Marry passion to professionalism and the result might very well be the new President and CEO of Communities In Schools of North Carolina, Eric Hall. “I want to put supports and interventions in place at schools so that students will not be displaced. This job gives me the chance to do work that I know is effective in keeping kids in school. It is the perfect integration of my personal and professional missions.”

Hall comes from a family of educators and is currently working on his doctorate in educational leadership. “My parents, aunts and uncles are all teachers, except for one who is a social worker. My belief in the importance of education and the need to have the community involved in the schools is homegrown.”

Newly arrived in January from a job as national director of educational services/regional director with AMIkids, Inc. in Tampa, Fla., Hall has found his transition made much easier by the team he inherited at the Communities In Schools office. “I am so amazed by the team of individuals I get to work with here. They have a long history with the organization and they live to support its mission. They make my job easy. The Board supports the organization by bringing in resources and connecting Communities In Schools to others who can help us accomplish our mission.”

It’s a team he knows he will need to rely on heavily as he and his staff consider how to best position Communities in Schools of North Carolina for the education reform taking place in the state. “We must be prepared to stay true to our mission while staying connected to the schools and the reform effort. We have the opportunity to innovate, to grow into new schools and to be more intentional about what we do in schools where we already have a presence.”

His almost two-decade record of work with AMIkids, a nonprofit organization providing intervention services to at-risk youth in juvenile justice programs and nontraditional schools in nine states, is a solid foundation for his new position. At AMIkids, he led the effort to build school programs for students who need nontraditional services, including those in the juvenile justice system. A key part of his job, as it is at Communities In Schools, was working with partnering organizations to bring in the best possible services for students. Hall believes the work he did in Florida during a time when then Governor Jeb Bush was instituting statewide reform will be valuable experience for dealing with the state reforms being enacted in North Carolina.

One of his greatest achievements at AMIkids, Inc. was collaborating with state and legislative officials to add more than $12 million a year of educational funding to juvenile justice schools. “That funding helped us to bring in educators who had more experience and education working with kids in the juvenile justice system and other nontraditional education settings, and to be more competitive with salaries. So kids were getting a better education.” In the end, that’s what matters most to Hall: ensuring that all kids can get the best education possible.

Today’s blog post is by Communities In Schools President Dan Cardinali, who writes regularly for The Huffington Post. In his latest post, Cardinali writes about ”the wisdom of the periphery” – insights learned at the margins of society. Let us know what you think.

Out of every 100 freshmen entering high school in the U.S., how many do you suppose drop out before they cross the stage on graduation day — 5? 10? Maybe even a dozen?

According to the latest study from America’s Promise Alliance, the actual number is more like 22, and even that depressing figure masks the full extent of the problem in poor communities of color, where dropout rates approach 29 percent among Hispanics and 33 percent for African-Americans.

If you work in public education, you’re already painfully aware of those figures. But when I talk about dropout rates among general audiences at speaking engagements around the country, I often hear an audible gasp.

These audiences are usually well read, socially aware and community minded, yet they have only the vaguest sense of this particular crisis. Dropping out of high school? It’s simply not something that we often encounter in middle class America. Everyone we know — our kids, their friends, our neighbors — finished high school and probably went on to college after that.

How can a problem be so pervasive and so invisible at the same time?

What I’ve found over the years is that problems — and solutions — often look quite different on the periphery. For those of us at the “center” of society, the problems on the periphery can appear smaller because we are physically or psychologically removed from the fallout. We tend to perceive and prioritize things differently when they don’t affect us in a personal way.

That’s why I believe that the best solutions often come from those who have experienced problems close-up, where the difficulties loom larger and the stakes are higher. At the margins of society you can find great insights and wisdom that are easy to miss when you’re in the middle. This is what I call “the wisdom of the periphery,” and it’s a recurring theme I’d like to explore in this space from time to time.

If there is any one individual who taught me the wisdom that comes from working on the margins, it would be Tony Dalton. I met Tony after my first year of college, when I moved to the South Bronx to work with the nuns at an outreach center for Dominican and Puerto Rican families. Several nights a week, I’d go to a nearby parish where the most unlikely community organizer I had ever met operated one of the most effective community centers I had ever seen.

Since 1980, Tony Dalton had run his after-school gym out of an unused church space in Mott Haven, a neighborhood widely regarded as one of the worst in the nation. In the middle of this horrifically violent place, Tony had created a refuge where kids could come for boxing, weightlifting, basketball, or just hanging out — anything, really, to keep them off the streets and out of the gangs that constantly beckoned.

In this tough environment, where the cops patrolled in bulletproof vests, Tony stood out as a strict and loving father figure, if not a local saint. Still, his rough demeanor — and his failing liver — betrayed his own past struggles that he rarely talked about.

I learned over time that Tony had once been a union elevator repairman. It was good work for an uneducated child of the South Bronx, though Tony was known to spend a good portion of his income on drinking and carousing. On a whim, he tagged along with a friend who was doing a service project in Haiti, and the needs that he saw there changed his life.

When he returned to the States, he began spending all of his free time at shelters for runaway teens and battered women. Eventually his avocation turned into a vocation. Tony retired from his job, gave away most of his possessions and his pension and moved into a nearby rectory as he built up his after-school center.

At first I didn’t grasp Tony’s impulse to cut himself off from the economic resources that could have ensured the future of his gym. But as I watched him and talked to him over the course of those months, I began to understand: By ceding his economic power, Tony had structured his life to create greater accountability with those that he served and those whose resources he was stewarding.

