10
Interventions That Work
What’s the use you learning to do right when it’s troublesome to do right and ain’t no trouble to do wrong, and the wages is just the same?
—HUCKLEBERRY FINN
Collectively, the seventeen women had 260 years of drug addiction, an average of 15 years each, plus long experience in crime, poverty and homelessness. All were on probation. They had lied to, stolen from and cheated just about everyone around them for years. But the jubilant crowd of three hundred was giving them a standing ovation. On this night in 2018 in Tulsa, Oklahoma, the seventeen women stood proudly before the crowd in beautiful dresses, their hair and nails elegant, to raucous cheers from family members and even police officers who previously had arrested and scorned them. This was a graduation ceremony from Women in Recovery, a diversion program from prison for nonviolent drug offenders, and these women were now emerging to reenter society as productive workers, taxpayers, voting citizens and moms. We had come to Tulsa not for a grim tour of human devastation but to celebrate a triumph and explore a program that has been astonishingly successful in helping shattered people rebuild their lives and families.
Several judges who had frequently encountered these women in their courtrooms were in the front row, applauding wildly. The sheriff was beaming. The district attorney told us how these women inspired him. Oklahoma’s state attorney general was a graduation speaker and called the women “heroes.” That drew smiles through tears from a group of women more used to being reviled as “junkies” or “whores.”
“I thought we’d be planning a funeral instead,” said one audience member whose younger sister had started using meth at age twelve and was now graduating at thirty-five.
Ken Levit, who runs the George Kaiser Family Foundation and helped launch Women in Recovery, told the audience that the program had saved Oklahoma more than $70 million in prison spending. “You and your stories have singlehandedly transformed the trajectory of criminal justice policy in this state,” he told the women.
Toward the end of the ceremony, the audience gave the women graduates another standing ovation. Then the graduates shouted, “Thank you, judges,” and gave a return standing ovation to the judges. The giddy scene offered a crucial lesson that the rest of the country hasn’t appreciated: there is hope even for people with addictions whom society has given up on—if they get the right help.
“It’d be a horrible injustice for them to be in prison,” Judge William J. Musseman Jr. told us. “It’d be an injustice because the system didn’t recognize that treatment could provide a sufficient wedge in conduct, that treatment could in fact change the trajectory of their lives.”
Women in Recovery is just one modest-sized program in a single city, but it can be replicated. It also underscores the point that with encouragement and the right resources for many Americans left behind, there is hope. While we worked on this book, colleagues so often made comments like, “That must be terribly depressing.” Yes, of course there have been grim moments, but we have also seen uplift and inspiration. We fear that too many Americans believe that addiction, homelessness and criminality are intractable, that nothing can be done. Anybody attending the Women in Recovery graduation saw immense joy and exhilaration, as well as a path to a better future. Those of us who care about improving outcomes can’t just wag our fingers and scold; we also must point out successes that are possible if we pursue different policies that consistently deliver opportunity.
Tanitoluwa Adewumi, a homeless refugee from Nigeria who studied chess while lying on the floor of his shelter, beaming beside the trophy he won as the 2019 New York State chess champion for his age bracket (photo by Russell Makofsky)
Flashes of hope burst out in unexpected places, and they give us optimism about what can be achieved. One of our most thrilling moments in recent years was watching a homeless eight-year-old boy named Tanitoluwa Adewumi—he goes by Tani—lug a trophy almost as big as he was through his homeless shelter in Manhattan. Tani had arrived in New York City only a bit more than a year earlier, after his family fled Nigeria because of Boko Haram terror attacks on Christians like themselves. A pastor helped them get settled in a homeless shelter, and Tani attended the neighborhood elementary school, PS 116, where 10 percent of the pupils are homeless. The school had a part-time chess teacher, Shawn Martinez, who was passionate about the game and came every Thursday to teach Tani’s second-grade class how to play. Tani had never encountered chess before and joined the school halfway through the year, but he quickly caught up with his classmates. Impressed by Tani’s start, Coach Martinez encouraged the boy to sign up for the school’s chess club. The club required fees to cover the cost of attending tournaments, but Tani’s mom, Oluwatoyin Adewumi, emailed the head of the chess program and explained that the family was living in a homeless shelter and couldn’t pay anything. The fees were waived, Tani showed up at chess club meetings, and everybody could see that he had promise. Nobody had any idea yet just how much promise.
