I started my professional career in August 1983, on a flight from JFK to Dakar Senegal, on a creaky old 747 loaded with dozens of eager young Americans headed for a world-saving adventure in Mauritania. Peace Corps RIM (Republique Islamique de Mauritanie) was a life-changing experience for me, setting in place a set of values and an uncompromising approach to social change that has fueled me for the past 30 years.
As of tomorrow, I will be the first CEO of the Dream Corps, founded by Van Jones, a man I consider to be an essential moral compass in our increasingly disheveled political wilderness. I join a stalwart team of deeply committed and passionate people. Just thinking about them, their life stories, and how they bring their personal sense of purpose to this work brings tears to my eyes. In a place like this, boundaries are permeable and emotional and political thermoclines can be navigated by relationships that can, as needed, weight you for the voyage to the depths, or buoy you back to the light.
My wife and I named our first daughter Eva Dakar. Eva -- to hearken back to Devora's Jewish immigrant grandmother who came from what is now Poland to start a new life in America, and Dakar to pay tribute to the place where I found my true heart. Each of our three daughters has a name that connects the disparate longings of our lives for beauty, connection, truth and love. Eva Dakar. Zelie Lloyd. Sophia Carmen. Tracking families through dim painful memories; dreaming of a better future. Passing on a legacy of constantly seeking the place of honest purpose, the hope of true love, and the gritty reality that we need to suffer more than a small dose of reckless willingness to trust that the universe will reveal her gifts, all in due time.
Peace Corps to Dream Corps, both aspirational and organizational. No corps without esprit, no esprit without a sense of shared history, no way to live without singing the future into the present. The Peace Corps was meant to be an antidote to the Marine Corps, and the Dream Corps is a similar vaccine that whispers and shouts -- we can have a better future, if we can only imagine it. I'm proud to be here, proud to be a small part of this effort, happy to put my shoulder to the wheel, and thrilled beyond expression at the joy and love I have already found.
My first official day is tomorrow. I ask your blessings, and invite you to join me for the journey.