>> Well, I did have a life-transforming moment
in social work, and it was here in Philadelphia.
I worked in Kensington for
a long time back in the day,
and there was a young, it
was a Saturday morning.
I was director of the Settlement House
in Kensington, executive director,
and it was a Saturday morning, and a
16-year-old kid was killed at a bar.
And the bartender dragged the body out onto
the steps, cleaned the steps from the blood.
A neighbor, one of my board members,
saw the body and called the police,
and it took the police in
Philadelphia 45 minutes to respond, and,
of course, the kid was dead on arrival.
And we immediately convened the board
and staff, and we said what should we do.
WE, first of all, what was a
16 year old doing in a bar.
So should we create recreation programs?
Should we create bereavement
programs for the family on the kid,
or should we organize the community to shut
down the nuisance bars, and that's what we did.
We organized the community.
It, and we shut down that bar, and then we
went on from there to organize around banks
and redlining and jobs and
all kinds of other things,
and that was really a life-transforming
moment for me because I saw
that you could do big things
by bringing people together.
And I've always kept that model in my
mind ever since, and that was 1976.