>> i understand i should say

something. [laughter] but i will say something. the issue we're trying to have a conversation about to, is not the issue that the country has really ever been mature enough to have a conversation about. so one of the questions that we are raising, is, can the country have a conversation about all the children in the country being children of the country and the country really taking responsibility for the quality public-school

education of all the children. so there is a defense between the idea of treatment as any call, and equal treatment. in terms of ways in which the constitution and people who think about the constitution think about those issues. treatment as any quote had to do with things like standing in separate lines and to bns the board in a position we all know a lot of examples of that. equal treatment has to do something being handed out

everybody gets an equal share of what is being handed out. of the educational side, if the country is saying we should have public education , equal treatment is every child getting the equal share of what is available for public education. the issue came up this afternoon. we were having some conversations, let me digress. and with the 50th anniversary last spring and then to take on the

responsibility organizing some sick people. that is a big job so as part of that invited the young people's project to look at your city to see whether or not if we could do what we are talking about here in washington d.c.. we have been here since the past election trying to get a handle on that. when the people that handle that question at one point*

in the discussion in mississippi during voter registration we're not thinking about getting a few e lead to voters. -- e leed motors or how we make sure that we get the cream of the voting crop. if you understand the 1957 civil-rights act, remember back how many people were here in 1957? some of us were here. eisenhower was president in at lyndon baines johnson was the majority leader of the

senate. and the first civil rights bill since reconstruction was passed. jackie robinson was everybody star. and also the republican and he fired off a telegram to the president and he said this is a terrible bill. please be to go. strom thurmond tried. i think maybe he understood that there was something to the bill that was deeper than what met the eye. he filibustered the bill 24 hours by himself but when he was finished, the senate

passed the bill. and then to look for either the voters, in other words, words,, the professors at tuskegee, who qualify the go under anybody's standards, should be allowed to go. slow the bill did not have snic in mind. that was the country's problem because when this hits in a move minh demerged and snic demerged, they have a very different take on that bill and in that bill, thinking of that is the key professors, to think anybody who interferes with

the person who register to vote and anybody who was trying to help register to vote to the state cannot lock that person up. in mississippi, what actually happened is it wanted to lock snic up, but because of the bell the fed would turn the jailhouse key to get snic out. so we were able to organize and then coming to the freedom riots but the etfs but an order for it to take

cold mill said mandela to stay in jail for longer periods of time than they were willing. so that part of the movement did not take cold. and mississippi has done that many, many times and to say the buck stops here they could of what the freedom writers through. get off the bus. we close the restaurant then put you back on the bus and you take your way down to new orleans the mississippi did not want to do that. if you come in here we will put you away. end then they couldn't quite

get direct action on the ground. so the quote we did-- the work we did on voter registration was a piece of legislation that was designed for the tuskegee professors but then in the hands of snic became a her real tool for the aliterate sharecroppers. to say we're not interested in a few people getting registered to vote but anybody who wants to register getting registereregistere d. fists her i said that to the lady we just a what students and teachers from the war to know what it is the kids

need, we're interested in the same way we were interested in the mississippi with the illiterate sharecroppers all of the kids at the bottom of the equal treatment that everybody gets that equal share of what ever will be offered and that should not depend on the pushy parents or the lottery. misses the question that we are putting out today, the question about quality public school education as a constitutional right. there is a lot more history and a lot more that i could say but does anybody have anything they want to say at

this point*? anybody want to raise a question or ask a question or open the conversation? >> [inaudible] >> my name is david. i am not a teacher by very interested in this subject. a constitutional amendment amendment, and you're indicating which would involve a constitutional amendment, that to the government cannot do it to you or prevent you from doing it but i am interested in knowing what the

legislation of a constitutional amendment would look like to guarantee the quality education a lot of folks whether the child appearance who are interested and have good reasons not to. there are families hurt education is a given that you know, the community will give a good education if you go through that system but then as i say, .

