"Reflections on Philanthropy and New E.E. Ford
Programs."
MR. LYMAN: Before I begin, if I sound a little
pained, I'm the father of three daughters, and I think my wife
elbowed me in the ribs about 67 times about all the things I have
been doing wrong. So I'm going to do my best to proceed
quickly.
My name is Brad Lyman. I'm the head of school at
Kentucky Country Day School in Louisville, and it's my distinct
pleasure to introduce today Mr. Robert Hallett. As you know,
Bob graduated from Episcopal Academy in 1965. In 1969, he
earned his bachelor's degree at Pittsburgh College in
psychology. He also minored in art, and was class
president. In 1976 he earned his master's degree in
education from the University of Pennsylvania.
From 1971 to 1985, Bob worked at the Friends Central School,
and he was the founding middle school principal, upper school
head, and assistant head of school, taught English, taught fine
arts, religion and for all I know, he drove the bus.
From 1985 to 2002, Bob was the headmaster at St. Paul's
School, and as we know, from 2002 to the present, he is the
executive director of the E.E. Ford Foundation.
Bob is blessed with a wonderful family, his wife, Nancy; son,
Tim; and his daughter, Sarah. Ladies and gentlemen, it's my
pleasure to introduce to you, my friend Bob Hallett.
MR. HALLETT: Thank you. I want to thank
Bruce and Brad and the planning committee for making me the
anchorman of this relay race. It's also fascinating to know
that Flipper is waiting to visit with you in the next half-hour or
so, so I'll do my best to be on time. And I also know that
there's high anxiety -- I guess there's weather happening and
you're all scrambling to change reservations to make sure you get
to your planes.
So bearing that in mind, we'll try to move quickly and
thoughtfully. I also want to seriously thank the committee
for getting me out of Maine in the end of February. This has
been quite a treat, a gift that you have given my wife, Nancy, and
me. We're really pleased to be here.
I want to take 30 seconds for one quick digression. In
the beginning of the conference, we had some memorials, one of
which was for Tom Wood. I had the pleasure, the opportunity, to
work with Tom Wood at Friends Central School, and just wanted you
to know that among the attendees at this conference, there are
four of us who subsequently went on to become heads of
school. They include Chris Dorrance, Lisa Darling, and Anne
Clark, and myself. And, in fact, by my count, eleven people
that Tom hired went on to become heads of school, which is an
incredible legacy. And one other piece -- I know there won't
be time -- but Anne Clark and I were thinking of doing a little
song and dance because were in those faculty musicals, but we'll
spare you that.
The foundation. The Edward E. Ford Foundation, to be
exact. Most of you may know this, but you probably don't,
because you don't go to our website to understand some of the
things, but I'm going to give a quick snapshot. We were
founded in 1957 with $5 million. Edward E. Ford is our sole
benefactor. He graduated from Mercersburg Academy in the
class of 1912. In 1962, he died somewhat suddenly.
Another $20 million poured into the foundation at that
point. We're very grateful that Mercersburg Academy didn't
get it all. They have been wonderful recipients of the
Foundation's funds, but Bill Fowle, who had been the headmaster of
Mercersburg Academy, was the first executive director of the
Foundation, and it was really Bill who got to Edward and said,
"Perhaps we can do something bigger with the resources which you
have at your disposal." So the Edward E. Ford Foundation was
born. It was really under Bill's leadership that the
Foundation established a mission, which we have embraced for 50
years, to get right down to it. We're 50 years old. We are
approaching $80 million in assets. We have given away over
that period of time north of $86 million. And as you all
know, we require that schools match our funds. Matching
funds now eclipse $81 million. We have also given about $4.5
million to associations. And NAIS has been the greatest
benefactor of those funds, receiving just shy of $1 million.
So our reach over the years we think has been important, and it's
in various places within your schools.
The average grant continues to be $50,000. We still give
$100,000 grants and this is not, I think, broadly understood by
schools. You know, our objective is not simply to help you
with the near-term funding requirement when you meet our
match. Our long-term hope for you -- and we can't calculate
the dollars that have been raised as a result of this -- is for
you to have people within your constituency continue to support
your institution. If they get in the habit of giving, if
they enjoy this, "It's kind of cool. We match the E.E. Ford
Foundation's funds. Let's continue."
I don't know what that calculus is, but I daresay it's
considerable, and it's an important thing to contemplate.
