Upstanders

Makayla George went on her first college tour when she was in the eighth grade. She took the requisite entrance tests on time. And in the fall of 2015, when she was a senior in high school, she applied to 13 colleges. She got into all of them. Then she spent weeks agonizing over which one to choose. George, a bubbly, curly-haired sports fanatic, revealed her choice on “Decision Day,” a school-wide assembly in May during which seniors stand up, walk onto a stage, and announce the college they will be attending. Clad in a yellow t-shirt with the words “ACCEPTED” on the front, she told the crowd, “I will be attending Eastern Michigan University.” Applause echoed across the gymnasium. Among her graduating class, her experience was far from unique. Most of her classmates applied to multiple colleges – one of them sent out 20 applications – and most got into their top choice. All told, 90 percent of her class will pursue some form of higher education.

Brian Aft was rolling his wheelchair through a strip-mall parking lot in Dallas with a Styrofoam cup of juice perched on his lap when a pickup truck screeched to a stop in front of him. Out bounded a tall, muscled man with shoulder-length hair. “Hey there!” he shouted. Aft figured he was about to get robbed. It would have been yet another bad turn in his life since stepping on a Taliban bomb buried in an embankment in Afghanistan in 2011 during a tour with the Marines. He had lost both of his legs. In the three years since, he had been wracked with painful pressure ulcers. When the pills dispensed by VA doctors failed to help, he turned to heroin – enough of it, every day, he told friends, “to kill a horse.” He was jobless and disheveled. And he was sleeping with a loaded gun next to his head. But the man in the truck didn’t demand his money.

After a rainstorm washed out attendance at a church event in the Washington, D.C., suburbs last year, Tierney Screen found herself in a room filled with unclaimed paper lunch bags, each containing a sandwich, fruit, chips, and cookies. Had there been a few dozen extra lunches, she could have handed them out to families she knew personally who needed them. But there were 3,600 – far more than she could distribute herself. The thought of having to toss them in the garbage pained her. Then she remembered an enthusiastic student she had met at an event a few months earlier. The young woman had spoken about a website she and some other university students had built through which restaurants and community groups could donate excess food to organizations that feed the hungry. So Screen called the woman, Maria Rose Belding, who explained how to post the lunches on the site. Four hours later, a nearby food pantry claimed them. The bags would be handed out to homeless people in Washington.

As the morning sun illuminated his kitchen, Steve Stone poured himself a cup of coffee and picked up the local newspaper. Reading it gave him a chance to cool off after riding his bike, and the articles usually provided him with a thought or two to incorporate into the sermon he would deliver later that Sunday morning at Heartsong Church, the United Methodist congregation he had started 19 years ago in Cordova, Tennessee, a suburb of Memphis. Stone’s eyes settled on a headline at the bottom of the front page: Muslims buy land for hub in Cordova. The paragraphs underneath said that the Memphis Islamic Center was planning to build a mosque and “a sprawling community center” in his community. That’s interesting, he thought. I didn’t realize there were that many Muslims in Memphis.

As Susan Burton stood in line to board the bus that would take her back to Los Angeles after her sixth stint behind bars, a guard recognized her. “We’ll see you back here soon,” he chided. “We’ll have a bed waiting for you.” A sense of dread settled on Burton. She had spent part of two decades in the custody of the California state prison system. While she wanted to prove that guard wrong, she knew she would be returning to her old neighborhood, where crack cocaine, the root cause of her previous convictions, was still everywhere. “It was almost like walking into a war zone,” she recalls. “I feared I would fail one more time.” Determined to break her pattern, she repeatedly called a residential drug treatment facility in the affluent beachside city of Santa Monica, just 15 miles away but a sharp contrast to the inner-city community that kept sucking her into addiction and crime. An intake officer there, impressed by her persistence, offered her the chance she needed. Once clean, she landed a steady job and, soon thereafter, a house.

When Andrew D’Eri, a silent, withdrawn toddler, was diagnosed with autism, his father, John, was confused. “What is autism?” he asked the family doctor. His befuddlement about his two-and-a-half-year-old boy’s condition soon turned to denial: It can’t be my son, he thought. This isn’t happening. That gave way to the hope for change: He’s going to grow out of this. Or for a cure: We’ll find a miracle. By the time Andrew was a teenager, John had grown to accept that “Andrew is who Andrew is,” but he began to worry about what would happen to his son when he outgrew his school years. Would he ever get a job? Where would he live when John and his wife, Donna, grew too old to care for him? The realization that his son might never be able to lead an independent life gnawed at him.

Four years ago, when Destiny Watford was a high school senior, she learned that the nation’s largest trash incinerator was going to be built less than a mile from her school and the house where she lived with her family. The facility, to be erected on a 90-acre tract in her Baltimore neighborhood of Curtis Bay, had the enthusiastic support of state and local political leaders, who touted it as a job-creating, green-power initiative. Watford, a shy, hard-working student, hadn’t thought much about environmentalism. But a facility that would burn gargantuan piles of garbage so close to her community, even if the politicians promised it would have sophisticated air filters, didn’t seem like a cause for celebration. So she teamed up with a half dozen fellow students at Benjamin Franklin High School to learn as much as possible about the project. “We were confused,” she recalls. “We asked ourselves, ‘What aren’t they telling us?’”

During Susan Rahr’s seven-year stint as sheriff of King County, Washington, she reviewed scores of internal affairs investigations. The ones involving allegations of an excessive use of force attracted her closest scrutiny, and led her to pose her own questions to the deputies involved. “Why did you use fire so quickly?” “Why didn’t you try another way of defusing the situation?” The deputies’ answers often reflected an approach that has long been in vogue with cops called “Ask. Tell. Make.” “You would ask someone to do something. If they didn’t do it, you would tell them. If they didn’t do it, then you would physically make them do it,” Rahr says. “And that doesn’t reflect real life on the street. Most good police officers don’t jump that quickly from the first step to using force.” Then she would ask, “Where did you learn that?”

There were times, a decade ago, when the Road Home, the largest homeless shelter in Salt Lake City, was so full that families trying to bring their children in from the streets for the night would be turned away. “Heartbreaking,” is how Matt Minkevitch, the Road Home’s executive director, remembers it. He had spent nearly three decades helping the less fortunate, and was on the hunt for fresh solutions to the intractable problems he saw. Minkevitch figured he could accommodate the overflow if he could find another place for his longest-term residents – the “chronic homeless.” Although they accounted for just 15 percent of the city’s homeless population, they consumed a disproportionate share of the shelter’s resources. But they were also the hardest to house.

The first time Hassan Foster stole a car, he drove off without any beginner’s luck. As he parked the vehicle on a Newark street, a police officer happened by, noticed his nervousness, and asked to see his driver’s license. A few minutes later, Foster was in handcuffs. Had he stolen the car a week earlier, before his 18th birthday Foster likely would have received a slap on the wrist. But in the eyes of the law, he was a juvenile no longer, so he wound up in the Essex County jail. The two months he spent there meant he missed enough classes that he’d have to repeat his senior year of high school in order to graduate. Though he was a straight-B student and a member of the basketball team, he had no desire to spend the next year with younger kids. So Foster headed down a well-worn path in Newark’s south ward: gang life, street crimes, drug addiction. “And, from there,” he says, “incarceration, incarceration, incarceration.”