Harold Richman, The Builder
Joel Fleishman
1) The VISION to imagine what the
world lacks, what needs to
be built. As Robert F. Kennedy often said, paraphrasing George Bernard
Shaw in
Back to Methuselah: "Other people see things as they are and
ask 'why?' but I
DREAM of things that never were and ask 'why
not?'" Harold
Richman was that kind of dreamer, that kind of
prophet who not only dreamed but who transformed his dreams into his
own
self-fulfilling prophecies. As my and Harold's friend and
colleague Professor
Lawrence Aber wrote me: "Harold envisioned a better world in
which governments
and universities worked together moreeffectively to identify, deliver
and improve services and
policies for
society's neediest children. This vision was rooted in his early work
in his
beloved Chicago and extended over time to our nation and the
globe."
2) The PASSION to build something
BECAUSE society
desperately needs it and no one else has yet had the vision or gumption
to
build it. As all of you who ever dealt with Harold know, his passion
for
serving children burned in his heart and shined in his eyes. Who could
possibly
resist his zeal for bettering the lives of the most vulnerable?
3) The willingness, the talents, and
the energy to assume
LEADERSHIP and to pour one's life into the realization of
one's vision. His
reputation for leadership won him a White House
Fellowship, and it was his
continuing exercise of leadership that enabled him to build the many
institutions which exist because of him. That leadership brought into
being
many collaborations between communities and Chapin Hall, between
foundations
and nonprofits, and among government at all levels on the one hand and
universities, foundations and nonprofits on the other.
Leadership, augmented by diplomacy and
tact, is indispensable in forging collaborations, and, but for Harold
those
collaborations would never have come into being.
4) HIGH CRAFTSMANSHIP—an
eye for and commitment to
detail, and with Harold, craftsmanship in assuring that policy agendas
were
based on reliable empirical data of high quality. The creation of major
databases
on foster care in some 22 states and 2 counties, as of now, provided
the
infrastructure on which much of Chapin Hall's policy
research was done, but
that is just one of the collections of data that inform the policy
papers and
policy advocacy which Harold is responsible for bringing into being.
5) A keen sense of the CONTEXT in
which one intends to
build. What an unerring, active
sense of context—the environment in which one wishes to build
anything—Harold possessed!
For Harold, his due diligence about context meant deep
engagement in the
communities in which children and their families lived, extensive,
continuing
engagement with the public officials and community activists working in
those
communities, AND deep engagement with the University of Chicago, which
provided
his teaching, research, and entrepreneurial base for 40 years. In other
words,
in all his work, he was THE bridge between the university and the
surrounding
community, between the people who worked in the university and those
who lived
their lives in the surrounding and adjacent communities, between the world of
objective,
empirical data generation and the world of action with which those data
dealt,
and between the world of government and the world of foundations and
nonprofit
organizations active in shaping the policies and practices of the
fields in
which he was a builder.
6) And a eye for TALENT, the
discernment to choose the
people to attract to his vision and to engage them as his fellow
builders. The
size and strength of Chapin Hall attest to Harold's instinct
for talent of the
highest quality. What a talent scout he was! It was Harold who first
told me,
in the early 1990s about this remarkable Chicagoan Barack Obama. My,
was Harold
prescient about talent. Again,
as
Professor Aber wrote me: "Harold recruited hundreds (and
probably thousands) of
us to join him to pursue this vision. Our own continuing work, inspired
and
sustained by Harold's life and example, is one of his enduring gifts to
the
world he loved so much."
And all of these talents, and more,
enabled him to build and
build!
He built the School of Social Service
Administration to new
heights as its dean, starting in 1969, and, parenthetically, when he
was the
youngest named professor on the University of Chicago faculty. And a
year
before becoming dean, he founded the SSA's Washington-based
Center for the
Study of Welfare Policy, which continues to this day as an independent
entity
with a wider mission under the name of the Center for the Study of
Social
Policy.
Moreover, what is now the University
of Chicago's Harris
School of Public Policy, of which Harold was a very distinguished
professor,
was invented by the Committee on Public Policy Studies, of which Harold
served
as founding chair. That Committee began awarding degrees in 1974. It
was in
that role that I first came to know and admire Harold 35 years ago!
And of course, there is Chapin Hall.
He not only transformed
the 120-year-old Chapin Hall Asylum for Half-Orphans on the board of
which he
served (AND THANK GOD HE RENAMED IT) into what is now the Chapin Hall
Center
for Children, which aims at benefiting ALL children, especially but not
only
those at risk, and he pioneered the establishment of similar
research/policy/action tanks on children and families in many other
countries,
including Ireland, Israel, Jordan and South Africa. It was Harold who
designed
those centers and for many years served as principal advisor to all of
them,
helped them raise money to get going and survive, and even took on the
positions
of Board Chair of the ones in Israel and South Africa. Moreover, he
linked
those international centers into a network with Chapin Hall at its
center, and
that network will help carry on the work that was the center of
Harold's
professional life. But for Harold, there would not be such institutions
benefiting children now functioning in those countries, just as, but
for
Harold, Chapin Hall would not be the towering lighthouse for public
policy for
children that he made it into.
Millions of children the world over who are now benefiting
from Harold's
passion for their welfare and the practical initiatives he instituted
to
improve it are here with us in spirit in this synagogue today.
What was the secret of
Harold's success? He instinctively
knew how to build institutions across often impermeable boundaries. His
genius
produced what I regard as the highest quality model of
university-situated,
evidence-based public policy research and action institutions in the
U.S.,
perhaps in the whole world. He knew that policy is worth nothing if not
based
in reliable objective data, and he committed himself to nothing less
than the
highest quality. And he knew that neither reliable data nor sound
policy could
be generated without intimate engagement with the communities being
studied and
without ongoing, thorough involvement of policy advocates and
government
officials. It was the credibility he earned with government officials
that
helped break down the walls between agencies and gave them the
confidence in
him to enable their data on their respective child welfare services to
be
shared across agencies. Because of the strength of Chapin
Hall's base in the
University of Chicago and its wide roots throughout both the City of
Chicago
and the other communities in which it works, it has attracted the
engagement of
government officials and policy practitioners in the policy development
and
improvement initiatives of Chapin Hall, and thereby earned the respect
of
policy scholars the world over. It is that combination of data-rich
analysis,
carefully considered theory, and thoroughgoing practitioner involvement
that
enable Chapin Hall, along with the other institutions to which Harold
has given
birth, to have the base of empirical data required to take the long-run
view,
to anticipate what the child policy agenda will be 5 years ahead. As
Harold
said in a talk that is on the Chapin Hall website, "Our job
is to be ready with
the policy formulations when the public realizes that the problems are
there
and wants to do something to solve them."
Where vulnerable children and their
families were concerned,
Harold was always at the ready. And, thanks to Harold, so are the many
institutions into which he bred the praiseworthy, wise values that
animated him
and yielded so much benefit to society.
"Is there not a certain
satisfaction in the fact that
natural limits are set to the life of the individual, so that at its
conclusion
it may appear as a work of art?"
Einstein,
La Pensee, 1947
Out
of My Later Years, 231
Harold, your life has been a sublime
work of art, and your
teaching will now go on and on and on!
"The Lord giveth, and the
Lord hath taken away; blessed be
the Name of the Lord."
Job
1:21