Restoration

How might the generational poor among us leave their cycle of poverty permanently?  

Restoration is defined as the act or process of bringing something back to its original good condition. When restoration is applied to someone rather than something, that original good condition is a person’s inherent dignity and worth. The traumatic effects of growing up, living and trying to raise a family while in poverty, often robs an entire family of their dignity and self-worth. How do you go about restoring that?  

In 1993 I finished graduate school and went to work for the Turnaround Practice of Arthur Andersen. Turnarounds are a specialized form of management consulting, different from all other kinds of consulting in three critical respects:  client type, consultant role and outcomes. The clients are always in crisis or need dramatic transformation. The roles we played were interim management - CEO, Chief Restructuring Officer (CRO), COO and CFO, wherein we were given the authority and accountability for decisive action. Finally, the outcomes of these turnaround assignments were binary:  dramatic transformation and restoration OR corporate death. Successful turnarounds help restore companies to the good condition they once enjoyed.  

I began applying these turnaround skills to entire city school systems when I joined Alvarez & Marsal’s turnaround practice in 2002. I led or co-led dramatic transformation and recovery efforts in St Louis, New Orleans, New York City, Washington, DC and Detroit. Turning around systems like school districts helped restore these public entities to their original good purpose of educating a city’s next generation.

I then applied these turnaround skills to individual schools, launching my own national non-profit school turnaround organization, Matchbook Learning, in 2011. We turned around schools in Detroit, Newark and now Indianapolis. When you turn around a school, massive numbers of children’s lives are restored with the inherent dignity and worth that emanates from their realized potential.

Our society needs both kinds of restoration. Restoring a form of education in schools that enables a future workforce to be trained while in school for jobs that do not require them to dive further into poverty via college debt. Restoring a form of capitalism that enables jobs and specifically people in those jobs to flourish as they were designed to do. 

So imagine you had experience transforming individual lives - both from an education standpoint (turning around school systems and schools) and an employment standpoint (turning around companies). What would it be like to bring these two learning curves together so that people in poverty could leave the cycle of poverty permanently through a great education, great workforce development training into a great job with a flourishing company? This is the thesis behind my new venture, POLK Capital.