Hope and Dreams

Johnson is enough of an optimist to take on seemingly insurmountable social ills, but he's enough of a realist to know that he can't make a significant difference quickly. He keeps trying and keeps experimenting anyway. Like a true entrepreneur, he constantly generates new ideas, new projects, new ways to apply business tools and principles to social problems. He helped launch a midnight basketball league that offered seminars on personal growth for young men. He organized workshops on entrepreneurship for single mothers living in public housing. He is creating a venture-capital fund targeted at minority-owned businesses. Johnson, who's also director of the Urban Investment Strategies Center at the Kenan Institute, designs different bridges to meet different needs, each bridge driven by a simple question that lacks an easy answer: What works?

Johnson prefers the term "community investment" to "urban renewal," because the latter usually doesn't last long enough to do any real good. At the first signs of improvement, he says, everybody thinks that their work is done, and they leave the community, taking their resources with them. An investment, on the other hand, lasts as long as there's a decent return. Besides, alleviating poverty and inequality is by no means short-term work. "These problems were created over years and years," he says. "Unfortunately, the solutions take time, and a lot of people don't have the patience. They've given up on these communities."

Not Jim Johnson. In a way, he's just getting started.

Hope and Dreams I: "He's got so much potential"

D'Mario Smith and Kevin Raiford met at a mixer for the kids in Durham Scholars and the students from the Kenan-Flagler Business School. To get better acquainted and to facilitate pairing the kids with MBA mentors, members of each group interviewed members of the other one. Raiford, who's 31, learned that D'Mario loves McDonald's French fries and video games, and -- on that day anyway -- wanted to be a scientist. D'Mario learned that Raiford follows college basketball, had worked for Snapple prior to attending business school, and hopes to own a beverage company someday. The two have been buddies ever since. "When Kevin enters the room, D'Mario lights up," says Carolyn Cofrancesco, 34, a social worker in the program.

One of the most valuable benefits of Durham Scholars is the network that kids form outside their neighborhood, says Johnson. Some of the children have rarely interacted with college students before meeting their undergraduate tutors. It's even less likely that the children have had contact with MBA students -- or know what an MBA is, for that matter. The number of volunteers has grown steadily since the mentor program was launched. Last year, there were 150 mentors, up from 40 when the program began three years ago.

Johnson was one of the main reasons that Kevin Raiford came to North Carolina. Since earning his undergraduate degree from the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, Raiford had worked as a financial analyst, finance manager, and sales director at such companies as Johnson & Johnson, Quaker Oats Co., and Whole Foods Market Inc. He had his pick of business schools. But Johnson's presence at UNC made it an easy decision. Johnson is doing the sort of progressive work that Raiford believes in: applying business principles and university resources to community outreach. Charismatic, energetic, and approachable, Johnson is the sort of professor whom students naturally seek out as a mentor. "When I heard about Durham Scholars, I jumped all over it," says Raiford. Like Johnson, he is a born mentor; he still keeps in touch with kids he worked with in high school, at church, and through Junior Achievement.

Since he had benefited from programs similar to Durham Scholars while growing up in Pittsburgh, he takes his role as D'Mario's mentor seriously. MBA mentors are asked to spend at least four hours a month with students. Raiford doesn't bother counting the hours he spends with D'Mario. The boy who loves playing video games, eating French fries, and drawing elaborate science-fiction illustrations has become a routine part of Raiford's life over the past year, and vice versa.

During the school year, they see each other almost daily at the business school. On weekends, Raiford takes D'Mario to the mall. This past summer, when Raiford had an internship at Hewlett-Packard in Cupertino, California, they spoke every week by phone. Raiford encourages D'Mario to aim high. Regardless of the goal, he tells him, achieving success requires self-discipline and hard work. Learning has to become a habit, Raiford says, the way that brushing your teeth is. You have to expect -- and demand -- more of yourself than anyone else does. While he congratulates D'Mario on making the A/B honor roll, Raiford also warns him not to be satisfied. "I'm like, 'Not bad, but you need better grades if you want to go to Duke,' " he says.