Background Context for John Karls' Essays

[johnkarls]

It occurs that a few brief notes on my background may be useful in putting into context my essays that will follow.

During the summer of 1966, just before my third year of law school, I worked for the US Justice Department desegregating schools in North Carolina.

This was a mere 2 years after the Civil Rights Act of 1964.

All of us in the program were based in Washington DC but assigned to one of the 17 states which had dual (white only and black only) school systems.

We made frequent trips to school districts in the states to which we were assigned.

According to the N.C. State Police, I was on one occasion within 30 seconds of being killed in a riot in a Bernie County NC Tastee Freeze caused by the mere presence in the Tastee Freeze of my partner, an African-American (our DOJ teams were always integrated).

Among various projects/causes, I was the co-founder of the first homeless shelter in Fairfield County CT (my ex-wife of 33 years and I moved out to a CT suburb to raise children and commuted back to Manhattan).

Although a high percentage of clients of homeless shelters now comprises families that have lost their homes to foreclosure as a result of catastrophic medical bills, loss of employment, etc., homeless shelters 25-30 years ago served almost solely adults with no life skills and, as a practical matter, you could not hope to provide more than a small degree of comfort until they died at early ages.

When Eugene Lang’s first “I Have A Dream”® program first received national publicity (NY Times + 60 Minutes) in 1986 as his Harlem PS 121 graduating sixth graders from 1981 were entering their HS senior year, it was an epiphany – unlike the depressing task of trying to make adults with no life skills a bit more comfortable until the end, one could provide surrogate parents (i.e., tutors and mentors) to young inner-city kids and transform their lives!!!

“I Have A Dream”® programs adopt 100% of the third graders in an inner-city school or 100% of the third graders living in an inner-city housing project and provide tutoring/mentoring through H.S. graduation + the guarantee of college tuition.

I was the sponsor/chief benefactor of an “I Have A Dream”® program which served 200 kids living in 3 different housing projects. In addition, I served as the volunteer treasurer of the national “I Have A Dream”® Foundation in the 1990’s when it oversaw 180 similar programs in 50 American cities (IHAD is still thriving around the country).

Because of my experience performing heavy-duty fund-raising for both my own IHAD program and for IHAD-National when I served as its volunteer treasurer, the Under-Secretary General of the United Nations for the Environment requested me to perform heavy-duty volunteer fund-raising for the United Nations Environment Programme. (The Under-Secretary General was based in Nairobi, though my primary contact was UNEP’s Director for External Affairs in UNEP’s Geneva headquarters).