>> and a number of barriers or education. >> let me say two things. who should get an education and congress appointed albert aims to mississippi

and then there was an office over the territory that included louisiana at least. then in 1870, ames actually oversaw the formation of the legislature in mississippi. and in 1873 or 1872 actually to be the governor of mississippi. because the majority of voters were black. and they sent in troops and they could actually vote.

and there is a report, the 2000 page report who was a senator from massachusetts massachusetts, about the terror and violence and murder that took place starting with the vicksburg election in 1874 than continued with the election for the legislature for mississippi in 1875. so the democrats are teheran and violence who overthrew the mississippi legislature. so william alexander percy percy, he was the brother of charles percy.

and william and charles in two other brothers were the son of don carlos. don carlos percy went to the bahamas around 1776 and picked up some slaves and some right to spanish territory. and then he had a son, thomas, i'm sorry, don carlos was their grandfather because he had a son named thomas and graduated from princeton and eventually settled in the appalachian foothills to the north of the foothills in the tennessee valley.

and during that period of american history, we have the people's president, andrew jackson. he was the people's president, but that the people he were concerned about were other rise settler said he was concerned they should have the land that belongs to the native americans. so is andrew jackson and has sought to it that live in the mississippi territory that became alabama and mississippi were shipped east of the mississippi. so charles percy was the son of thomas in 20 years old in

1940 and by that time, his family had acquired land in the mississippi delta. he loaded flatboats with everything he had an all family possessions from the plantation they had acquired worth half a million dollars back in 1840 including all of the slaves and got on the tennessee river and went down to the ohio then took the ohio river to the mississippi and landed in a place that is called deer creek mississippi. close now to the little town. the youngest kid on there was william alexander percy who was just three years old. charles did not last long. he died 10 years later.

that william went to princeton but when there he became a colonel and have their regiment. he was not for secession but when they seceded, he went to fight and came back, the plantation was decimated but he reorganized. when the terrorist overthrew, he was a respectable face of terror to go into the mississippi legislature to become speaker for just one term and had one major objection which was to take the money that was allocated for the education of the slaves to use that to build the railroad would structure and

he did that. past or. 1863. sitting in the green bill court room to take hundreds of sharecroppers down to go to i'm sorry if citi and the federal court room is packed with sharecroppers john doe is my lawyer and he leans over to look at me to say why retaking the illiterates down to register to vote? so sharecropper a literacy write-downs through 1963 is the suspect of the right to vote. the country has decided not just the people from mississippi but that a whole

people should not be educated. or they should get the sharecropper education. nation have that which meets the horizon of the work that the country has assigned them to do. so now there is another part to the story. a young kid who is 12 years old living in mississippi decides he wants to learn more about something that has happened in his neighborhood. so he investigates this and gives a report to his class. it is a contest and he says he will enter. his teacher and mother encourage him after the report to give to a

fraternal organization of the white people and white men in the area. so he does. his report is about sharecroppers who left the plantation to set up something that became known as strike city. this is 1965 when they did that. but they are furious that they have now started to talk about, this is our country's problem. we don't talk about what we did and we're furious if anybody talks about it. they were furious but his mother told him, you go back and learn everything that you can about what happened

to those people. that started the young kid on a journey. he ended up on it at the "wall street journal" and decided to keep looking at what happened and he cut down another young kid and slope number 12 birmingham alabama and he track down win in the early part of the 19th century, got arrested for vagrancy. and what happened to him? after he was invested he was fined, they extended it at one year, they sold his case to the tennessee which is the city to put him in slope

number 12 with 1,000 other black people who were digging the coal. he lasted five months and he was dead. the person who did that robocalls slavery by another name. what they are documenting this 200,000 young black men who actually did in the groundwork for this country's coal and steel industry and alabama. so the question for this country and around the issue that you raise, all these people who don't want the education, all the country has set up a system in which it has denied a whole people access to an education.

that is one part and the other question that i am raising tonight is not the question about what will happen or will such an amendment say, or it even can we have a conversation? can we have a national conversation about every child in the country getting an equal sheriff public-school education? i don't have an answer to your question about what the constitution may or may not say. what we do know, is the official constitutional status is there is no constitutional right to an education in this country. but the question for the country is, do we want it? can we have a conversation

about it? >> hello. i am a teacher and a social policy%. i have a question for you in regards and to that question that you speak of record do believe the african-american community can come to the table to be honest about the current state in terms of what we bring to the table as old days as a whole where on the macro level meaning parents, a student to school

relations, how those are going, i do think the african-american community could be honest with in that conversation? considering that i believe currently education has been undervalued meaning that some during than 1920s when we create all of these wonderful schools, they were able to go to school to get the college degrees they earn them and they came back after the 1960's when we went through the civil-rights movement, i believe they were going to gain respect to reach these levels of attainment. however, i think that what happened and what they actually found during the '70s is they went and actually found they were hitting the glass ceiling and other things they

