DATE: Friday, May 23, 1997                  TAG: 9705230009

SECTION: LOCAL                   PAGE: B11  EDITION: FINAL 
TYPE: Opinion

SOURCE: KEITH MONROE

                                            LENGTH:   85 lines

EDUCATION SCHOOL FUND-RAISER RELIES ON THE JOY OF SACRIFICE

Bill Ravdin helps schools raise money. It's his fourth career and a labor of love. He's a Philadelphian who is dropping into Hampton Roads periodically to assist the Virginia Beach Friends School with a capital campaign that aims to raise $1 million.

I've had children in Friends Schools in two states and so was prepared to be interested, but Ravdin would have gotten my attention in any case. He's a compact, dapper, dimpled man of 68 with silver hair and mustache. He resembles the character actor Leon Ames who played the good father in so many films, notably ``Meet Me in St. Louis.''

Ravdin is himself a product of Quaker education and spent 20 years as an international executive for the pharmaceutical industry, working in Brazil, Mexico and the Pacific. Weary of wandering, he returned to Philadelphia and made a career switch to banking for another 16 years.

At that point, he felt a ``leading,'' as Quaker's say, to devote the last 10 years of his working life to strengthening Friends education. For eight years, he was development director for William Penn Charter School, the oldest Quaker school in the nation.

No sooner had Ravdin retired than he was asked to join Serapis - a company that provides independent schools with fund-raising advice and expertise. At present he's working with nine schools, several of them on a pro bono basis. One is Virginia Beach Friends. He is an admirer of the school's founder, Louise Wilson, and so was doubly inclined to take on its case.

The school is small with only 165 students through 10th grade. It has quietly gone about its business on Laskin Road since 1955. The campaign is in part necessitated by a decision to expand through the 12th grade by 1998. Two new buildings are envisioned - to contain a theater, gym, computer lab, science lab and classrooms.

Ravdin says that Virginia Beach Friends may be small, but ``for those who understand what it is that Friends School does, there's no alternative available.'' He argues that the special quality of Quaker education grows out of the belief ``that there's a divine spark in each child that can illumine each life.''

Ravdin thinks independent schools are important incubators of democracy as well. ``In the schools I'm interested in, the student body is racially, religiously and socially broad and the groups are small enough that children learn to work, play and study across social lines in ways that don't happen in other environments. We need to treasure these schools,'' Ravdin says.

For what he calls ``the posh schools,'' Ravdin notes, the $1 million target would be pocket change. ``But for a school of 180 students without a lot of ties to individual wealth, it's a chore.''

Independent schools rarely attract gifts from beyond their own small circle, though it can be argued that they are laboratories of education that benefit the larger community. And elementary schools are at the bottom of the pecking order. People give to their colleges or to residential secondary schools because living on campus creates a strong bond. Community colleges and primary schools are harder sells.

Ravdin will help Friends by systematizing the campaign and by helping people ``come to grips with what it means to give sacrificially. A campaign in a school the size of Virginia Beach Friends can't happen without some sacrifice.'' He believes, in other words, in giving until it hurts.

He quotes the parable of the widow's mite. Though the widow could give only a pittance as the world reckons, for her it was everything. And he speaks of the joy such sacrifice can contain. ``In giving,'' he says, ``do the things that feed the spirit.''

He and his wife have tithed for 37 years, and he says deciding to give a fixed amount is liberating. ``Whatever the percentage, you know how big the pie is. All you have to do then is decide how to carve it up, and that puts the joy back into giving.''

Ravdin also teaches that asking people to share ``is not a science, it's an art. It's an important art. You wouldn't persuade a person to take a trip to Jamaica by talking about the cost, you'd talk about the scuba diving and the climate and the scenery.''

Ravdin says, when fund raising is done right, ``the person comes to the edge of the chair and says `what can I do to help' because you've talked about children and education and opportunities.''

Does that mean he thinks Virginia Beach Friends School has a chance to meet its ambitious goal? The veteran campaigner answers with a broad smile. ``I told them not to waste their money on a feasibility study. There isn't a doubt in my mind the campaign will succeed.''

That might be faith talking - or experience. Either way, Virginia Beach Friends is lucky to have Bill Ravdin in its corner, a man who assumes that sacrifice for the good of children is the natural order of things. Is he wrong? MEMO: Mr. Monroe is editor of the editorial page of The Virginian-Pilot.

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