Finally, the board is currently composed of 11 members, seven
of whom are members of the family. They are direct
descendants in some fashion of Edward Ford. And I think it's
telling of those members two are adopted. That suggests
there was maybe in the DNA of Mr. Ford or his family a willingness
to extend their reach in a very personal way to consider adopting
people and having children be part of the family.
And I would also add that my predecessors, Walter Burgin and
Phil Havens, are still on the board, and Phil Smith continues to
be on the board. He just stepped down as president. There is
a strong educational presence there, as well, and the family takes
the mission seriously.
I was asked to speak a little bit about my reflections on
philanthropy. They'll be decidedly pointed in the sense of
what I know with the work that I do with the Foundation. I'm
not really equipped except in some parenthetical ways to talk
broadly about philanthropy in this country, which as we know is
changing significantly, happily. But let me say this.
Having been where most of you are today, I am keenly aware of the
challenges you face, namely resource acquisition. It's
endless work for you and your board. Most schools we see are
grossly underfunded, having little endowment backing while
carrying considerable debt that impacts your P&L with serious
implications for cash flow to manage debt service. There's
little uniformity -- and this is one of the things that I didn't
understand completely until I started to do this work -- among you
regarding the following ideas: Fiscal policy; Spending
policy as it relates to endowment; Tuition remission for faculty;
Need-based financial aid; Merit aid; Salary benefits;
Discounting. Funding depreciation, and a host of other
financial considerations I won't go into.
Suffice it to say that during my six years of making
recommendations to our board, the fund has been and remains
illuminating. It's hard to find money. It's hard to
grow money, and it's surprisingly hard to give it away. Many
of you come up to me and say, "You've got the best job in the
world. When are you retiring?"
Well, I guess they can get in line. It is hard to give
it away. We have to make some pretty fine judgments
sometimes, and so there are days when, as easy as it looks and as
much fun as it is, we really work very hard at what we do. I
liken my work to that of being an investment banker. At the
meetings with management, a hard look at cash flow and debt, audit
reviews, an in-depth understanding of your mission, in many cases
a site visit, and a thorough review of your proposals, we have to
decide, do we want you in our portfolio? Will you bring
shareholders a good return on investment? And the ultimate
request relates to stewardship. Will you be good
stewards? These questions are not unique to the E.E. Ford
Foundation, although we are told we are one of the few foundations
that makes site visits to schools.
We have been and we continue to be venture capitalists,
although I daresay back in 1957, venture capitalism was not a
notion that was broadly understood or in the public eye as it is
today. So at a time when money is tight and demand for
the validation you say the Foundation brings to your
efforts, I find making recommendations to my board again to be
difficult. Sadly, not all of you are good bets. Indeed
some of you are very risky, but we are also not risk-averse.
You are in competition with one another when it comes to making it
to one of our agendas, and I'm not sure you always understand
that.
But on average, there are going to be 30 requests per meeting,
meetings occur three times a year, and the success rate lately has
been between 65 and 75 percent. Pretty high, actually.
But in a typical meeting now, we will have $1.6 million in asks,
and we will give away $1,100,000, which is our current spending
policy. We're required by law, as you probably know, to give
away 5 percent, which means we've got to make more than 5 percent
in the marketplace. And sometimes some of you wonder, well,
why don't you give as heavily to endowment? Frankly, we think we
can do better than some of you. Some of you can do better than us,
but the vast majority of you do not.
I don't know if we make this very clear, but let me tell you,
we place a very, very high premium on the involvement of the head
of school in the process. I fully understand, God knows, you
are overbooked and understaffed. That said, we believe and I
believe the school's principal leadership has to be fully
engaged. Therefore we look to heads to ensure that if the
funds are going to be wisely spent and deployed -- and this is a
little editorial, but it is a function of what happens within our
office more often than I care to say to you -- you should have
double files in your offices, which is to say, your office ought
to have a file on E. E. Ford, your development office ought to
have one on E. E. Ford. I have replaced files in schools, you
know, about seven of which occurred in the last year.
Schools lost us. Not good.
You also would be amazed to learn that some schools have
misplaced E.E. Ford endowments, some schools have cannibalized
them. That might make it really hard to talk to me. I
mean, I'll be kind, I hope, but I'm going to be pretty direct
about what one has to do to correct those errors in judgment that
happened along the way.