required besides an education in those are things that racism was given to them. said you have a level of affirmative-action. so the education being undervalued has caused the african-american community not to necessarily value education. by that, i mean currently have federal programs inside the schools where they offer freed to during two searches schools and they are very underutilized. and parents defending children not not doing homework or not succeeding or my child should be able to continue to the next grade even though they don't

know there multiplication facts so do you believe really if we could sit down to have a conversation the african-american community could be honest about to read the values and priorities are in terms of their relationship with what they believe education could do too further their life? >> do you know, jim andersen's work? about the education of black people in the south and the civil war up o 1935? you should look at the book. you should look at her, was the freed slaves who really

established to push the public-school education in the south. during reconstruction for a brief period and after three construction. then look at how this was the railed i just gave one example. in the 1940's, there are only three high-school because those students who walked out of mccoll

high-school in 196-1119 of them because one of the students who went to sit in in had been sent away to juvenile detention. 119 of them walked out of macomb high school. sonat this weekend that just passed by just before that, they had a reunion come in the 50th and it broke down because the superintendent gave her the diploma so she waited 50 years to get the diploma from a high school. so on the one hand his wife has passed but the wife is

87 years old swy was asking her and she finished high school that if her mother had finished but there was no high school and if her grandmother had finished high school and there was no high school for her grandmother to finish. one of the famous is to actually find out all of the effort the black people have made for the years during slavery and reconstruction and afterwards really to get the education. that is one thing. so on the question of what is going on now, a few people the civil-rights movement open doors so few

people were able to walk through those doors and the country decided they would make room for people to walk through the doors of was talking to somebody from princeton who is a very prestigious black professor on assignment cited was complaining that princeton has not produced one black ph.d. in physics since the 1970's. he did not have an answer answer, why a that was happening. but somehow he felt there is something wrong with this picture.

so what is true is that the doors that were open and allowed a few people to go through but the people who pushed against the doors were not the middle class of mississippi. when we we're doing that work and the 1960's what was the black middle class? it was about 7,000 teachers. of high school teachers most of whom were not permitted to vote because they would lose there jobs. one of the high school teachers from mccombs came out which is the county next-door of course, nobody knew who he was. but he could not do that voter registration work he would lose his job. so the people who push for

their shares crofter at -- sharecroppers, a domestic laborers, but they were not able to walk through the doors. the judge would say why retaking illiterates? the country has set a horizon since the time of the civil war quite deliberately no question about that. but the country was not talking about it. now on the kids, every reporter came up to me with the same question isn't that why they're not going down to register to vote? so finally what dawned on me

is my job and the job of snic to figure out how we work with these people they call apathetic to unleash their energy. that is our job to figure that out and we finally stumbled on a simple tool. our job is to use the tool not just the pledge of the power like i am doing here to stand up and preach but how do we get them? so we just organized how they met and what they wanted to work on with the monthly meetings people coming from all over the state getting up at 4:00 in the morning. they go with a group of

people who want to work on that and figure out what they want to do then they would report about what they did. little things. but out of that came energy, the 80th that to they could do something and decided they decided to do something big that is how we have the mississippi freedom it democratic party and how you got obama whether you like him or not. [laughter] if those sharecroppers had not gone up to the democratic party to say look , you have to throughout said dixiecrats, may have to open the party to get jim-crow out of the national party structure. the same thing that happens

to everybody that says the manager in the country first is the student i hear that here. they're dysfunctional, the parents are dysfunctional and the committees are dysfunctional. this functionality the version of apathy. that it is also said teachers that teachers cannot do this or that. solos the conversation in mississippi changed as soon as hundreds of sharecroppers demanded their right to vote. they could not say they were apathetic any more. but the conversation in this country will change as soon as the tens of thousands of students demanded education.

but my job is to figure out how to get the students to unleash their energy to make that demand. that is my job. my job is to listen to those who say it will never happen because they don't want it. so the question is having done that, the question is washington d.c.. having done that, we are the people who was to make sure that it happens here but working said demand side not abdicating on the behalf of the sharecroppers were working with them to get them to demand their rights. that project is doing the same staying with the kids.

