's less of a fight now with the community. I think that TAP generally has a good reputation in the Roanoke Valley. We've got political problems at the state and federal levels. But if we've got good support locally we can maybe overcome that. The solution to TAP's future is to have 100 percent support of the communities locally.
Half the people in the area don't know what TAP does. I think they still think TAP is connected with welfare. I don't kid myself or anything. We've never had any money to have a big public relations thing. But I don't think TAP is understood locally.
And I don't know why. I don't think people are that interested in poor people. They're consumed with their own problems.
How is TAP countering that culture?
TAP is trying to do exactly the same thing that we tried to do when we started. TAP's mission hasn't changed. We've looked at the people in society that are not participating in the American way of life and we try to do something to give them a chance, whether it's the children, the hungry, the homeless or people on drugs or ex-offenders or people in the country who don't have water. We've segmented the 14 to 15 percent that are not participating into demographic groups and tried to have a program especially designed for them.
Now, the political climate has changed so that the people do not want the government to do these things anymore. But that should strengthen TAP because TAP is doing these things and TAP is not government. But the government can take one dollar and put it in TAP and we'll make it 10 dollars and not build up the government, not build up the bureaucracy and take care of the problem better than the government could.
One example: We had a homeless problem in the Roanoke Valley. When a homeless task force went before Roanoke City Council and council recognized for the first time that the city had a big homeless problem, they didn't know what to do about it. So they called me and they called [TAP President] Ted Edlich and said "TAP, would you help us with the homeless problem?" So we did. We knew we had to have a shelter because there was no place if you were homeless that you could stay more than one night. We looked around and found that the best thing we could do was to have a transitional living center. We were fortunate to find a building at Shaffer's Crossing [an old freightmen's dormitory]. We had no idea how we were going to pay for it. We go down and sign the lease on the thing and we don't know how we're going to fund it. When we get the building we figure it out. We get some grants and the city helps us, and the end result is we have a facility now in Roanoke.
How does TAP position itself for the next 30 years, given the culture of society?
TAP has to be stronger and have programs that will give hope to people. What TAP has to do is let the middle class know that it's in their own interest if there are not any poor people. I was in the shoe business. I can't sell shoes to poor people. I want them to have money. It was in my self-interest to help the poor people get some money to buy my shoes.
What TAP has to do is position itself to offer hope to every low-income person in the TAP region, whether it's through the baby, mother, whether it's hope because somebody cares and you give them a literacy program or a GED program or if they've got a GED, give them more sophisticated job training. Or if they're hungry and homeless you give them a place to get their life together so then they can think about job training. You see, if somebody's hungry and doesn't have a place to sleep and their children are on the street, they can't think about anything else. You've got to take care of those things and give them a chance before they can think about anything.
But TAP has to position itself within the community so that ideally everybody in the community knows what TAP is supposed to do and everybody in the community helps TAP do it and applauds it and gives it a little money. Then TAP's going to go out and hustle 10 or 12 bucks for every dollar they give them. If they did that, then we would have a stronger community.
How does TAP increase nearly $1 million in core funding 10 times over?
The federal Community Services Block Grant and the state block grant essentially pay for the central TAP staff. That pays for 80 people. Then the TAP staff identifies the programs that we need to have and figures out how to get the money to have that program. Take the Transitional Living Center. We borrowed the money for the building. We went to the [U.S. Department of] Housing and Urban Development. They had a homeless grant, a competitive thing. We got that grant. The state had some homeless money. We went after that. We found foundations that had some money allocated for homeless people. We got that. We tried to put in job-training programs for the homeless people. We found the Enterprise Foundation that had some money, One thing leads to another. It's all synergized and networked. That's the way we leverage a little bit of money, in everything we do.
Does TAP receive any local support?
When we started TAP, we didn't ask for any local money. We didn't want to take any resources away from the public schools or anything else that anybody else was doing locally. We wanted to bring in new resources, and we have. We've brought in $300 million over 30 years. Even if we put in 20 percent ourselves, that's $250 million of brand new money outside the area to deal with the poor people of this area. That's an amazing statistic.
We don't get a lot of local contributions. We get $200,000 to $300,000 from local people each year. It's a broad-based spectrum. We've had no huge contributors. Marion Via made significant contributions three to four years before she died. Dominion Bank made a $20,000 contribution once or twice before they had their difficulties. Now we get a large number of $1,000 contributions, some $2,000, a few $5,000. We don't get any $100,000 contributions.
