Innovation for Social Change

Chapter 1A Story of Transformative Innovation

The investigative television show 60 Minutes began with its trademark rapid ticking of a stopwatch.¹ That evening's segment opened with a camera panning over the industrial skyline of Newark, New Jersey. A narrator described the city in 1967 as a time “when all hell broke loose”—high unemployment, police brutality, race riots, and white flight utterly changed the city. As the camera panned over city blocks, it paused on a high school campus, a 100‐year‐old prep school for boys. The narrator said that like so many others who abandoned the troubled city, even the Benedictine monks who taught here had lost faith in Newark, and they closed the school.

But a handful of dedicated monks decided to stay. Fast‐forward from 1967 to 2018. The show views a morning convocation in a school gymnasium filled with teenage boys dressed in school uniforms. Nearly all the diverse student body comes from low‐income neighborhoods. The gymnasium reverberates with energy as the students begin their day, shouting chants of positive affirmation and songs about facing daily challenges and conquering, their arms around each other, swaying to the music. When a senior student stands up with a raised hand, a hush falls over them. Five hundred high‐energy boys become respectfully quiet and stand at attention. That's the signal for the elected student team leaders to begin their orderly roll calls. As it turns out, students are required to run much of the school. ...