CHANGING THE TRAJECTORY of lives is the ambitious goal of Women in Recovery, and its alumnae show it can be done. One of those alumnae is Rebecca Hale, who spoke at the Women in Recovery graduation. With fine brown hair framing sparkling green-brown eyes, Rebecca grew up in Tulsa and told us that she drifted to prison the usual way, through an obstacle course of neglect, trauma and physical and sexual abuse. For as long as Rebecca could remember, her mother, Joyce King, had sold meth from their home, and people would traipse in and out constantly. Joyce was also a user and often high. When Rebecca was about six, Joyce was imprisoned on drug charges, so her father took care of her. But her dad was drinking heavily and also using drugs at the time, Rebecca said, so she and her father ended up homeless over the summer after she completed first grade.
When Joyce left prison, Rebecca went to live with her, but her mom returned to selling drugs and was sent to prison again. At the age of thirteen, Rebecca found herself effectively an orphan, her father already in prison for burglary. Rebecca was placed in a children’s home but wasn’t happy there, running away to stay with friends. But she wanted to continue school, so when ninth grade began she went to her local school to register on her own. She picked up enrollment papers, took them to prison to get her mom’s signature and finally went to school to sign up for classes.
“Where’s your mom?” a woman in the school office asked.
“She’s at work and can’t come in today.”
The woman asked her more probing questions. Finally, Rebecca owned up.
“Look, I’m homeless,” she admitted. “My parents are in prison. Please just let me enroll in school.”
“Oh, honey, we can’t do that,” the woman replied. “There are laws and rules. We can call somebody who can help you.”
The woman telephoned the police, and as she was explaining the situation, Rebecca excused herself. “I need to go to the bathroom,” she said—and ran off.
She bounced from one friend’s house to another’s before running into one of her mom’s drug suppliers. That’s when Rebecca became a drug runner and a user. Rebecca visited Joyce in prison on weekends, and slowly their relationship became stronger. Then Rebecca revealed a secret to her mother. When Rebecca had been five or six years old and they were living in the projects, she would play outside on her own. An elderly man, probably in his late sixties, would sit outside and give her popsicles and candy. One day, he lured her into his apartment and started kissing her. Then the man started touching her inappropriately and making her touch him.
“I knew it didn’t feel right,” she said. “But I’ll tell you, the sick, twisted part is that he gave me a lot of attention that I was really needing.
“He told me that’s what dads did with their daughters and that it was a secret,” she recalled. “Because my dad had been in and out of my life, I thought maybe he was telling the truth, that that’s really what dads did with daughters.” It happened six or seven times. And then her dad came back from prison. Soon after, Rebecca tried to give her dad a long, deep kiss.
“My dad told me, ‘You don’t do that. I’m a grown-up, and you’re a little girl, and I’m your daddy and that’s not okay.’ ” Rebecca didn’t tell her father about the man then, but now she did tell Joyce, who wept at the revelation.
One of Joyce’s friends had taken Rebecca into her home and registered her in school again. Rebecca then found a job that enabled her to buy a car in which she could sleep, and while still homeless, she graduated from high school. As she turned eighteen, Rebecca was at a fork in the road. She had demonstrated extraordinary initiative and resilience to graduate from high school, and now she took a job as a cashier and cook at Arby’s, allowing her to rent her first apartment. But Rebecca ultimately took the wrong fork. She continued to use and sell drugs, and she had a child, Chloe, at the age of twenty, and then another, Nate, a year later, with a different father. Nate’s dad disapproved of drugs and tried to get her to stop, but she wouldn’t listen.
“I don’t think there’s anything anybody ever could have said to make me stop,” said Rebecca. She was haunted by the shame of sexual abuse and had no feelings of self-worth. Rebecca was sinking deeper into drugs and was repeatedly thrown into jail. Then Nate’s dad left Rebecca, went to court and took custody of their son, while Chloe went to Joyce. “I really lost it at that point,” Rebecca said. “When the kids got taken from me, I really went wild.” Rebecca embarked on a crime spree that sent her to federal prison for three years for money laundering, bank fraud and identity theft. When she was released, she took out a loan on her mother’s good credit, bought a small two-bedroom apartment with no money down and enrolled in school for an associate’s degree in criminal justice—a field in which she did, after all, have expertise.
