Composing a Further Life

had been institutionalized in the state mental hospital after mental breakdowns. “I asked the question, why were these young people so unempowered when their lives were strong and young? They didn’t have any apparent disabilities, but they didn’t feel they had any worth.” On the advice of a psychologist working with the halfway house, she began studying for a counseling degree at San Francisco State. “It was an awakening, not at all part of the intellectual tradition I had had,” Glady recalled. “I was surprised that even though the people with whom I did some practice counseling were of a different milieu, different cultures and ethnicities, I could find a way to empathize with them, and I became really deeply curious and interested in finding the real reason for the acting out and the disempowering of young people. Just a human dilemma.
    “When I graduated, I thought of going on to Berkeley and starting a Ph.D. program there. But a couple of my own kids were teenagers by then, and I just decided to start this agency, called Enterprise for High School Students, that still exists. The seed idea was that their feeling of not being seen to be independent, not knowing who they were, separate from their teachers and their parents and their milieu, would be addressed by creating a kind of after-school matching service for sixteen- to nineteen-year-olds. I would train some mothers or people like myself in minimum counseling skills to listen to them and then kind of assess their skills and match them with summer or after-school jobs or constructive trips abroad.
    “I’d never even kept a file. It was completely, you know, disorganized and pretty messy, but that disciplined me. I think life has its way of teaching you things you have avoided when you need to address them, especially if you have something in your mind that you want to do. What was brewing was a nonprofit, which was in my living room. We would go to the schools and say [to the students], ‘Summer is coming, would you like a job?’ Well, we went to one school, and about four hundred kids signed up that they wanted jobs. We were somewhat artful, I think, in realizing that if we asked ‘What did you do last year?’ on the questionnaire they filled out, we could harvest some of that. The ingenuity of some kids was amazing. They had found jobs working with the Coast Guard and with the Foreign Service as well as mowing lawns or babysitting, working for young parents with children or householders who needed somebody to come and fix this or that, or being a dog walker, or party help, and they wrote these up as responsible jobs with needed skills.
    “My notion was that this was just an experiment: if we gathered the kids who had the motivation to want to do something, to express themselves that way and learn what jobs are like as they go through school, then there would be an equal number or more of people who would like to use a young person. I found to my great pleasure that the people who hired these kids wanted to help school them. There is this bonding when we invest in the promise of youth, and that moved us all. So anyway, it began to grow and grow in the house, and the living room was full of desks and telephones and a copier on the piano. Jim would go up the back stairs, and the kids would come home and say, ‘Oh, Enterprise!’
    “So then I had to raise money, and that’s what started me on my begging career, which has been my kind of métier in the nonprofit world.” Glady did not mention it, but one of the things that makes it possible to raise funds is recognizing that, just as some employers welcome the opportunity to help young people, some donors are grateful for the opportunity and the vision that give them a way to help.
    “So that was one episode, but it was such a teaching episode. I didn’t have any idea really that this was going to be a life path or that it would combine anything that I had left behind as an artist. I was so busy bringing up the children and investing in this that I just went on and got a federal grant to take the model into three high schools funded by the Industry Education Council, and that really brought me into the public schools, which were in turmoil.”
    The public schools in San Francisco were being overwhelmed at that time by the migration of impoverished African Americans from the Southeast and were failing badly. Glady realized that she wanted to move on from Enterprise, so she found funding