And this is one thing that is a particular, I suppose, pet
peeve. The worst thing you can do is to turn over this
process to "the Foundation person," generally, in my experience,
the neophyte who has no clue who we are. More to the point
-- and I believe this -- they do not understand your school,
either. Frequently heads come to my office with material
that's not accurate, and I daresay you would not accept from your
students some of what we see.
I would ask you this parenthetically. If you would think
about this -- I don't want a response -- what's the rate of
turnover in your development offices? I suspect it's pretty
high. And there's certainly turnover among you as heads, which
complicates things further. So naturally, we're predisposed
to have heads talking to us and really, as I said before, being
engaged.
I'm going to share with you a couple of things about recent
support because we get this question all the time. What are
we supporting now? First of all, the web site is very clear.
If you want to hop on it, you'll discover very quickly what we
have supported within the last year: The school's name and
the grant's name, and there's a quick snapshot of what the project
was. But between 2002 and 2005, 15 percent of our money went
to fund professional development; 17 percent for curriculum
development; 14 percent for financial aid and endowment.
Special projects were 12 percent, faculty benefits and salaries,
10 percent; technology, 9 percent; diversity, 6 percent;
construction, 5 percent; global initiatives, 5 percent; science
renovations in labs, 3 percent; character education, 2
percent.
One thing that's interesting to me in this data -- and I won't
give you all the money that we put against all of these except in
one category. Financial aid endowment, we gave schools $1,110,000.
Schools match that to the tune of $4,410,000, arguably the largest
matching number, not surprisingly. You are coming to us
seeking as much money as you can get, and within that bucket
there's one school that we gave $100,000 towards financial aid,
the only school that's ever done that. They matched us 15 to
one and raised $1.5 million in one year. And this is a
restricted endowment for Latino kids. And if you want to
know who it is, it's Noble and Greenough, an extraordinarily
powerful school with lots of muscle, and actually our $100,000
went to support someone in the admissions office who then was
working on identifying those kids and those families and really
doing the best that they could at least to ensure their success
within the community, and I understand it's working pretty
well.
Not in this list, but I do want to share with this group, we
have also given money twice now to the National Coalition of Girls
Schools. They have embarked on some new research. We
like to see some research. I personally am predisposed to
see what research tells us and I hope, you know, heads of schools
act upon that.
I assure you we're not one-dimensional in our funding.
Later on, I can also share with you some other projects that I
think are pretty interesting and generative. But I do want
to get to the business of talking to you about our newest and for
us most daring initiative.
The management foundation has been around for 50 years.
We believe we've done good work. We hope to continue to do
good work. But there's a tension within the board about, we
ask you to come to us with your greatest need, and yet we also are
feeling maybe we've got some other responsibilities to do
something with our resources. And that doing something extra
sounds like leading. Should we be leading some conversations
in education, as opposed to simply reacting to what you knock on
our door with? And I think at this point in the life cycle
of the Foundation, we decided, yeah, let's tee that one up, and so
let me say this. The general categories are a snapshot of
history, but it does not predict the future.
Last June, as some of you know, I hope you read -- if you
didn't, it's okay -- I sent a letter to 800 schools announcing our
new initiative, the Edward E. Ford leadership grants.
Increasingly we recognize that $50,000 frankly is not a lot of
money for you to raise, particularly with day school tuitions in
some areas north of $30,000 and certainly boarding school tuition
approaching $50,000. So we reasoned that for some schools
there was less incentive to ask for our funds.
As I said to you earlier, we talked about leading
conversation. It's fair to say that our board, while wedded
to meeting needs of schools, was equally despairing, however, of
the repetitive nature of many requests. And yet we can't in
good conscience abandon our primary mission, which is to meet the
needs of schools. We had a dilemma.
We concluded that if we were unhappy, we had the means to do
something that was more daring and transformative. Thus the
leadership grants idea was formed and it's presently gestating,
with birth expected of June of 2008. Thus the topic of this
conference is timely, because we too are in a period of transition
with the distribution of our resources. This is venture
capitalism on a much greater scale than we've anticipated or ever
done in the past.
How does it work? We've decided to take one meeting per
year where we will award in the neighborhood of $1,250,000 to a
selected, and I underlined selected, number of schools.
