Social Justice and the Power of Compassion by Bouvard Marguerite Guzman;

Author:Bouvard, Marguerite Guzman;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield Publishers

EIGHT

Jodi Rosenbaum and More Than Words

Jodi Rosenbaum’s impressive skills and background and business acumen more than prepared her for starting a wonderful social enterprise. Before creating the organization More Than Words (MTW), she had worked in child welfare and juvenile justice, and had a lot of experience working with young people who were removed from their homes because of abuse and neglect and placed in the foster care system. She also worked with young people in juvenile courts on delinquency charges. She was deeply moved by seeing how our young people didn’t receive the support, the attention or opportunity they needed, and, consequently, often didn’t have good outcomes in their lives. She was also a teacher with Teach for America for three years, a nonprofit organization that recruits people to serve in schools with few resources, and witnessed that the institutions working with children were not helping them. She taught in Houston for two years. Jodi felt that was an even more humbling and challenging experience than starting More Than Words. Her third year teaching in the Teach for America program was spent in Georgia.1 In child welfare she worked with shelter and advocacy centers for abused children, and with child advocate attorneys who represent young people in the state system.

One day a friend of Jodi’s found a pile of abandoned books on the side of the road. She took them home with her, looked them up on the Internet, and discovered that they were worth some money. Jodi and her friend were excited. Jodi saw it as an opportunity to have young people work with books and technology, think critically about how to sell them, appraise them and then raise revenue. It could become a special learning experience that would help them. Jodi had heard about how social enterprise could use business to create a social mission so she started doing a lot of research on the used book industry. After a year, Jodi founded a nonprofit to test her vision.

Jodi quit her job, rented a 150-square-foot office in Waltham, Massachusetts, and began working with a few teenagers who were living in a group home in the foster care system, and taught them how to focus on the Internet. As there are few foster homes for adolescents, they live in group homes providing care and supervision to between eight and twelve young people. In 2004, she began selling books on the Internet with a few youngsters from a group home and who never liked books, worked with books, or had any experience with technology. Nor did they like to be held accountable for showing up on time and acting professionally. However when the books started to sell, they became intrigued and felt empowered because it was they who were selling and shipping the books, and responsible for the money that was coming in.2 That was the beginning of what has become a model throughout the country.

Jodi will never forget the first book they mailed overseas. A young man, Charles, was packaging it and sending it to South Africa.

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