but to get to demand everybody says they don't want. so actually it needs to be done. >> [inaudible] >> full disclosure i am on a teaching for change staff. but just to say briefly, we have the parent organize same project doing it from the opposite end of the viewpoint of the discussion with the kids, teachers of the schools. just last wednesday and thursday the school is 99 percent african-american and and we had a dialogue to bring the parents and teachers together on an

equal footing because everybody has something to share and 3k through six we had 100 parents show up between two days to sit with their children's teacher. that is three operate from in to talk about the country struggling to have the national conversation. one of the things we're working on in the school for those who are with the of your project embracing a new culture that does not focus on dysfunction but empowering for what we have done before and organize and work together. wrote if you take that conversation to schools and education reform, talk about the legislation, what was good you anchorage looking at the coulter that we need?

particularly in the curriculum side but if you could outline the platform with a culture of the things that we are talking about. >> i have been trying to pitch something just around that issue. if you think about it, legions of adults all across the country put enormous amounts of time and energy and money and resources to make sure the kids do sports. all over the country. you cannot point* one network of adults who do the same for the math knowledge base. we have such a game.

fourth graders who love to go around the gym can do that with numbers instead of basketball. we are looking for an elementary school at once to reorganize who wants to learn there number facts because to play the game, you have to know about 51. that is what it? 17 times three. that is not anybody is multiplication table. what about seven? nineteen times three? eighty-seven? ninety-one? now to play the game, all of the numbers have a very

important the mathematical feature in common. all of the numbers. but none of them are in the multiplication table. to play the game, the kids have to know those and other numbers. they have to learn more about the numbers and think deeper about the numbers band-aid do never raising a table. memorizing the multiplication table is 19th century school mathematics. so we have an idea for the 21st century vote school mathematics a way for the kids to learn there numbers. we would love to work with your people there. i have a patent on this idea.

back in 1996 called gains for mathematical understanding we gave the pattern over to the young people's projects so they could have intellectual property that nobody else had. they have run with it to form the young people's project. they have played the game after school. but it is time to take it into the school day so we need to have people who actually wrestle with the issue that you raised young lady what do the children negative we want to learn? i take jt's they do and our job is to do the math in such a way that they see that they can do it and have

fun doing it to in learn a lot too. >> i am a howard university students and we have to keep in mind not due to generalize african americans when said the african american community does not value education so given your classroom because nine out of 10 depends on where these people come from how they were brought up. when they say the african-american community don't care about the education, i don't like when people generalize is as old. that is all i have to say.

>> i am the director of research for an organization dealing with poverty and race resource action council how do think we would never get to a constitutional amendment the organizing, the stakeholders, how long it would take? >> what would it take to get to the constitutional amendment? we got the 15th amendment in 1870 and got the right to vote 1965. the country coming here is

what i think. the adn that to we the people in the preamble to the constitution started out a as we the property white men. what happened across the centuries there is the intention but we the people should ensure that justice and liberty and the pursuit of happiness happens. the extension of we the people is that it is on a path where it grows a fuzzy said. who are we the people?

if you look across town from the civil war, you have constitutional people but constitutional property. 625,000 people die eight so we no longer have constitutional property but all those people who don't quite make it to the full-fledged constitutional people, but we are extending the class of people who are the we the people class. i think there is a challenge to the young people who were between the ages of 10 and 40. 30 years from now come with a bill be between the ages of 40 in 70 and they will be running the country.

we want. so if across the 30 years they can figure out that they need to dedicate themselves to the extension of we the people class to include all the children and to figure out because of that age of which they are living, that age of information that has a shift from industrial to information technology, it mechanized physical work. levying to reading and writing literacy and those sharecroppers of the mississippi delta who were ill literate to read and write aliterate,

aliterate, -- illiterate, t he information age doesn't recognize physical work but it organizes what we think about and help us to organize what we think about. you have the whole shift from one kind of work to another called knowledge work and critical thinking. all of the schools that we have are the artifacts of the industrial age. right now and the school that you are going to is an artifact. sometime during this century we have schools that are artifacts of the information age but as we do that this group we want to see to it

that every child that is equal treatment that is what has to happen. i went to mississippi but sitting there in cleveland mississippi, the head of the naacp was looking at everything that was happening he was reading all of the information the justice department was producing about how many black people there were two were eligible to vote but were not voting? students, i do this.

we don't have any lunch counters down here we need political access you need to go this way and take math with it because the information age along with reading and writing they are headed for the criminal-justice system. >> i teach math today i used

to teach science in special ed. i am interested to know, idc organize same differently as the majority black in places where they have complete control of the school's? it and then complete administrative curriculum where in many cases it will say the four people have a right to vote to they're not at disenfranchised than in many cases have represented what they thought they wanted for their children how to untie the knot but

what those bought that they wanted. >> teachers they thought that they wanted the institutions they did their best but the parents and people from the district created the system how do untie that not? what they do to untie the knot the project is actually trying to get to the students to untie the knot you have to actually get to the students my own personal

experience with that, we had to get to my own children to make sure they did their math and i started with them before they went into small that i found out they would not get it in school so i made them do it they did that on vacations, this summer, we just did math and then when it came time to do algebra and they were not teaching it and my daughter was ready to say i don't want to do the math -- . >>