Funding has been a nonstop struggle at the federal and state levels. Will TAP need more local support?
We've tried very hard at TAP not to ask the local community for huge amounts of money. When the TAP [Shenandoah Avenue] building burned [in 1989], we had big meetings with the community. What do we do? Where do we place ourselves? Our consensus was to have a big fund-raising drive and raise $3 million and build a building. I didn't want to do that. I said I'd rather raise money for programs. So we called about 25 local businesses that we knew had some empty space and they lent us space. Banks had empty buildings. Roanoke County gave us space. Roanoke City gave us space. The community was wonderful. We didn't pay any rent anywhere for two years. The telephone company installed phones. IBM rebuilt the burned-out computer.
Why step down now, when the need for TAP's services seems greater than ever?
I have two reasons for deciding this is the time to turn the organization over to somebody else. 'Cause I'm not giving up on this. This has been my life. I think I should spend my time talking about these things to the governors, the federal government, the legislature, to people in industry. I think I should tell them what I've learned in 30 years and what I think they ought to be doing. And how. That's where I should spend my time. I shouldn't spend my time running board meetings and signing grant applications and expense vouchers. That can be done by someone else.
Point number two is that we need broader support and broader understanding in this community. And we need a broader business participation and more and different segments of this society involved in TAP leadership.
How does TAP give the poor a chance?
We started the Opportunities Industrialization Center in 1966. It was the first time that an adult beyond public school age who couldn't read and write, didn't have a seventh-grade reading level, could get any kind of training. So we started a literacy program, a program to bring them up to a fifth-grade reading level. Then we developed five job-training programs built around a fifth-grade reading level. For example, you couldn't go into the adult education in public schools and take a course in electricity if you couldn't read blueprints, and that was a seventh-grade reading level. So we taught how to read a blueprint with a fifth-grade reading level, taught auto mechanics with a fifth-grade reading level, and taught sheet-metal working with a fifth-grade reading level.
TAP started a lot of good things, of which that is one. That's just part of the process of giving people a chance who don't have a chance. What do you do when you don't have health care? What do you do when you're four years old and your parents don't have enough money to put you in a day-care facility?
Have programs built upon one another, or started whenever a need was identified - or both?
Whenever a need was identified, we built a program. And each time we built a program we tried to build it on another program. For example, for children who don't have health care we started the CHIP program (Child Health Investment Partnership). Now the CHIP program involves health care for the baby, not for the mother. Now, we've got the baby with a doctor. The baby's taken care of. Now, we say to the mother, "What are you doing? Are you on welfare? Why are you on welfare? Can you read? Do you want to learn to read? Do you have a GED?" So we try to work with the mother through the baby so that she gets on the track toward self-sufficiency.
That first year is very important. We found that if we have a program that helps a member of the family, especially the baby, that helps the whole family. It makes the mother think that somebody cares. It gives that mother some hope and it helps them want to succeed in society. It reduces their tendency toward desperation, toward drugs, toward crime, toward welfare. I think the best welfare prevention program is the CHIP program because it is a private nonprofit way to provide health care to the babies and you don't have to go on welfare to do it.
How have you championed the cause for 30 years? Where does the desire come from?
I was in World War II, almost got killed a couple of times. We came upon the remants of a concentration camp. We saw that stuff. I saw all that and I knew it wasn't right. It became clear to me during the war that a democratic system was the right system. I've tried with my life to strengthen that system.
I came back to Virginia Military Institute, graduated. I wanted to do something. So I went to the [U.S.] State Department. I was sent to Berlin, during the Berlin Blockade. My job was to try to figure out if there were enough raw materials on the airlift to keep employment up in West Berlin. It was a tense time.
When the blockade was over in 1949 I didn't know what I wanted to do. But I decided I didn't want to work for the government. So I came home. ... My father had a little shoe business which he was liquidating because he was tired. But he had invented a new way of making a shoe which I thought was very interesting. So I took over this business and built it up.
I started 45 years ago with the concept of keeping a calendar with a six-year planner in the back. I write down everything that I'm going to do. All my life I've scheduled my time each week so I spend 20, sometimes 30 percent doing something other than making money. It's always community service. This was before TAP, goes back 15 years before TAP - the Chamber of Commerce, the Rotary Club or other civic organizations. I did all these things and then the TAP opportunity came along and I devoted my energies to that and turned down everything else. I refused to serve on the Salvation Army board or the American Red Cross board or the United Way board or any of those other things. I've devoted my public service thing to TAP.
Keywords:
PROFILE
by CNB