Increasingly, Rebecca wanted to start over. She called up her probation officers and said she wanted to go into drug treatment but lacked the money for it (she had no insurance). They said that they couldn’t help unless she was arrested again on state charges.
“What you’re telling me is I have to get in more trouble in order to get help?” Rebecca asked.
“Pretty much.”
Soon Rebecca succumbed again to drugs and crime and landed back in jail, this time facing twenty-eight felony charges. In the booking room, she was handed two sets of orange jail uniforms.
At this point, Rebecca was fairly typical of women in prisons and jails in the United States. Look at their records and you see hardened career criminals who seem to have decisively chosen this course. But dig deeper and most were on a trajectory toward prison from childhood. One study found that 81 percent of delinquent girls in South Carolina had experienced sexual violence, while another in Oregon found that 93 percent of girls in the juvenile justice system there had experienced sexual or physical violence. Imprisoning them risks replicating this trajectory in the next generation, for 79 percent of women in jails have children under the age of eighteen.
Now dressed in her orange scrubs, Rebecca went through the dope sickness of withdrawal, but her outlook slowly changed. She read the Bible every day and prayed a lot. “When you get clean and you have a minute to reflect on your life, you realize what you’ve been doing to the people that you love the most,” she said.
Chloe then was thirteen years old and refused to speak to her mom when she phoned from jail. That hurt Rebecca and helped push her to make a decisive change: “I was so tired of that life and being away from my children. I’m just repeating that same sick cycle.” That’s when she found out about Women in Recovery and became desperate to get in, telling everyone that she wanted to join the program. “If they had told me that I had to do handstands and walk that way for the rest of my life to stay sober,” she told us, “I would have done it.”
BACK IN NEW YORK CITY, Tani participated in his first tournament in 2018 with the lowest chess rating, 105, of any participant. He worked hard and attended a free summer chess program in New York City schools, and soon he began to win. Chess trophies began to stack up in the homeless shelter. He won chessboards as well, making it easier to practice. “He is so driven,” Coach Martinez told us. “He does ten times more chess puzzles than the average kid. He just wants to be better.”
Still, it was hard for Tani. He came home from school crying one day when classmates teased him about being homeless. At an immigration hearing, he misunderstood the judge and burst into tears when he thought he was about to be deported back to Nigeria. On the plus side, Tani had an enormously hardworking and supportive family. His dad, Kayode Adewumi, held two jobs: he worked long hours as an Uber driver using a car he rented and also passed a real estate exam and became a licensed real estate salesman. His mom took a course to become a home health-care aide. It was easy to see where the boy’s diligence and ambition came from. Likewise, the family was enormously nurturing and proud of Tani’s achievements. Every Saturday, his mom took him to a three-hour free chess clinic in Harlem, and his dad let him use his laptop computer with chess software that the school provided free of charge. Even Tani’s older brother, fifteen-year-old Austin, who aims to become an engineer, regularly took time off to accompany Tani to chess events. The family is very religious but, a bit reluctantly, allowed Tani to miss Sunday church services to attend chess tournaments.
“Tani is rich beyond measure,” Russell Makofsky, who oversees the chess program, told us—for what the boy lacked in family financial resources he received in family love and support. In 2019, with a rating that had swelled to 1587, Tani went to the state tournament. It had been only a year since he had started playing chess, but he had evolved into an aggressive, intuitive player. In one round, he boldly exchanged a bishop for a much less valuable pawn, and the school coaches worried that he had made a foolish move. But they fed the move into a computer simulator, and it declared that Tani’s chances of winning had just increased: it saw, as Tani had, that the gambit improved his position several moves later. At this level, Tani was competing mostly against kids from elite private schools with their own $100-an-hour chess tutors, but in the end, Tani won that game and was undefeated in the entire tournament. He won the state championship for his age group.
“It’s an inspiring example of how life’s challenges do not define a person,” Jane Hsu, the principal of his school, told us. Makofsky, the chess administrator, just shook his head wonderingly. “One year to get to this level, to climb a mountain and be the best of the best, without family resources,” he told us. “I’ve never seen it.”