[inaudible] >> then i said you will do my math in the school so i will come teetoo and i did. [applause] i became her teacher. and that is how the algebra project got started. son now, when it got back to mississippi, we were in it brinkley middle school in jackson mississippi, in in 1993 we started with a sixth grader they hit did they say that the eighth grade in 1996 and a group of them had done algebra so i decided i wanted to see how they could get a soft landing in geometry in high school. i told the principal will you walk over with me to the high school to talk to the high school principal? i will teach one class of geometry to see what it

means to do geometry now that they have done the algebra project. i in about the high school for 10 years. i taught one class a then they asked me to teach a full load. i became one of those that have a special and wrote out my application and became a teacher. what does that mean? 150 kids. six glasses per day. but the issue of what we're talking about here and now really hit me. what am i looking at? where did it come from? what happened that we ended up this way? because we have the wrong conversations we talk to the

country about the kids. we need to talk to the country and the about the country and to talk to the kids and the kids it is no good to talk to the daddies but how did the country get to this place and what will they do to get out of it? but on the side of what you talk about, we work with the kids there but then to do something more than teach my own class, i knew what was up. they are on the ap schedule. nine minutes per day. the kids will have to do double up to do 90 minutes every day. . .

but you have to double again. so some kids did, some kids didn't. what happened in the tenth year was kids could take the test on their own. we were not doing algebra.

we were doing in geometry, but they started to pass so the culture became all of us are going to get through this test. there was one girl that didn't pass until the second semester of the 11th grade but she stuck with it and graduated on time. so after the tenth grade we said to them look if you want to stay with us you have to double up, agreed to double up for the 11th or 12th year. topolanek everyday, 90 minutes of math. they thought these kids aren't going to double let you can't make them take all that math and of course we couldn't make them take it. our job was to figure out how to teach it so they were willing to take, and so that's what we did. that's what we learned about, and we learned part of what it takes to hold ourselves

responsible for kids leaving high school ready to do college math for college credit, not pass the s.a.t. with the state exam. yes they have to do that too but it doesn't qualify them to be ready for college math or college credit. so we've taken that on as our job, and part of the job is figuring out how to work with the kids, but math to teach and how to teach it. so, we are here with that. we need to be up here. it's our -- it's been 25 years doing that. it's not going to happen overnight. [applause] spec robert moses is the founder

of the algebra project. to find out more, visit algebra .org. >> we went to war after 9/11 on a credit card. we didn't ask anything of the rest of us, no sacrifices whatsoever. we were kind of encouraged to go back and go shopping again. we had an enormous boom in housing which was irrational, so much as it from the beginning. i remember our daughter calling me from san francisco. the offering me 20 year deals with interest only the first 15 years you could see what was going to come after the first 15 years and she said we are going to be more cautious. i worry about my friends and i went to a couple of major construction people left at that time and i said what in the world is going on? they said there's so much

instrumentation of their people will loan anything and fannie mae and freddie mac were driving a lot of that and those were political institutions and they got a very clever, jim johnson and others about getting the idea of home ownership for everyone when plainly not everyone was qualified and was going to be yclept. we are paying a big price on that now. 20 million homes in the country at the moment that either in foreclosure or stress or in danger of going into foreclosure. that means 20 million homes not buying new carpeting. they can't move to the new job. they are stuck with the biggest investment you're going to make in their life. this represents a lot of their net worth so if we get the housing thing figured what it's going to be a harder job to get the economy really rolling back on track in a way that we need to and neither party is talking about it which is kind of

striking to me. >> your book is made up of some very poignant questions and one of them is a question john f. kennedy asked many years ago, and if you -- if john f. kennedy were around today and asked you what to could do what you've done all for your country recently, how would you answer? how would you answer? >> i would say the new york public library. [laughter] [applause] schoomaker what else would you say -- >> honestly i met a stage in my life if there is an oxymoron in american life is a humbling kuran we don't exist so this is in modest of me but i seem to have turned a certain place people will listen to me and i've always cared about the country. the greatest generation right in that book gave me a kind of platform that was completely

