“James!”
I shouted as loudly as I could. I’d just sprinted from the KOB center down the street and back to my house as fast as my legs could carry me. I needed James to see what I had just seen. To tell me if it was really as bad as I thought it was.
James ran out of the bedroom, his forehead furrowed. “Diane, what’s wrong?”
I leaned on the back of a folding chair for a moment and tried to catch my breath. “It’s the center,” I managed to say between gasps. “The roof caved in.”
James sighed. “I’ll get my tool belt.” What exactly he thought he’d do with a hammer and screwdriver, I didn’t know, but I didn’t argue.
We rushed back to the center and pushed open the door. There it was, just as bad as I’d remembered it. Right in the middle of the 2,500-square-foot room was a hole in the ceiling the size of my living room. What had once been a thick plaster ceiling looked like it had exploded all over the room. Plaster was everywhere, covering the computers, printers, tables, even the music studio. I looked up and saw straight to the sky.
James shook his head, his hand on his hip. “I knew this was gonna happen.”
I used every ounce of restraint not to smack him upside the head. My pen would have come in handy right about then. “Then why didn’t you fix it?” I snapped.
“Hey now,” he said, holding up his hands like I was the police. “Don’t go blaming me.”
“I know, I know.” I mentally calculated the damage. Just cleaning up the plaster would be a major undertaking. And our landlord wasn’t exactly in a hurry to fix any repairs I’d called him about in the past.
Lord, what are we gonna do? I thought. These kids are counting on me to be here for them. What am I supposed to do if I don’t have a place for them to come? I didn’t want to close, not even for a day. What if the kids showed up and our door was locked? They might think we closed up for good, and they might never come back. I couldn’t let that happen.
Calling the landlord didn’t make me feel better. My heart sank when I heard his tried-and-true line. “I’ll get to it,” he said, ignoring me when I pressed him for a firm date.
James barely looked at me as I told him what the landlord said. He was too busy staring up at that hole, feeling the cool October breeze.
“I think I can fix it,” he said confidently.
“Fix it?” I looked at him like he was crazy. “The roof is gone too. How you gonna fix that?”
“Well, maybe I can patch the ceiling enough to hold us,” he said. “Just enough to get through until the landlord takes care of it.”
I rolled my eyes. It was going to be a cold day in you-know-where before my landlord showed up. I didn’t know what good it would do to fix the ceiling when the roof let every ounce of rain and snow inside. But once James sets his mind on something, nobody’s going to tell him otherwise.
Together, with the help of a few volunteers and KOB kids, we cleaned up the plaster. James hauled his ladder and tools over to the center and patched the ceiling. For two weeks, we kept trying. We pretended we weren’t freezing our tails off as the cold autumn wind cut through James’s sad little patch. We kept up our mentoring sessions, the musicians kept recording, the dancers kept dancing. But every day, that patch looked a little more rickety. And every day, the landlord didn’t show up.
A thought lurked in the back of my brain. This hole might very well never get fixed. We might need a new building.
By the end of two weeks, I’d had enough. This center wasn’t safe. If the roof had fallen in once, it could do it again, and next time could be even worse.
“That’s it,” I declared after James had to march in with his tool belt once again. “We’re outta here. We’re moving back into our house.”
It was a no-brainer. I wasn’t upset about losing my personal space or moving backward to the old days of KOB. This was just what we had to do. Sure, we wouldn’t have much space, but I’d made it work before. I could do it again. Besides, it was only temporary, I told myself. Just until we find a new building. We’d be out in a month or two.
James, however, wasn’t too keen. This man enjoyed being king. He loved not having to worry about a kid snacking on the leftovers he stashed in the fridge or breaking our new sofa.
“Why are you doing this again?” he asked. “Just close for a couple months until we’re able to figure this out.”
“Because I’m making progress with these kids,” I protested. “If we close, they might not ever come back.”
Suddenly, after years of peace, we were back to arguing every day about KOB. You would have thought I’d gone behind his back and blown the roof off myself. But like it or not, KOB was coming back to our house. That weekend, about a dozen boys rolled dollies over to the center and hauled every last cabinet, computer, and printer back to my house. We spent hours pulling tacks out of walls and stacking pictures, news clippings, and awards carefully into a pile. The music studio, the art supplies, everything was loaded up.