MOST PEOPLE WHO HAVE an addiction need outside resources, though, especially as adults. Diversion programs have become more popular as many Republicans and Democrats alike have called for criminal justice reform and a greater response to drug addiction. There is broad agreement that prison terms are expensive and often accomplish little other than keeping inmates temporarily out of circulation and breaking up families, while initiatives like Women in Recovery have an excellent record of helping people transform their lives. The three-year recidivism rate for graduates of Women in Recovery is just 4.5 percent, far below prison recidivism rates.
Women in Recovery is built around intensive psychosocial counseling, which we discovered was the secret sauce of successful programs that are sprouting up around the country. Women in Recovery became our window into how these programs work. The women spend most of the day on-site and share housing, so they are surrounded on a daily basis by therapists, counselors and many professionals whose main objective is for the women to make it to the next phase and then graduate. They build camaraderie and sometimes use group voting to pass students to the next level.
“They can’t pass the curriculum without saying, ‘I’m responsible for this. I’m not a victim,’ ” said Catherine Claybrook, clinical director at the program. We remembered that Daniel McDowell at the Baltimore Station was also taught this principle. That’s the paradox: individual offenders need to embrace the narrative of personal responsibility more fully, while American politics and society should be more skeptical of it.
Another well-validated therapy employed by Women in Recovery teaches women how to make decisions that keep them out of prison and guides them in developing the moral compass they didn’t acquire while growing up. The counselors help the women resist temptation and explain why they are better off taking a dreary job at $8 an hour as opposed to accepting $150 for sex or $800 for transporting drugs. The Women in Recovery program lasts about eighteen months, far longer than most rehabilitation programs, and the length and intensity are crucial to its success. If the women fail periodic drug tests, they go back to prison, and that’s a powerful incentive to make the do-over succeed.
The women pay nothing. They are housed and fed, schooled and counseled. The cost over eighteen months is $28,000 per person, contributed by the George Kaiser Family Foundation. That may seem expensive, but it’s far less than a prison term would cost. Just as important, it includes children in the programing and aims to break the intergenerational cycle of drugs and poverty so that those kids are less likely to be arrested themselves in their teens or twenties.
Women in Recovery is a model of how a program can be humane while at the same time saving taxpayer money. It offers a proven toolbox to help people who are struggling, if only we will use it. And it’s replicable and scalable. Indeed, in 2017 Oklahoma’s Republican governor made Women in Recovery the centerpiece of a “Pay for Success” program to allow it to serve more women. Essentially, the expansion was paid for out of savings from money that would otherwise have been spent incarcerating the women.
REBECCA WASN’T INTERESTED in the abstract policy, though. She just wanted a life raft. The day of her preliminary hearing, Rebecca heard her name called at four a.m. from her jail cell. She was taken down the hall to be searched, then shackled and handcuffed. With other women, she was led to a small van that took them to a holding cell in the courthouse. Rebecca closed her eyes.
“Lord, please give me this opportunity,” she prayed. “I’m tired of doing the same old thing over and over. Please open the door for me to go in this program.”
When Rebecca’s case was summoned, she saw the district attorney step up. At the previous hearing, he had terrified her: “They were pissed,” she recalled. “They were like, She has multiple felony accounts. With this large number of counts, she’s a menace to society.” Then Rachel Delcour, a liaison at Women in Recovery who works closely with officials from the local courts and jails, interviewed Rebecca, who made a point of showing her determination to work hard and turn her life around. This time when Rebecca’s case was heard, the DA announced, “We’ve gone over her records, and we’ve decided that she is eligible for Women in Recovery and has been accepted.”
Rebecca had won the new start she had been dreaming of.
“I think it’s God,” she said. “My mom was praying, I was praying. Even my daughter was going down front in church every Sunday.”
Rebecca devoted herself to Women in Recovery. She attended all classes, baring her soul in therapy sessions. She took a deep and emotional look at her past—the trauma, abuse, neglect and drugs. Therapists helped her assess her past decision-making and advised how she could avoid bad decisions in the future.
