 |
|
 |
|
 |
|
 |
|||||||||||||||||||||||||||
|
The William E. Simon Foundation awarded prizes of $250,000 each to a Massachusetts pastor and to a New Jersey businessman whose work embodied the philosophy of its founder, William Simon. William Simon, the former treasury secretary, was a fearsome businessman with a philanthropic philosophy that emphasized giving people tools to help themselves. The Simon Foundation awarded the Prize in Philanthropic Leadership (to be passed on to a charity of the recipient's choosing) to Raymond G. Chambers, a retired businessman who worked closely with Simon. "He came into my life 22 years ago and he didn't come quietly," Chambers said of the blunt-spoken Simon. Chambers said his philanthropic work was animated by conversations with Simon in which they talked of the need to "help people become self-sufficient and help in ways that will be measurable and accountable" Chambers was selected for his work in such national charitable programs as the Points of Light Foundation (remember Bush I?) and America's Promise. The $250,000 from the Simon Foundation will go to a charitable program designated by Chambers, the Children's Scholarship Fund, which provides K-8 scholarships for needy families and has helped 34,000 children get a better education. The other honoree, Eugene Rivers, is a former gang member, criminal, Marxist, and black-nationalist agitator. He now is the pastor of the Azusa Christian Community, a Pentecostal church in Dorchester, Mass. Rivers immediately handed the hefty check — which, in contrast to the other prize, is meant for his own use — over to his wife. "As a son of the high-octane wing of the low church," Rivers exclaimed, "in circumstances such as this, the homiletic impulse would be to say: Praise the Lord!" When inner-city Boston was being torn apart by gang violence in the early 1990s, Rivers stepped in and formed a coalition of churches and ministers to combat the drug and gang problems. In the process, they healed the rift between police and the black community. The gang wars were quelled and the murder rate dropped sharply. Rivers's work is driven by his Christian faith and philosophy of self-reliance. He's an outspoken critic of race-baiting types like Jesse Jackson, Al Sharpton, Louis Farrakhan, and Cornel West, who blame the state of black America on the twin phantoms of white racism and government conspiracy. Departing from the black-activist orthodoxy, Rivers locates the blame for black poverty in crime, secularism, and dependency. Every day, Rivers sees firsthand how this dependency and the culture of victimhood it brings with it saps individuals of initiative and ambition. "We are partisans of the new philosophic movement," Rivers said last week, "calling for a revolution of the spirit." At the end of his remarks, he said he had to get back to Boston to gather — he said with a grin — "100 young thugs and send them to summer camp for five weeks," in an effort to help "keep the property values up and the crime down — someone say 'amen'!" Amen. — Sarah Maserati is an NR associate editor.
|
|
|
|
|||||||||||||||||||||||
<% dim printurl
printurl = Request.ServerVariables("URL")%>
ast
week, a crowd of about one hundred gathered at New York City's University
Club to witness compassionate conservatism at work — with the federal
government nowhere in sight. 
