The Work of Hope
Sowing the Seeds of Grace in a Crumbling Town

C H A I N S A W ! ! ! Brrrrrip!!!” Ed Grove wrote, Tom-Wolfe style,
in an e-mail to his son. “Are you nuts? For graduation? Sheese! What will be your next project?” The parents of Matt Grove, CGS’03, had good reason to worry when their son asked them to bring along a chainsaw when they came down from Utica, NY, to see him graduate last May. Grove had been arrested not long before in a protest of the war in Iraq. At the end of senior year in high school, he deferred admission to Penn after arranging with the bishop of Zimbabwe to work for a year in an African hospital that was 30 miles from the nearest paved road. He changed IVs, dispensed meds, bandaged wounds, pulled teeth, and removed stitches and casts. He used a manual put out by the World Health Organization to figure out the settings for the x-ray machine. “He did everything but major surgery,” according to his mom, Carole, who remembers vividly the worry of sending off her 18 year-old boy to a country 8,000 miles from home and under siege by a fierce plague of AIDs. “The chainsaw incident is minor—really minor!—in comparison. I gave up any attempt at judgment or control or anything else since Zimbabwe.”

On the morning after graduation, Ed and Carole drove across the Ben Franklin Bridge to a fixed-up row house in a rundown, boarded-up North Camden neighborhood where Grove had a job. He and his dad took the chainsaw from the trunk and—Brrrrrip!!—cut two stumps from the dirt in front of a three-story, brick home to make way for a flowerbed. Then they pulled out a masonry drill, bored holes in the brickwork near the front door, and bolted to the wall a honey-colored wooden plaque onto which Grove’s fiancée had burned the word Hopeworks. (Grove and Annie Wadsworth, C’03, were married in September. They met in the office of President Rodin, CW’66, during a nine-day sit-in by the activist group Students Against Sweatshops.)

Hopeworks (http://www. hopeworks.org/) is a faith-based, technology-training project aimed at “empowering” at-risk youth in Camden. It encourages young people to stay in school and out of trouble by providing computer-skills training and work experience in small-scale business ventures. The smell of baking bread often fills the computer-crammed house. The warm aroma helps feed the hunger of young trainees for a stable and caring home, and the bread satisfies another more gnawing need.

“ To live in Camden is very difficult,” observes Fr. Jeff Putthoff, Hopeworks’ director and a Jesuit priest who resides in nearby Holy Name parish. “There are just lots of situations that people live in that are full of pain. A lot of it is just poverty. It’s a lack of resources—a lack of medical care and education. It’s a lack of parents who have jobs or housing that’s sure, instead of temporary.” A loose t-shirt and baggy pants hang shapelessly over Grove’s stringy frame. Camden drug dealers often mistake him for a suburban junkie wandering the neighborhood in search of a fix.

“ At ages 13 or 14,” he explains, “[Camden] young people’s lives start to unravel, and they drop out of school. . . . We use technology to engage the youth and get them excited—helping them to see that there’s a future they can take hold of.” As they progress through the Hopeworks program, successful trainees start to lose the hard edge of the street and become more confident of their ability to learn, which helps them discover more options. One high school dropout went on to college to study computers and ended up majoring in music.

Grove learned about Hopeworks as an intern working next door at the North Camden Land Trust, part of the requirement for his urban studies major. Hopeworks had developed an online Web design curriculum that was good enough to earn course credits for trainees at a local community college. Fr. Putthoff had been looking around for new areas of technology that Hopeworks could grow into and thought Geographic Information Systems (GIS) held promise for skill building and business opportunities that might yield more jobs. GIS is software for visualizing information, particularly data related to location.

“ The only problem,” Fr. Putthoff mused to a companion during one of many brown-bag lunches they had come to share with Grove, “is who could lead such a project?”

Turning to Grove, who was a junior and had some experience with GIS at Penn’s Cartographic Modeling Lab, the priest asked, “Do you think it’s a good idea?
Do you know anyone who’s graduated that could start this out?” Grove responded, “My only question is, How am I going to tell my parents that I’m dropping out of college to do this?”

Grove turned out not to be another Camden casualty; he simply put off graduation for a year. He transferred to the College of General Studies and became a part-time student, stretching senior year over two years in order to work full time at Hopeworks.

Starting from scratch, he wrote training lessons one day at a time. Eventually, he augmented Hopeworks’ budding GIS curriculum by tapping into the University of Montana’s online classes—at discounted tuition rates. Jack Dangermond, president of ESRI, a leading producer of GIS programs, became so enamored of Hopeworks’ mission and Grove’s moxie that he donated the company’s expensive software. Last summer, ESRI brought Grove and his trainees to its international conference in San Diego to give a presentation on the 33,000-parcel GIS map of Camden—the city’s first and only digital map—that they had pulled together from old tax documents.

“ We trained the youth and created it in about five months,” Grove says. “At first, people didn’t think we were the real deal. . . . We made [the Camden GIS map] to establish our legitimacy, in the hope that it would get people interested in taking advantage of our services.” Hopeworks now fields nearly a half-dozen word-of-mouth referrals a week, from small nonprofits to big city governments. Some projects require months of work, while youths go into neighborhoods with hand-held computers to collect information. Smaller jobs need only downloading and crunching of existing data. Clients include the Camden Housing Authority, Camden County Improvement Authority, New Jersey Tree Foundation, Rutgers University, and other community groups looking for affordable GIS services. “If anyone wants to do any kind of parcel-level analysis in Camden,” Grove brags, “they have to come to Hopeworks.”

Around Thanksgiving, Grove left Camden and returned to Utica to take over the family business, the Bagel Grove, where he had worked growing up. “Hopeworks has engaged a lot of his idealism,” Fr. Putthoff says, “and it might have roughed up some of that idealism too.” In the bagel shop, Grove and his wife plan to incorporate some social-awareness events and perhaps experiment with employee ownership, but they also are determined to keep the business in the black. It’s all a matter of pushing reality as far as you can—until it pushes back.

Camden’s “youth crisis,” he learned, is too big for one person—or one organization. Sometimes, in the precarious lives of the youths he has worked with, illness, crime, job loss, and any number of misfortunes can force someone to drop out of school and find any McJob that will keep the family afloat. “That’s an example of the reality overwhelming all the good you can do,” he says. “I’m not going to be the savior of all these people. Hopeworks isn’t going
to be the savior.”

Back in Camden, the weeds that once caught trash in front of Hopeworks are gone, and there are flowers blooming in the bed Grove and his parents helped prepare with their chainsaw. A sweet gum grows there too, a seedling from Elvis Presley’s Graceland mansion, which one of the trainees won at a GIS conference in Texas last summer. Hope—and a little grace. “It’s humbling,” says Grove. “I guess you just have to trust that there will be other people in the lives of these youths who will help them with the different problems and situations that come up.”