social justice - Ray Bakke

Title: Executive Director
Company: International Urban Associates
Location: Chicago, Illinois
Age: 60

Most of us look at the inner city and see misery and despair. Ray Bakke sees promise and opportunity. Most of us look at efforts to eliminate poverty and see a legacy of failure. Ray Bakke sees slow-but-steady progress -- creative programs and dedicated people who are making a difference.

Most of us rarely come face-to-face with the realities of life in inner cities. We move from comfortable suburbs to office buildings to airport lounges to hotels -- and see ourselves as lucky. Ray Bakke sees missed opportunities to witness the fullness of human experience, to learn from what inner cities have to teach.

"Our cities are famous for violence and strife," he says. "But I see them as R&D units, where different kinds of people are learning to get along. Whites, Blacks, Muslims, Jews, Arabs, Christians -- people with different languages and cultures are crafting new ways to live and communicate, to work and raise their children. It is possible to construct a life of denial and avoidance. But once you've hidden your kids away in a gated community, how will you educate them to have perspective? Cities expose us to perspectives that are important for the times in which we live."

Raymond J. Bakke has developed his perspective on the inner city during decades of hard work and from firsthand experience. Since 1959, he has served people in cities from Calcutta to Caracas to Chicago, his home base. A professor and an American Baptist pastor by training, Bakke has arguably become the world's foremost "urban evangelist." Think of him as a consultant -- not for individual companies but for entire cities. Think of him as a mentor -- not for up-and-coming executives but for church leaders and theology students who want to make an impact on their communities. And think of him as a change agent -- a dedicated activist who is determined to make a difference in places that much of society has written off.

Bakke is executive director of Chicago-based International Urban Associates, which he founded in 1989. (He's also professor of global urban ministry at the Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary, in suburban Philadelphia.) Well-versed in both religion and business, his campaign to transform cities borrows freely from practices designed to change companies. Here too he has firsthand knowledge. Ray Bakke is the older brother of Dennis Bakke, 53, cofounder and CEO of AES Corp., a fast company in one of the world's slowest industries. AES, which builds and operates power plants, has built a radical business model around rank-and-file leadership, grassroots innovation, and a commitment to social change. (See "Power to the People," February:March 1998 ). The company now employs more than 40,000 people in 30 countries.

Ray Bakke's approach to making a difference is not to build a major company but to help rebuild the world's 400 major cities. His primary technique involves leading a "consultation" -- a network-building exercise in which Bakke and his colleagues visit a city, search for ideas on improving the quality of life there, document what's working, and convene a high-profile event to spotlight these grassroots innovations. Bakke organized his first consultation in Bangkok in 1980, at the invitation of Billy Graham's Lausanne Committee for World Evangelism. He has organized more than 200 consultations since then.

"Basically, we try to turn cities into laboratories," he says. "We get a committee working in a city for about a year. I ask people to go to every bishop and every church leader and say, 'If you had to prove that God were alive in this city, what would you point to in order to prove it?' I want this committee to find the best practices, whether they involve working with kids, prisoners, or battered women. Then we create a learning event. My visit becomes a reason for people in the city to get together and share their ideas."

For example, a conference in Addis Ababa -- the capital of Ethiopia and one of the poorest cities in the world -- cast a spotlight on the efforts of Jember Teffera, the 55-year-old wife of the city's former mayor. When she and her husband were imprisoned for political reasons, from 1977 to 1982, Teffera offered health and nursing classes to her fellow prisoners -- a program that she continued after her release. Today Teffera also works to build houses and repair streets in Addis Ababa; thus far, she has raised $7 million and built more than 1,100 houses. She also spends part of her time in Philadelphia, where she is studying with Bakke to get her doctorate in ministry from the Eastern Baptist Theological Seminary.