Grants will be in the realm of $250,000 per school, and in time,
we hope to open those requests to consider grants up to half a
million. As is policy, these grants are going to have to be
matched one to one, but we've amended our policy regarding the
matching period, allowing schools to take more than one year to
make the match. Some of you are going to have trouble
raising a quarter of a million in cash, or whatever the number is,
over a period of one year. And in our process and thinking
about how to launch this boat, we borrowed a chapter from some
other foundations, one of which some of you have already, I know,
received some funds and that would be the Malone Family
Foundation.
As you know, it's a highly restricted process. You are
invited to participate for the big grants, which, I think, are $2
million, and it's restricted for endowment or financial aid.
Pretty neat stuff.
But anyway, in this first round -- and this is the other piece
of the puzzle, as we think about leadership -- we asked the
schools -- and there were 20 schools that we invited to answer or
think about this question. And each year it's our intention
to develop a different question. That's going to be
challenging for us, and we're working on already next year's
question. But this is what we asked the first 20 school
heads to consider. The current world climate is increasingly
challenging and changing rapidly. We know you hope your
students today will become contributing members and perhaps
leaders within their communities in the larger world
tomorrow. We also know that no one can fully anticipate what
will be required of them. Nonetheless, what specific frames of
mind and skills seem essential for them to have? What might
your school do differently to help them be better prepared?
How might we help?
So that went off to selected schools and a committee of the
board winnowed that list down to six that will be competing for
funds this June. And a new requirement will be for the head
of school -- this is the first time this has ever happened -- to
meet with the board of the Foundation and to present the proposal
in more detail. A site visit by me, as part of the process,
along with a proposal that may be up to five pages in
length. And I think this is important. Pat Bassett has
agreed to showcase the successful requests along with our process
at next year's NAIS conference in Chicago.
It should be transparent why we would want to do that.
It's pretty much a requirement of the schools; all the schools
have had to think this way. What are you doing to extend the
reach? How might your proposal go beyond your own
borders? Can you partner with somebody besides your own
school? It could be another independent school, could be a
public school, it could be a university, it could be a community
college. It could be a boys' and girls' club. It could
be anything. We're not predisposed to tell you where to go
with it. But we want to try to get a little muscle out of
the money, and that's a place we're going to do that. I hope
that Pat will allow us to do this on an annual basis. And as
I said to you earlier, each year it's our intent to ask a
different question.
Now, there are too many of you, too many schools, to simply
put out a request for proposals. Some of you may not know this,
but our office is pretty lean. It's me, my assistant, and
her dog. That's it. And I couldn't handle it, candidly. So
with that in mind, for the near future, schools will continue to
be invited to participate. And I think this next round we
will invite fewer schools, probably between 10 and 12, since
frankly, saying "No" to 14 of you was not a lot of fun. You
were all good, but it was really hard.
We're also thinking of changing the calendar around and moving
it to April for reasons I won't go into right now. But it
does make a lot of sense to me as we think this through.
How does one secure an invitation? And this is how we
think about this. And as you appreciate, I hope, we are in
transition. We are thinking. We're planning. The
head of school must be in place for at least a three-year period,
and must agree, all things being equal -- we can figure it out --
to stay for at least one year after receipt of the grant.
The school must be seen -- and this is terribly important; I can't
emphasize this enough -- as having been good stewards of past
resources from the Foundation. And that comes down to timely
reports, continuing reports, communication. If we have to
remind a school for a report, that's not a good thing. And
you know, it's got to be done.
And stewardship is beyond the reporting session. If you
have an endowment, if your endowment has gone nowhere and you have
had it for 20 years, I think we'd scratch our head, wondering, how
could that happen? Frequently I'll see a gift that was
given, let's say, in 1985 of $25,000 to a school. We ask for
the current market value. It's still $25,000. Not a
very good rate of return. In fact, I would argue a loss,
given inflationary pressure. But we see that.
And then, to the extent to which we can measure it, the school
must have demonstrated generative thinking with past proposals or
significantly new programming at the school that either I have
discerned or some of you have called me up and said, "This is what
we're doing."
I should add that of the six schools that will be at the
meeting -- and this is very timely for this group -- two will be
all girls' schools. It would be also interesting to know -- I
can't share the schools that we invited. It was a really
broad reach: Day schools, boarding schools, middle of the
country to the coast. A couple of schools would not be on
your list as schools that you might think of as ones that we might
first invite. I just pass that on to you.