In making himself utterly dependent on the community, he fostered greater authenticity and freedom in his relationships with the kids. He never felt entitled to their love, because it wasn’t his “stuff” at the youth center; it was given by the community.

In a nonprofit world where scale and impact are often perceived as a kind of Holy Grail, I still believe there is tremendous value in making ourselves truly vulnerable to the communities we serve. That’s a lesson I learned from Tony Dalton, a hard-living Irishman who first showed me the hard-won wisdom of the periphery.

Follow Dan Cardinali on Twitter:

@DanCardinali

Today’s blog post is by Communities In Schools President Dan Cardinali, who writes regularly for The Huffington Post. In his latest post, which originally ran on March 27, Cardinali writes about demonstrations of bravery, decency and inspiration shown by youth every day in schools across America. The newly announced Peace First Prize will acknowledge and honor the young people who are leading social change and making a positive difference in the world. Let us know what you think.

In a Florida high school auditorium not too long ago, a shy, awkward freshman approached a group of older students to ask for directions. With her strong Haitian accent and unstylish clothes, the new girl was easy prey for the sophomores, who slipped instantly into a kind of group hunting mode. They taunted and teased and tore at the girl with insults that only grew louder as the humiliation etched into her face.

But one sophomore laughed a little less loudly as the new girl slunk away, isolated and alone. Nephtalie had made the trip from Haiti to Florida when she was much younger. She’d had time to soften her accent and learn the latest styles, time to make friends and fit in.

In other words, Nephtalie had had time to become cool, but she realized in the auditorium that day that she couldn’t be cold. The pain in the new girl’s eyes ignited something unfamiliar inside her — a spark of empathy that she couldn’t ignore. She sought out the new girl to apologize, and then she went back to her own friends to confront them about what they had done.

A moment of violence followed by a small act of kindness and then a real act of courage? Not the ending we’ve come to expect from a story of high school bullying.

But the story doesn’t actually end there, because Nephtalie’s newfound sense of empathy still wasn’t satisfied. Realizing that there wasn’t just one “new girl” in the school, Nephtalie recruited her friends to start a club that would seek out all foreign students to help them fit in and learn their way around. The “mean girls” are now an unofficial welcoming committee, and they’re finding their new role immensely satisfying. “It brings joy to my friends and I as we help our fellow peers despite their accent and the clothes they wear,” Nephtalie explains.

It’s an extraordinary story, isn’t it? How often do you hear of teenagers with the courage to resist peer pressure, do the right thing and create a little bit of peace in their world?

There’s no doubt that Nephtalie is a brave, decent and inspiring girl, but I’m not so sure that those are extraordinary traits in our young people. In fact, I operate under just the opposite thesis: Bravery, decency and inspiration manifest themselves every day in every school across America, but those stories all too often are overlooked simply because they do not fit into the dominant cultural narrative that casts young people as perpetrators of violence.

In other words, it’s not extraordinary when our students seek to create peace in their schools and communities — it’s only extraordinary when we hear about it.

I know that I would never have heard Nephtalie’s story, except that I happen to serve on the board of a wonderful nonprofit that is deeply committed to bringing such stories to light. Peace First has spent more than 20 years fine-tuning a curriculum that teaches “the essential social and emotional skills of empathy, personal awareness, relationship building and promoting inclusion” to students from Pre-K through eighth grade.

Now, under the able leadership of co-founder Eric D. Dawson, Peace First is expanding upon its school-by-school “retail approach” by introducing an ambitious new effort to discover, celebrate and empower young people who are already out there doing transformative work.

Several months ago, Eric shared the stage with Chelsea Clinton to announce the Peace First Prize, a two-year, $50,000 fellowship conceived as a kind of Nobel Peace Prize for young people aged eight to 22. Winners will be chosen based on three key criteria: compassion, courage and the ability to engage others in creating positive change. Five fellowships will be announced in September, and the cash awards plus high-level mentoring are sure to make a lasting difference in the peacemaking efforts of each winner.

In a way, however, the real power of the Prize goes far beyond the individual winners. By creating a premier showcase for those who have “confronted injustice, crossed lines of difference, and had the courage and compassion to create lasting change,” Peace First is seeking to inspire young people everywhere by shifting the narrative from violence to peace. Here’s how Eric described it to me:

“The need for peacemaking today is more critical than ever before. We are bombarded with negative stories about young people in the media, when in reality, the norm is that young people are leading social change. Making a positive difference. Standing up for justice. Those are the stories Peace First wants to tell…

“We have to give young people alternatives in their lives. We need to give them hope and a vision to aspire to. And we have to celebrate their accomplishments. That’s what the Peace First Prize will do.”

Hope. Vision. Celebration. It’s rare that we talk about young people in such terms — and rarer still that our young people hear those words applied to their generation.

The Peace First Prize offers a chance to change our vocabulary and our perceptions. Every time we tell another story of courage, conviction and compassion, we help to shift the narrative in a more positive direction. We show kids like Nephtalie that they’re not alone, that they’re making a difference, and that we believe in them.

Thank you for reading Nephtalie’s story, but please don’t stop there. Find the young peacemakers in your own community, and share their stories by April 12.

Peace is alive and well in our schools. It’s our job to search it out, recognize it, and build on it.

Follow Dan Cardinali on Twitter:

@DanCardinali