unanticipated. i thought i ought not to squander that. i need to step up as not just as a citizen and a journalist with a father and husband and a grandfather and if i see these i love to write about them and try to start this dialogue which i'm trying to do in the book about what we need to get to next. in our family wield we live different things. meredith is here tonight and has a microfinance program going and i have a daughter on habitat here and another daughter who spent a lot of time in haiti living in a tent with rodents all over she was doing counseling and another daughter that worked for the national rescue committee in san francisco because we were raised by parents and grandparents who just saw that as part of the national quality-of-life that you gave back in some fashion. i've done that but i like to

think my larger contribution is to try to engage people in the defense that refine their time. >> if you have passages in the book precisely about the legacy of parents left to you and how careful and cautious they were and thrifty and never spent more than they had. you say like almost everyone else of the age they were thrifty by nature and necessity. they didn't spend with the didn't have and they saved something every week. >> sometimes to a fault. >> meaning they were too thrifty. i would say white and of little bit. you can afford this but was hard for them to do it. it was hard for them to spend the extra bucks. it didn't mean they didn't have a great life. they did everything they wanted

to do and i had the good fortune of having real resources and so i could help them in trips and helping them buy a retirement place, but it never defined our relationship. my dad died about three weeks before and had been announced this was a great thing for our family for me to suddenly have this wonderful job and all this responsibility, and it came with that a very substantial salary and i caught the wave of people getting paid a lot of money for doing this work and they got a lot of publicity, and my father who never earned i think cash income more than $9,000 out of his life. maybe at the end he did better than that. worked for the corps of engineer in the house he called me with a wonderful sense of humor and a sign reading these reports about

my salary. is that true one? i said we've never talked about my salary before and i made good money before that but this had taken me to a different level. just reading about it we went on to something else and "time" magazine did very detailed reporting, my father called he said by reading "time" magazine. [laughter] i said why are we talking about this? i will tell you why we are talking about this. as long as your mother and i have known you you always run short at the end of the year and we need to know how much to set aside at the end of this year. [laughter] the perfect way of dealing with it. i also saw a story in the book i took him shopping in california one time he came up to visit a high and place market and i had

the card going through the supermarket and i thought i would show off my thrifty so we had fresh squeezed orange juice and i said that such as expensive let's get the boxed stuff and he reached down and he picked up expensive bottles of california wine and he said i guess the money you save on range juice's will help pay for these and the kind of put it in perspective for me. >> but he must of been very proud. >> he was proud but he was not an honest about it. you couldn't ask my mother about me without her saying my son bill is running a restaurant and my son like lives around the corner in the marines, and they just didn't play favorites. my father, when i first got to have some kind of a public celebrity someone went to ask him when he was at a gathering he went to our home town and said are you related to tom

brokaw and my dad said i'm not sure. [laughter] >> another aspect of your book i would like us to talk about, which i didn't really know the incredible and importance that you attach what we might call an enlightened form of philanthropy and plays an important role, and by that i mean foundations such as -- one of them i am attached to in this city is the robin hood foundation, and you talk about that as a model the robin hood foundation would do well to expend in many different cities. >> we are 44 genet. i was a big skeptic. these were guys trying to buy

reputation and i have a lot of friends that were involved in it and they invited me to their breakfast which they have every year. they have one coming up before too long and john kennedy, jr. was there at that time and he introduced to young men he had gone to prep school with who were running a school in east harlem and was very moving about what they were doing and how jongh was attached to him and so when that john was lost i thought what can i do? i went up to that school and i said i would like to help out for a while and then the robin hood people came and said to me we could really use you won the award because, you know, we are all hedge fund guys and we make a lot of money but we don't have much of a political year. we don't understand how the rest of the world works. we need somebody to give us a reality check. so i went on the board and i must tell you i was astonished at the lead in the commitment of these very busy people and be,

the discipline that they brought to how they give away their money. they paid all the overhead for robin hood. the head metrics in which they go out to agencies, very professional staff, take the measure of an agency on mothers for abuse, family members and come back and say that once not going to work or it's doing something really important but we need to go in and help the staff, and they pay for everything. all that is done. this is the most generous country in the world. there is no other country in the world that gives money as freely as the united states does for a variety of causes and no city will ever compare new york when it comes to raising money. i do a lot of defense at the waldorf, and for some times for causes almost no one knows about and it's not routine to raise $1.542 million in an