“We really studied the pathways that bring women into the criminal justice system,” said Mimi Tarrasch, an energetic, passionate social worker who developed and runs Women in Recovery. “First thing on that pathway is family dysfunction.” Tarrasch said that when women have been traumatized, abused, pimped by a mom or dad, then a rehab program for just one, two or three months isn’t going to be enough to overcome a long-term addiction. Yet most rehab programs last only three months, if that long. In contrast, the default prison sentence for a repeat felony conviction is measured in years. Shedding an old way of life takes time.
Rebecca learned how to set goals, and then how to meet them. It’s a basic discipline that these programs—like the military—inculcate in their people. She and her classmates received coaching on decision-making and taking responsibility, budgeting and conflict resolution, nutrition, relapse prevention, résumé writing, plus help getting GEDs, housing and jobs.
After Rebecca completed the program, she searched for employment through Women in Recovery’s network of business partners who are willing to hire the program’s graduates. Rebecca took a job at an air-conditioning company, handling billing and customer service, and on the side she enrolled in classes to learn the technical side of heating, ventilation and cooling. If customers become annoyed with her, she applies lessons about calming and anger management from Women in Recovery. Anyone looking at Rebecca’s rap sheet might have come to the conclusion she was a hopeless recidivist, while anyone now working with her on an air-conditioning issue would encounter a happy, well-adjusted employee and solid citizen.
For the first time, Rebecca, at the age of thirty-seven, is not on any government assistance, but she does struggle to pay the bills, including mortgage and student loan payments as well as installments on $20,000 in debt built up in the local courts. It is not lost on Rebecca that some of her new work colleagues have saved for the past twenty years in the company’s 401(k) and earned profit sharing, while she is just getting started. “Because I chose to go a different way,” she said, “I’m just now starting in the last four years to rebuild my life and to prepare for the future. It’s really challenging.”
ONE OF THE IMPEDIMENTS to scaling up programs like Women in Recovery is that this intensive treatment is expensive, at least compared to traditional one-month programs, which are much less effective. Another impediment is the perception that drug treatment is a Sisyphean task that usually fails, and that even after enormous investments of time and money, most people will relapse. Yes, relapses are often part of recovery. But remember that astonishing recidivism rate for Women in Recovery: only 4.5 percent of those completing the program reoffend within three years. That’s a stunning success and a sign of what is possible. It’s true that this is partly because of self-selection and because the threat of prison hangs over anyone who fails a urine test, and not every program would be able to replicate it. But it underscores that with intensive long-term programs we could turn around the lives of countless people struggling with addiction, along with the lives of their children, and that far too many aren’t getting the help that could be transformative.
Moreover, while the expense is real, the corollary of success is that it brings huge cost savings. Treatment is expensive, but so are crime, incarceration and foster care. One study found that if offenders in state prisons received needed drug treatment, the country would enjoy $36 billion in savings and benefits.
If quality treatment programs can be significantly expanded and replicated in many more cities and counties, these initiatives offer a way for America to move away from mass incarceration, while helping drug offenders get treatment, counseling and jobs. Judge Musseman told us that the majority of his cases were drug related. And when women with children are jailed, the kids’ lives are often ruined, too, sending them on a terrible life journey. “We’re all about the two-generation model,” said Tarrasch.
Rebecca Hale, right, in her home, now has a much better relationship with her teenage daughter, Chloe. (photo by Lynsey Addario)
While Rebecca Hale was lucky to be in Tulsa to take advantage of Women in Recovery, vast numbers of drug users remain locked in cells because there is no such program available in their areas. We need Women in Recovery, and Men in Recovery, programs all across the country, creating hope where devastation has prevailed. But let’s also acknowledge that charitable local solutions are not enough. More important, we need scalable, institutional macro-solutions—with initiatives like job training and job placement—to get earnings growing again.
The impact of Women in Recovery’s two-generation model can be seen in Rebecca’s children. Chloe, seventeen, with a round face, blue-gray eyes and brown hair, is a junior in high school, and while she still has the same homework and boyfriend troubles as her girlfriends, she has issues that most teenage girls don’t have. Not only is her mom on probation, but the man she calls Dad is in prison three hours away. He is serving a five-year sentence for drugs and for adult kidnapping with a baseball bat, she told us rather matter-of-factly. As for her real father, she doesn’t have contact with him now.
