Hero. George C. Marshall

I was interviewed today and one question was "who do I admire most and why".

I have studied history since high school and majored in it in college. I spent three years in Army Intelligence, which is where you learn to use best-available information to make decisions that affect thousands of lives. I’ve applied this to my own efforts.

Thus, I have many people who I admire, rather than one or two. In the T/MC web library are many organizations that I admire for the work they do.

However, if I had to pick one person it would be George C. Marshall who lead the US military in World War II. At this link you can read about how he had to “ fight a global war which had two fronts: one in Europe, the other in the Pacific” . He realized that to win he had to “make sure the military had the materials and manpower they needed. Material had to be manufactured and people had to be trained, which took time. Organization of supply distribution needed to be accurate and efficient".

He did all of this without the aid of laptop computers, cell phones and social media. Wow! He must have been one heck of a visual and spatial thinker.

I see tutoring/mentoring as a way to engage more people who don’t live in poverty in the war on poverty, which we’re fighting in many places. In this blog article I compare this to a military campaign and show that without supporting the “troops in the field” the way Marshall did in WWII, we can’t win.

My goal is to recruit others who have greater talent, more civic reach, and greater energy who will collectively take on the role of George C. Marshall in our efforts to win the war on poverty by helping kids who are born or living in poverty have support systems that help them get the education and jobs that enable them to live their adult lives and raise their own children beyond the reaches and influences of high poverty neighborhoods.

We need to build an organization to support this effort, and to sustain it in future years when new leaders need to step forward to take the place of myself and others who have started this movement. This article on Tipping Points illustrates some of the things that I think need to happen.