No way was all that fitting in my house. Most of it, especially the cabinets full of papers and whatnot, went straight to the basement. I didn’t move out any of my furniture, set up a mentoring space, or clear out an area for computers and printers. In my mind, this was all temporary. I just let it flow. If it bothered the kids, nobody showed it. They all sat at my big dining room table, and if somebody wanted to do homework, I brought out a computer.
It was like traveling back in time. We couldn’t do art projects or put on plays anymore. Even the music studio didn’t fit. I had to partner with another organization down the street who let my kids use their studio. In my house, we were down to mentoring and homework. Anybody who walked in off the street probably thought we were some kind of low-budget operation.
And yet the kids were grinning like somebody had just cooked their favorite food. They were happy to be back in my house. There was something about being in the same place where I ate my meals and slept at night that made them feel safe and comforted. They didn’t care that we were all on top of each other again.
“Don’t get too comfortable,” I warned them. “We ain’t gonna be here long. We gonna find a new building.”
But it didn’t quite work out that way. Month after month, there was still no building. Eventually, the Salvation Army let me use two rooms for a technology entrepreneurship program and let us play basketball on their court in the winter. It wasn’t much. It wasn’t what I wanted to do for the kids. But it was enough.
Months later, we were still in my house. Still down to mentoring, homework, and basketball. Still meeting around my dining room table, now well-worn with scuffs, scratches, and water rings.
I’d long since stopped telling myself we’d be out in a few weeks. I still didn’t unpack all those boxes and cabinets I’d stuffed in the basement. We were doing just fine as it was, aside from the daily challenge of filling their bottomless bellies, and Lord knew I didn’t have room for all that stuff anyway. Much as James fussed, I didn’t mind the kids being back in my house. But sometimes, I’d look around at the kids filling every square inch of my house and think, I could be doing so much more for them.
My house was filled to bursting one day when my phone rang. I had to holler for everybody to hush and then duck into a corner bedroom just to hear who was on the other end.
“Is this Diane Latiker?” I heard a woman say.
“It is.”
“Diane, my name is Laura. Congratulations, you’ve been chosen as a top-thirty finalist for the L’Oréal Woman of Worth.”
I screamed so loud it’s a wonder a dozen kids didn’t come rushing in to save me. “Really? Oh my gosh, this is so cool!” I gushed. “Thank you, thank you, thank you!” I went on and on for at least two minutes. Poor Laura must have thought, This lady won’t let me get a word in!
Laura told me the thirty finalists would be narrowed down to the top-ten honorees in the next few weeks. “Stay tuned,” she told me. “We’ll be in touch.”
It was the last call I’d expected to get that day, even though I was very familiar with the Woman of Worth honor. The truth was, I’d nominated myself. A Facebook ad came across my feed one day and caught my eye. L’Oréal had been big in my house when I was growing up. If we washed our faces or smeared cream on our skin, it had to be L’Oréal.
The ad came up again and again. Something about it just stuck with me. I couldn’t get it out of my head. The award was meant to honor women who ran nonprofits. Anybody who was chosen for the top ten would get $10,000 and a trip to New York for the award ceremony. But it wasn’t just about the award or even the recognition it could bring KOB. My eyes were stuck on the words I’d heard repeated on L’Oréal commercials for so long: “You’re worth it.”
What if they chose me? I thought. How amazing would it be if L’Oréal thought I was worth it?
It was more than a slogan to me. As a black woman, I don’t feel like I’m worth it in the eyes of the world most of the time. I feel like I’m in the corner, screaming at the top of my lungs, “Hey, I’m over here! Can I at least be heard for a minute?” But in a white world, it feels like nobody hears. As I’ve gotten older, I’ve only become more invisible. My mama raised me to go for it anyway, to believe that I can do anything. And I always have.
I applied to be a L’Oréal Woman of Worth in spite of my belief that the color of my skin put me at a distinct disadvantage. That’s based on a lifetime of disappointments and rejections. Like the time I drove two hours to a job interview, and because I was one minute late, the white woman who had greeted me promptly turned me away without asking me a single question. And the time a white supervisor on a construction site fired me for stopping to use the bathroom after holding it for more than three hours. I knew both situations would have had different endings if I had been white. And yet what could I do? I’d be dismissed as an angry black woman if I fought back. So I kept my head down and moved on. I bit my tongue. I held back a piece of who I really was. I kept living in this skin, even though it felt oppressive.