Much of our thinking was generated by convictions that are
held by my predecessors, and me that there is vast imagination
waiting to be tapped within our schools. We believe our
schools are resources for others and, as such, we have a
responsibility to share those with everyone involved in the
enterprise of education. Remember, we educate but one
percent of the school age population, yet we are perceived as
exclusive, overfunded, and cloistered. And among you, our
independence is our greatest strength and from my perspective,
having done this work for six years, it is our greatest
weakness.
You're all in silos, we're in silos. If you're in the
same city, sometimes, you know, you might consider pooling
resources, sharing resources. We don't do it. But
that's a whole other conversation.
I think we have a profound opportunity to have an impact
that's greater than the population we serve. That's why we
insist on reputable projects for this new venture, and giving
voice to these ideas requires cash, and we can provide that. Most
schools heads wax eloquent to me about their faculty; their genius
and their love of learning. We aim to provide the resources
necessary to unleash this energy and imagination of which you
speak. Imagine what could you do with a net half a million dollars
that was aimed solely at program generation?
These are exciting times in the Foundation. We have
partnered with 649 schools over the last 50 years, in many cases
multiple times. We've seen our funds touch many lives and programs
and obviously, we plan to continue that ambitious practice with
you and your peers in the future.
I'm going to go to lunch, where I'll answer questions.
Obviously, I have got lots more to say. It's great work, and
I should say one other thing, because this is just
mechanics. Because of this change in our calendar, instead
of seeing 90 schools a year, we're really down to about 65.
Therefore, if you want to be on "a regular agenda," you need to
pick up the phone, because we're booked, obviously, for April,
we're booked for November, and we are already taking bookings for
June of 2009. Things are going to start getting a little
tighter in that regard. Thank you.
MR. LYMAN: Bob, thank you so much for the great
work you do on behalf of independent schools and on behalf of the
entire NAPSG organization. Thanks to the Edward E. Ford Foundation
for what you have been able to do to help children of independent
schools. Thank you very much.
MR. GALBRAITH: Lunch is right next door, and all
the trips will leave from the front desk area, as in the
program.
Tuesday, February 26, 2008.
Question-and-answer with Robert Hallett.
MR. GALBRAITH: Bob Hallett is happy to answer
some questions, and I have asked him to repeat the question just
so that you can all hear it, because we don't have a mike for you
to speak into. But if you have a question, Bob will be happy
to respond.
MS. RAE: I gather the new philosophy is that you
won't do the smaller grants?
MR. HALLETT: No, smaller grants will still occupy
60 percent of what we do. We're certainly not going to
abandon our historic mission at all. You can count on
that.
Another thing I didn't tell you is that it's also possible you
could be in line for just a regular grant, $50,000, $100,000, and
still be considered for a larger grant. In fact, there is
one school that's on the April meeting for a regular "grant" and
they're also in the bucket for a larger grant. Should they
win the quinella, you know, they'll be the envy of everybody, I'm
sure. But that's how we think about it.
MS. GOODMAN: On the risk-taking front, has the
Foundation ever thought about providing services for people
wanting to start new schools? I have called NAIS two or
three times in the last period of time, and there's always a deep
silence at the other end of the phone, and then they say, "Well,
Mrs. Goodman, we have a member services department."
I say, Well, yes, and it works very well, but I'm not talking
about member services, because then you have got to be, in NAIS
terms, well-established, to be able to pay NAIS fees and
presumably go to the conferences and everything. I mean
brand-new schools.
MR. HALLETT: The answer is no. And the
rationale for that is, we don't have enough funds. We limit our
funds to nine through twelve. The demand far eclipses what
we can do. And this will give you a little snapshot of some
of the things with which I have to deal. A new school that
might come to us -- and there have been several in recent years --
with debt approaching $30 million to $40 million, debt service $2
million to $3 million a year they have got to generate in cash,
and they're talking to us, hoping that we'll give them some money
to underwrite their debt, or something on that order; and frankly,
we're very skittish of even supporting those schools that have
launched their boat, have the building up, but are really, from
our point of view, a huge risk.
