The Power of Half

The Power of Half One family’s decision to stop taking and start giving back Kevin Salwen & Hannah Salwen It all started when fourteen-year old Hannah Salwen had a “eureka” moment. Seeing a homeless man in her neighborhood at the precise second a glistening Mercedes coupe pulled up, she said “You know, Dad, if that man had a less nice car, that man there could have a meal.” Until that day, the Salwens had been caught up like so many of us in the classic American dream—providing a good life for their children, accumulating more and more stuff, doing their part but not really feeling it. So when Hannah was stopped in her tracks by this glaring disparity, her parents knew they had to act on her urge to do something. As a family, they made the extraordinary decision to sell their Atlanta mansion, downsize to a house half its size, and give half of the sale price to a worthy charity. What began as an outlandish scheme became a remarkable journey that transported them across the globe and well out of their comfort zone. In the end they learned that they had the power to change a little corner of the world—and they found themselves changing, too. The Power of Half 1 Introduction OUR FAMILY is a fairly typical Atlanta foursome: two baby boomers (Joan and Kevin) and two teenagers (Hannah and Joseph). Our days consist of the standard American life – school, work, and youth sports. For more than a decade we aspired to the usual “stuff”: new cars, a spacious home, nice vacations. Sure, we took on the occasional volunteer activity; feeding the homeless and building Habitat for Humanity houses, but largely we were consumed by our careers and enhancing our lifestyle through bigger, newer, better. We were focused on us. We moved into a huge “Dream House,” large enough for us to scatter in different directions. As we drove from activity to activity, the TV in the back seat kept the kids entertainedand our family from connecting. At dinner, conversations began to center on to-do lists instead of meaningful dialogue. Our sense of togetherness was beginning to erode. I can't pinpoint the moment it happened because, after all, erosion is so much harder to recognize than earthquake damage. Still, when we stopped to take a hard look, it was clear that we were drifting apart. We were losing our core. Then our Iife took an amazing turn. Prodded by Hannah, who at fourteen had become increasingly upset about the imbalance of opportunities in the world, we launched an audacious family project. We decided to sell our 6,5oo-square-foot landmark home, move to a nondescript house that was half as big, and donate half of the sales price to help alleviate poverty in one of the neediest corners of the planet. We committed to donating more than $800,000 for work in two dozen villages in Ghanaa place we not only hadn't visited, but one so foreign to us that we had to look it up on the map. The result was a remarkable family adventure. Around our dinner table, we spent hours discussing the world's problems and how we might help. We made every decision in our two-year journey collectively, with kids having just as much say as parents. But this book is more than just the tale of a family trying to turn the good life into a life of good. It's about unintended consequences, like the way inventors stumbled across penicillin or Post-it notes or Flubber. Yes, we're helping the world a bit. But in the process we are transforming our relationships with one another. And that has been the real surprise. During this adventure, Hannah and Joseph became empowered and confident, which enabled them to relate much more deeply to each other and to Joan and me. Our family discussions became more democratic, more open, more honest. By sharing The Power of Half 2 decision-making, Joan and I became better at listening to the other members of our family. Several times Hannah said to me, “My friends never discuss things with their parents,” and then told me what she was thinking about people or events. We have learned to converse about big human issues, and while we're talking, we often veer into a discussion about other things we wouldn't previously have shared, like adolescent relationships or even sex or drugs. Don't get me wrongour family isn't perfect (far from it), but we have found a broader avenue for communication. And I'm willing to bet that many families would be glad to have that. So, Cool Thing #1 is that the old maxim “the more you give, the more you get” is actually true. Setting out to be selfless became the most self-interested thing we ever did. We truly brought our family together. Then there is Cool Thing #2: just about everything we've done can be replicated, regardless of the economy or individual asset level. The Power of Half is more about how we undertook our family project than about what we did. Some people say to us, “I could never sell my house.” Who expects you to? Our project was never about size. We chose to sell our house because it was something that our family could handle from the perspective of giving half. But as you'll learn in this book, your “half” can be whatever you choose, at whatever budget you set. Why half? Because it's measurable. Often when caring individuals see social problems, our gut reaction is “I ought to do more.” But “more” is too vague to be useful, and we usually end up not doing much of anything. By contrast, “half” provides a metric to live with, a way to set a standard to push us to achieve. You can be creativea little goes a long way. To offer a simple example: if your family watches four hours of television a week, you could jointly decide to halve that, then choose as a family to devote those extra two hours to some unified purpose. Care about the elderly? You might work together in a nursing home. AIDS patients? Maybe serve meals once a week for those two hours. Cool Thing #3 is that The Power of Half not only works for so-called intact families but also provides great opportunities to connect divorced families, nontraditional families, and intergenerational ones. No matter what your family makeup is, no matter what your version of “half” is, the secret is the process. Steal it, then use it to build your relationships. In an era of iPods, video games, headphones, and other isolating technology, The Power of Half can help you create your own connected journey. As the French essayist Michel de Montaigne said, “He who does not live in some degree for others, hardly lives for himself.” The Power of Half 3 1 The Treadmill Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot, nothing is going to get better. It's not. Dr. Seuss, The Lorax IT'S FLAT-OUT AWKWARD for two people to share a pair of sewing scissors among their ten right-hand fingers, but Hannah and the tribal chief are trying their best. After a few seconds of what looks like thumb wrestling, they evenly control the scissors' gray plastic handle, then carefully move toward the sky-blue ribbon stretched across the door in front of them. Forget Oscar Madison and Felix Unger. This is the oddest couple I've ever seen: a grinning fifteen-year-old white American girl in her wicking REI khakis and an earnest seventyish African tribal chief in gold and brown ceremonial robes worn like a toga across his left shoulder. She speaks English and has come six thousand miles for this. He speaks the tribal language Twi, and I'm guessing he has never left the West African nation of Ghana, except for maybe a vacation journey to neighboring Togo or Burkina Faso. Yet here they are, pairing up for the opening ceremony of this new hand-cranked corn mill. For all their differences, they share a goal of helping this rural community on its path out of poverty, the chief because these are his people and Hannah because she is so eager to make the world a little better that she has uprooted her family and pledged more than $800,000 to help villagers in a country she couldn't locate on a map a year ago. Their eyes meet for a second, the chief's gray goatee and mostly bald head contrasting with Hannah's auburn hair, which falls to the middle of her back and is frizzing in the July West African heat. The chief is silent as Hannah quickly and quietly counts, “One, two, three.” Her plan is for them to squeeze the scissors at precisely the same time. As usual, Hannah is striving for fairness. I am standing on the other side of the ribbon, swelling with pride in our daughter. For months we've been talking about moments just like this: How doing with a little less ourselves can improve the lives of people surviving on less than a dollar a day. How we can enable opportunity for African girls who otherwise would carry corn for hours, missing school while their parents work in the fields. How humble structures like this simple cinder-block building will keep more young women pursuing education, creating The Power of Half 4 much better life options for themselves.

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