“We talked on the phone,” Chloe said. “And then apparently he got drunk and said that I wasn’t his daughter and that my mom was a whore, and that he wants nothing to do with me and that I should just go and kill myself.”
The kids have undergone their own counseling, for their traumas make them vulnerable to substance abuse and health problems later in life. Once, when Chloe and Nate were home, an angry boyfriend started beating their mom. The boyfriend cut Rebecca’s throat and face badly. Another time, he took a hammer and shattered her arm and hand and threatened to smash her head. Whenever violence flared, Chloe and Nate would rush to their bedroom, crawl out the window, run down the street to their grandmother’s house and summon help.
“I already knew he was a bad guy,” said Chloe. “He told me that he would take my mom from us if I said anything.”
Asked about drugs, Chloe is firm. “Not for me,” she said, and she has stuck with this so far. When her best friend of six years started using drugs at age fourteen, Chloe severed the tie. “She already has a kid,” she told us.
Chloe works as a cashier at a Carl’s Jr. hamburger restaurant, honing her customer-service skills with people angry about the food for one reason or another. She has had customers throw drinks at her, spit on her, curse her, but she tries to remain patient. “You have to try and calm them down,” she said. “Be like, We’ll get it out as fast as we possibly can. We’re doing the best we can.”
Chloe says she wasn’t bullied or stigmatized at school about her parents being in prison, partly because she and Nate didn’t tell people. “We’d make stuff up,” she said. “Like, I live with Grandma because Mom is out of state. I said we had a perfect life.” Chloe also wants to focus on improving her grades. She had a 3.89 GPA in ninth grade, but it slipped when she was breaking up with her boyfriend. Both she and Nate are enrolled in Oklahoma’s Promise, a state program that allows them to attend state college with free tuition as long as they keep their grade point average above 2.5. Chloe wants to volunteer at the local animal shelter, and for her birthday she got a pet potbellied pig named Dexter that stayed in her bedroom until she realized how much work a pig is. Dexter was then dispatched to her cousin’s farm.
For a career, Chloe aspires to do something with art. And although she quips that lunch is her favorite class, she is deeply engaged in high school. She is joining the school’s theater club and told us that she had recently read The Secret Life of Bees, and also a play that she described as “the classic with those characters, Brutus and Caesar.”
“Et tu, Brute?” piped up Nate, an avid reader.
A sturdy high-school sophomore and football player, Nate is a playful jokester, poking and tickling his sister frequently. One vestige of childhood trauma may be his fear of loud noises. When he was young and arguments and beatings were exploding around the home, Chloe would run to the bedroom and cover Nate’s ears with her hands or a pillow and sing him to sleep.
Nate is particularly enthusiastic about school, both academics and activities. He has tried multiple sports—tennis, soccer, track, wrestling and football—and he is also committed to doing well in school to get into a good college. He says he plans to apply to Stanford University or Yale University, and is also thinking about the navy or air force. After living for years on a tightrope, Nate and Chloe seem safer and happier now. Nate acknowledges that he’s “spoiled” by his mom and his sister. And Chloe said, “I like my life now; it’s really good.”
So a story that began with drugs, sexual abuse and homelessness has been transformed into a tale of resilience and the coming together of a family—because Rebecca happened to be a woman in Tulsa, where Women in Recovery offers this lifesaving intervention. Almost anywhere else, Rebecca acknowledges, she would be in prison and the family would be a mess, but she focuses on the triumph of what has happened here. “We still struggle,” she said. “But the cycle stops with us. It’s not going past me.”
Nate agrees. “I’m very confident we will break it,” he said. His sister nodded and added, “We’ll break it, keep going on with life like nothing happened!”
WE ARE HOPEFUL that grit will triumph over vulnerability. In Manhattan, we walked with Tani back to his homeless shelter as he lugged his huge trophy. An elderly white woman on the street looked at this scrawny black boy with an oversize trophy and asked him, “What’s that for?” Without stopping, he said matter-of-factly, “Chess. I won the state chess tournament.” The woman’s eyes opened wider. “Chess?” she repeated. “Wow!”