I thought my application would be dismissed out of hand like everything else. I dared to hope when I saw other black women had been honored in the past. Still, I was shocked when Laura called. And when she called a few weeks later to tell me I was in the top ten, I was so geeked I could have flown to New York myself. I didn’t need an airplane. I was already flying high. I’m worth it, I thought.
My friend Lehia joined me on the trip to New York. She’s handled my public relations for years—in fact, she was the one who got me my first news article when she worked in marketing for Chicago Community Trust.
A driver waited for us at the airport, holding up a sign with my name on it. He whisked us to the Quin Hotel, where all the honorees were treated to a reception. I nibbled on appetizers, taking in the plush carpet and glittering chandeliers as I met some of the most incredible women I’d ever encountered. Women who helped children stricken with cancer and disease. Women who opened their lives to young girls struggling with health issues. Women who walked across the country to raise awareness and money for asthma and bronchitis. The fact that I was being honored right alongside them felt unreal.
I woke up early the next morning for a meet and greet at the L’Oréal headquarters. We pulled up in front of the huge, shiny building, and my jaw dropped. I’d never seen anything so gorgeous. After passing through a security outfit that reminded me of the Secret Service, we took pictures with the L’Oréal president and other staffers dressed in power suits and dresses. Then, all the honorees were taken to the Bloomberg Media Group headquarters.
When I applied for the award, I didn’t know it came with a day of intensive training for nonprofit leaders at Bloomberg. I wasn’t exactly looking forward to it. I’d been running KOB for thirteen years and felt like I could teach my own class about what you should and shouldn’t do.
I didn’t have high expectations. We sat down at round tables, and a bunch of executive-types filed into the room. I prepared myself to feel bored all day. But to my surprise, this training rocked my world. My hand cramped as I scribbled notes furiously, trying to keep up.
The speakers told us we needed to think of our nonprofits not as charities but as businesses. We needed to stop thinking that we were sacrificing our lives for some noble cause. When you care about something, it isn’t a sacrifice, they told us.
A man named Dave Pitts told us to stop begging people to help our nonprofits keep going. We needed to flip the script and ask them to invest in our business, because their investment will pay off. Instead of focusing on just the dire consequences of failing to help, we should paint a picture of hope and tell our investors about our specific, concrete goals.
Oh my gosh, I’ve been doing this all wrong, I thought over and over. All this time, I’d been out there telling people to help me keep kids off the street or that this fifteen-year-old has already been to jail, and he’s going to go back if we don’t do something. I focused on emotion, not specifics. For better or worse, people who donate to a cause want to see results. They want to see people who will go on to excel, not victims of a lost cause. They want to see a vision of hope.
Something clicked. The day I’d dreaded became a complete game changer. I knew this was why God brought me to New York. I knew this was the reason I was chosen for the Woman of Worth honor.
The award ceremony was incredible, and I teared up and laughed through the whole night. But, to be honest, I was dying to get back. I could not wait to jump back into KOB and put everything I had just learned to use. I was ready to restructure everything. I was ready to sit down with kids like Devonté and talk about his future. I was ready to change the conversation from how we keep him out of trouble to what college he wants to go to and what steps we need to take to get him there. I’d talk to him about financial aid, potential majors, and whether he’d rather live on or off campus. No more dealing in hypotheticals—I would tell the kids not only were these dreams possible, they were absolutely going to happen.
Keeping kids out of gangs wasn’t enough. KOB had to become a holistic community where we dealt with every aspect of a kid’s life. From the moment a kid came to us in eighth grade, we had to focus them on their future and what they wanted in life. KOB wasn’t about gang members. It was about kids who might have made a wrong decision but still had a future.
I seriously upped my mentoring game too. When kids sat around my dining room table, we didn’t just vent about this or that problem anymore. We talked about their dreams and goals right along with the bad. I brought in more volunteers to give more kids the opportunity to have one-on-one mentoring. Aisha stepped in to help, along with Zeek, DaJuan, Jordan, and other KOB alumni. I felt like a proud mama. I watched these kids, who had poured out their problems to me a decade ago, giving advice to younger kids now. Boys who had once sold drugs on street corners, who had carried guns in their backpacks, were now helping the next generation make better choices.
That right there is how you decrease violence. You give a kid hope. You point them toward the future. And you give them tools to get there.
This works, I thought. It really works.