Joining

MISSION & JUSTICE

at Philadelphia's Gesu School
Faith is driving force for Win Churchill

By Phil Wagner

     There is a neighborhood in North Central Philadelphia where drugs, guns, broken families and undreamt dreams rule, and in its midst is a school called Gesu. Its 450 children, pre-K through grade eight, are 100 percent African American, 100 percent low-income and 10 percent Catholic. Yet some 95 percent of Gesu grads go on to graduate from high school, and a growing number then pursue higher education.

      Gesu School, since the Archdiocese of Philadelphia closed its accompanying church in 1993, has remade itself into a paragon of inner city educational excellence locally and a model school nationally. Many have participated in this remarkable transformation; one has steadfastly led the charge. Faith has been his driving force.

      “Gesu School is about justice—justice that fuels a justifiable anger at the obvious wrongs we see around our cities, and everywhere else in society.”

      This lament graces the front covers of both the Gesu School’s annual report and the case statement for its nearly completed $12 million capital campaign. Its speaker is Win Churchill, who chairs Gesu’s 55-member board of trustees. Borrowing from the film Network, he adds, “I’m mad as hell and I’m not going to take this anymore.”

      Winston J. Churchill…mad? How is that? After all, here’s a man who has it all.

      Churchill is managing partner of SCP Partners, a diversified multi-stage venture capital firm with over $800 million under management. He holds a bachelor’s degree in physics (summa cum laude) from Fordham University, a master’s degree in economics from Oxford University (Rhodes Scholar), plus a J.D. from Yale Law School. He’s a trustee of Fordham, Georgetown and Immaculata universities, in addition to Gesu; a family man (fiancée Ellen, plus son Justin finishing a degree at Georgetown) living in a suburban Philadelphia French country house; a thinker who reads voraciously, favors yoga, flies his own plane, plays “satisfactorily bad golf,” and enjoys “an incredibly rich life because I’m into why things don’t work.”

      So what is he mad about? Public education. Churchill says it’s been a huge success in this country for most people, but an abject failure since World War II for those in America’s inner cities. That’s the justice point. Or rather, that’s the injustice point. Here’s the richest country in the history of the world, demonstrating vast waste everywhere as people recklessly spend resources. Then you have a whole subclass of people in poverty permanently confined to inner cities and the resulting culture of discrimination, because the education there is so inferior. Churchill disapproves.

      “Education’s supposed to be the passport to democracy, or egalitarianism, but we have a totally failed system on which we’re spending huge amounts,” Churchill bemoans. “Why has it failed? Well, it’s not the money. It’s not the kids. I don’t believe it’s the teachers.” He served in the 1990s as chairman of the Finance Committee of the Pennsylvania Public School Employees’ Retirement System, “so I know a lot of tremendously dedicated schoolteachers. It’s not the buildings. So it must be the organization, the bureaucracy.”

      One thing Churchill cannot brook is bureaucratic disorganization, an affront to his Jesuit roots. His Gesu School involvement came in 1993 after the Maryland Province Jesuits had committed funds to renovate an accompanying building for the newly independent school. Churchill’s former classmate at St. Joseph’s Preparatory School, Fr. George Bur, SJ, was Gesu School’s first president.

      Poised to restore the rooftop cage as a safe play zone for the students, Churchill thought better of it after confirming with Bur that the school was bleeding. So the financier launched a survival plan for the Gesu School.

      Churchill went to a close friend and dean of the Jewish community, “telling him in three sentences, we have Jesuits and IHM (Immaculate Heart of Mary) sisters teaching in a school with no Catholic kids and little funding. He understood instantly that here we had a school not just taking care of ‘their own people,’ but a catholic school with a small ‘c.’ Real catholicity. Gesu has a Jesuit mission of service to others in the full realization that each individual can then be qualified to serve yet others.” The friend pledged to help, which he has done ever since. Churchill endowed a development office to fundraise, discover new money sources and extend the Gesu brand.

      That fundraising has reached its zenith in Gesu’s nearly completed $12 million Building for Tomorrow campaign. First, this ambitious effort has increased endowment to ensure the school’s future by reducing its yearly need to raise close to $2 million (77 percent of operating budget) since tuition and registration payments cover only 23 percent of current operations. Second, it has empowered Gesu to enhance academic and enrichment programs through facility renovations including: an enclosed rooftop gymnasium, three multi-purpose rooms for after school and extended day programs, a second classroom for four-year-olds and an early childhood center, technology instruction and classroom integration, expanded remedial support and learning disability programs, improved music and art facilities, a new chapel, tutoring/counseling/mentoring space, and a sorely needed elevator.

      Clever networking and the appointment of Gesu trustee Christine Beck as the next president of the school have steadily advanced the cause as well. Win Churchill and his dozens of “people of good will” – 15-20 active co-trustees, including Bur, lending their trust, support and names – have fashioned the Gesu School into an all-inclusive bastion of education, character development and faith in the Jesuit model. Children are admitted non-selectively, regardless of academic and financial ability. At Gesu, the belief is that every child can learn. “We teach them,” Churchill says, “that, with dedication and hard work, success in life is within their grasp. All the while is the drumbeat of our faith in them and their consequent faith in themselves. This is our most important lesson.”

      Churchill et al have learned their own lessons, taking valuable direction from the Catholic schools and other education options surrounding them, like charter schools, which teach so well by example, word and deed. As an independent, private school, Gesu sidesteps the separation of church and state issue to educate moral, ethical young lives. Any Gesu grad can be a high achiever, no matter what his or her chosen field.

      It is more than a dozen years since Gesu School reinvented itself. Churchill has fed into every initiative, including the Institute for Inner City Education, a non-partisan, neutral forum “where people can meet and exchange ideas because the worst problem of all is just stupidity. Remove that, and everything else will run. Help people arrive at the obvious, eliminate the wastefulness that goes with debating the wrong topics, substitute consensus for contention, let people line themselves up to accomplish the mission.”

      In short, Win Churchill knows something about mission…and about justice.

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Gesu School

Phil Wagner is a marketing communications practitioner in Villanova, Pa., serving corporate and non-profit clients.