Tani’s triumph reflects his brilliance and diligence, but also a combination of circumstances that too rarely come together. It helped, of course, that Tani’s family is strong and was committed to getting him into the chess club and to every practice and tournament. It was also crucial that the chess club was willing to waive all fees and admit him. None of this would have happened if PS 116 hadn’t taught chess and employed a first-rate chess teacher devoted to helping Tani improve his game. Most homeless kids don’t have Tani’s talent, but they also don’t have his opportunity or drive. “I want to be the youngest grand master,” he told us.
Nick wrote about Tani in his Times column, and the resulting outpouring of goodwill was staggering. Within hours, a handful of families had offered housing to the family. One woman had an empty furnished home that she was prepared to let them live in, another had extra space in her apartment overlooking Central Park, and another said she would help rent the family an apartment near Tani’s school. Several others offered to buy Tani’s dad a car so he would not have to rent the car that he drives for Uber. A company offered jobs to Tani’s parents. A couple of private schools offered full scholarships. Lawyers offered immigration advice. President Bill Clinton invited Tani and his family to visit him in his Harlem office, so the boy took the morning off from school for that. And hundreds of readers contributed to a GoFundMe page that quickly raised more than $250,000 for Tani and his family.
A few days later, we helped the Adewumis move into their new home, a pleasant two-bedroom apartment in Manhattan, not far from his school. A generous reader had paid the rent for the first year, and another family had furnished it. “I have a home,” Tani told us giddily, as he raced around the empty rooms. “I have a home!” He said he was particularly excited about eating a home-cooked meal for the first time in a year. “I want my mom’s cooking again,” he explained.
The Adewumis were overwhelmed but grounded. They politely declined the scholarship offers from elite private schools, while saying that they might reconsider when Tani reached middle school. For now, he would remain loyal to the elementary school that had given him a chance and welcomed him onto its chess team even when he could not pay fees. “This school showed confidence in Tanitoluwa, so we return the confidence,” his mom told Principal Hsu. And then, fighting tears, they hugged.
The challenge is that when we highlight an inspiring story like Tani’s, readers invariably want to support that particular child rather than the class of people similarly affected. Humans are moved to help individuals, not to address structural problems. But the solution to child homelessness is not winning the state chess championship. That’s not scalable. So what the Adewumis did next was particularly meaningful. They decided not to touch the quarter-million dollars in the GoFundMe account, aside from 10 percent that they would give to their church as a tithe. The rest went into a new Tanitoluwa Adewumi Foundation to be used to help struggling immigrants like the ones they had been a week earlier. “God has already blessed me,” Tani’s dad explained. “I want to release my blessing to others.”
We asked Tani what he thought about handing over this vast sum rather than, say, keeping a few dollars to buy a bicycle or a video game, or simply going out for a celebratory dinner. “I want to help other kids,” he said, but just a trace of wistfulness crossed his face when we mentioned the other options. So we pressed him: Wasn’t there anything he wanted? After a long silence, he confessed: “Well, maybe a computer,” he said. “That would be nice.” As soon as Nick reported that, of course, Tani was deluged with offers of computers.
Exactly a month after the first article appeared, Tani’s parents had a Nigerian-style dinner in their home for all the people who had helped them, from the chess coach to the donor of the new car parked outside. Philip Falayi, a Nigerian pastor who had let the Adewumis sleep in his church for their first few days in New York, blessed the food, and Tani played chess in the corner with one of his school buddies. A bookshelf of donated chess books, the towering state chess trophy and a practice schedule to prepare for the national tournament completed the scene. “We are so thankful to everyone,” Tani’s dad told those present. “This happened because of all of you.”
To see Tani with his trophy was to sense the possibilities when needy kids are supported. It’s the same sensation we had cheering the graduation for Women in Recovery, and the right policies can replicate both kinds of opportunities. We say “policies” because there’s a risk that recounting such a heartwarming tale may leave the impression that charity can solve social ills entirely rather than fill gaps. The outpouring of help for Tani’s family was moving, but kids should have housing even if they are not chess prodigies. What we need is not just the dazzling generosity that people showed Tani’s family, although that was transformative here, but systemic solutions to help children even when they don’t know a bishop from a pawn. So we should be inspired, yes, but inspired to try to build comprehensive systems to replicate that web of support as much as possible for all kids, and that requires Americans to show generosity not only in private charity but also in public policy.