When I say we're not risk-averse, I can think of a school in
Chicago. The population was 89 percent minority, a school
for the arts. Probably close to 80 percent of the kids in
the school were on some kind of financial aid. They had a
decent balance sheet, no endowment, an annual fund of maybe
$300,000 a year, and wanted some money for need-based financial
aid. And I thought they had a terrific mission on
paper. If you just looked at the finances, you would
probably say this is not a good bet. I urged the board to
fund it, they did, the match has been made, the school head wrote
me recently just thrilled, and guess what, it's garnered more
money for the school. That's a point where in my judgment
and in the judgment of the board, this was a risk worth
taking.
MS. GOODMAN: The reason I asked is really in
terms of the bigger picture, because it seems to me that the world
could use any number of new nongovernmental schools, be they
independent, parochial, Catholic, proprietary, Christian,
whatever. You name it. Because it doesn't seem to me,
and I think probably to most people in this room, that the public
schools are working.
MR. HALLETT: I wouldn't argue with you on
that.
SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: What is the process by
which you determine topics?
MR. HALLETT: We don't determine the topics.
You do. Oh, excuse me. The big grants? Oh.
Probably several bottles of wine. I mean, that's a little
tongue in cheek and flip, and I don't mean to be flip, but we will
sit around a table and put a lot of things on it, and really come
to what I hope is a consensus about what the next piece is going
to be. We started with globalism, so to speak, because it's
on everybody's lips. People are thinking about it, they're
raising money, we're seeing new programs all the time for it, so
we wanted to just push that with a little more depth and see what
we might be able to mine out of it. As I say, the hard part
is, we had 20 great proposals, and winnowing that list down was
brutal, no fun. So we're going to reduce our pay going
forward.
SPEAKER FROM THE FLOOR: Would you say a little
more about your philosophy about funding endowments, if you have a
program that you would like to fund through the endowment, a
specific program?
MR. HALLETT: This is a question about funding
endowment and what our philosophy is on that. We will fund
endowment. We have a threshold that if you have $20,000 or
less per student in endowment, we're more likely to let you, in
effect, create the endowment, rather than having us give direct
money to it. The way we do that is this. You ask me for
$50,000. I'm going to say to you for an endowment match we'd
like to see you do at least two-to-one, because the buying power
of $50,000 isn't a whole lot in the marketplace, particularly the
income off of it. Therefore the more you can make that
endowment, three-to-one, four-to-one, whatever the number is, that
has real power. And I can think of several grants we've
given recently where the school has raised a quarter of a million,
$200,000 against our 50, or in the case of that extraordinary
$100,000, to get $1.5 million. There are several schools
that have done ten-to-one, several for faculty compensation.
Sidwell Friends would be one that comes to mind immediately.
Another one, I can't think of the name, but it's in Rhode
Island. Another ten-to-one for faculty compensation.
But that's why you have a conversation with me, so I can guide
you and help you think about how do we get from here to there, and
how to use our money to the greatest possible advantage to achieve
your goal. I try to be helpful. Look, I want you to be
successful. Seriously. It's much easier saying you did
a great job.
MS. GOODMAN: Continuing on with new school, first
I should say that my own school, the school I founded, the
Washington International School, has the greatest respect for the
Edward Ford Foundation. We had to wait many years in order
to get help for the secondary school because we started with the
babies. It took a long time, but we did, and we're very
grateful.
But on the new school fund, when I talked to NAIS this last
time, last week, the gal at the other end of the line said, "Oh,
we had a very interesting lady from South Africa talk to NAIS
staff recently and she talked about all the services that South
Africa gives for new schools, new nongovernmental schools."
Now, I'm not sure whether this is the Independent School
Association of South Africa or what it is. But I just
wondered whether you happened, in your enormous knowledge of
schools and traveling around, to hear about any North
American-based such service. Charters, of course, but then
the whole political complications of the public system come with
it.
MR. HALLETT: It's kind of you to say I have an
enormous base of knowledge. It's just not true. I
really haven't. I think certainly governmental agencies are
going to be limited in what their support might be for
schools. And as you pointed out, charter schools are coming
along, although the failure rate among charter schools is
extraordinarily high at the present time. I hope that gets
better because we need them to keep us on our toes, among other
things.
But no, the only other sort of venture cap people we know
about are the Bill Gates's of the world, you know. And if we
can get people like that -- well, Oprah. Look what she's
done. And there are people I think that are predisposed to
think that way, but encouraging them, guiding them, helping them,
you know, that's beyond us.
I would be happy to talk to you more, but I'm going to try to
catch a plane.