Awakin Call · Bill Milliken, in conversation with Zoe Weil

One Beggar Telling Another Beggar Where to Find Bread

At seventeen, Bill Milliken was the kid nobody expected anything from — labeled dumb, rebelling to mask his loneliness, watching friends die or go to prison. A stranger from Young Life spent a year simply showing up at a pool hall, offering nothing but presence, until Milliken decided that if this kind of love was real, it was his only hope. Six decades later, at eighty-five, having buried fourteen friends by the time he was twenty-six and built the country's largest dropout-prevention movement out of storefront schools in Harlem, he still calls himself “one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread.” He has watched a Grand Dragon of the Ku Klux Klan become best man at his Black friend's wedding, all because of one honest question. And he still believes, as the Dalai Lama once told him, that if you think you're too small to make a difference, you've never tried sleeping in a room with a mosquito.

The Pool Hall That Wouldn't Give Up

Milliken's faith was kindled the way most things about him were — not through doctrine, but through a person who wouldn't quit. A man from Young Life spent a year trying to get a seventeen-year-old Milliken to trust him. Milliken's friends didn't trust the man either. But he just kept showing up, and that's part of what love's about — just showing up. It was unconditional: Milliken didn't have to believe what the man believed. The man said there was a higher power, and Milliken didn't buy it — he'd already watched friends die and go to prison, and he couldn't square that with a God who cared. But the man lived what he believed, and cared about Milliken whether Milliken believed it or not. That was what made him curious.

He found his way to a version of Jesus he called the most radical person he'd ever encountered — not religion, just unconditional care for him exactly where he was. “If you're real,” he told himself, “you're my only hope.” A friend of his who was on heroin at the time had the same experience. When that friend got out of jail, the two of them committed the rest of their lives to the streets, so that no more of their friends would end up dead or in jail.

Storefront Schools and the Relational Router

Milliken spent eleven years on the streets before he was ever let inside the school system. He and others ran storefront schools called Street Academies for kids who'd already been kicked out or caused trouble — and the academies worked well enough that school systems eventually asked him to bring the approach inside, to keep kids from dropping out in the first place.

Once he got inside — meeting with superintendents, principals, janitors, food-service staff, riding the buses and listening — he found the real problem: schools had lost community somewhere between the end of World War II and the sixties, and were now being asked to be mother, father, sister, brother, and social worker all at once, then blamed for failing. His answer was what he calls a relational router in every school: someone like the community organizer he'd once been, who knows every kid by name, who needs food or clothing, and who's struggling with gangs, drugs, or suicidal thoughts — and who pulls in whatever resources exist around town instead of leaving them scattered in silos.

That router organizes around what Milliken calls the five basics every kid needs: a personal relationship with a caring adult, a safe place, a marketable skill, a healthy life, and a chance to give back. Communities in Schools now works inside nearly 3,500 schools and reaches 2 million students and their families each year.

Hope Is the Game Changer, Love Is the Delivery System

About ten years ago, Milliken was invited to speak to a room of attorneys general — not a warm, fuzzy group, as he put it. He'd had to learn how to use a clicker to show them his data. With five minutes left, he was asked what he wanted to leave them with.

Zoe Weil asked him to say it again so she could write it down. He couldn't quite remember his own words. “At least it's recorded,” she said, “so we'll be able to find hope.”

One Beggar Telling Another Beggar Where to Find Bread

At another hearing in the seventies, a questioner with as bad an attitude as Milliken's own asked him what the difference was between the kids he'd watched die and the ones who made it. Milliken's first instinct was to go across the table at the man. He lost the first minute to that anger. Then the answer came to him: help isn't always helpful. You can destroy people with helping them — it's a form of slavery. The greatest gift you can give somebody is to allow them to give something to you. If you think you're better than someone because you have a degree or a credential they don't, you'll never see transformation in yourself or in them. “I'm just one beggar telling another beggar where to find bread,” he said. “We have a common soul, a common place, and we were just born in different zip codes.”

That conviction shapes how CIS works with the students who've grown up furthest inside the system, too. When Zoe Weil raised how even positive labels — “you're such a good debater, you should be a lawyer” — can box kids in as much as negative ones, Milliken pointed to a group of students CIS had followed from sixth grade into twelfth. One boy, reflecting on a project where they'd worked to solve a problem they cared about, asked: wouldn't it be wonderful if kids asked themselves what difference can I make, rather than what do I want to be?

An Orchestra, Not a Village

Milliken and his friends wrote what they call a hundred-year plan, because they'd concluded the usual theory of change — governments wanting results in two to four years, foundations in three — was ludicrous for something this structural. He testified decades ago that the country needed a new three Rs: not just reading, writing, and arithmetic, but relationships. It's taken the first forty-seven years to grow from one school of 120 kids to the 2 million CIS serves today; he calls it “an overnight success” that only took forty-seven years.

He no longer thinks of the family, or community, as a village. “It's an orchestra,” he said — you need a conductor to pull the instruments together, and people come and go, but the music continues as long as there's a long enough plan to hold it. CIS is approaching its fiftieth anniversary; Milliken, at eighty-five, recently lost his board chair and dear friend of seventeen years, Elaine Wynn, and says he expects to hand a baton to the next generation for the next fifty.

The image he returns to most is smaller than an orchestra. In meditation, he came across the Dalai Lama's line: if you think you are too small to have an impact, try sleeping with a mosquito. CIS, he says, is an army of mosquitoes — and it's not alone; it's linking up with other armies, like Habitat for Humanity and the United Negro College Fund, because the moment calls for uniting armies of passion rather than staying siloed.

Why Do You Hate Me?

Loving your neighbor, Milliken said, means being in proximity — if you aren't near someone, it's hard to love them. Loving your enemy is harder still. He told a story he's used often with his own staff: a Black musician friend of his, playing a gig in a country-music bar, was approached on a break by a large white man who liked his music and bought him a beer, then introduced himself as the head of the Knights of Columbus — a Grand Dragon of the Klan. The musician thanked him for sitting there, and asked a single question: why do you hate me? “I don't know,” the man said. “I guess I was taught that way.” The story, which made the New York Times, ends with the Klan leader inviting the musician to keynote a Klan meeting in Tennessee — and later asking him to be his best man.

Milliken sees the same pattern play out in his own political work. He once put a former Republican governor of West Virginia, who'd brought CIS site coordinators into fifty-five rural communities before leaving office, in the same room as a Democratic senator from a blue state. “You would not know the difference,” he said — both spoke about CIS as their future workforce. In Texas, where CIS reaches 47% of the state's population, a wave of mothers tried to strip the program out of school boards as part of an anti-“woke” push. CIS had more mothers on its side than they did — many of them MAGA mothers themselves, because, as Milliken put it, they don't care if he has long hair; they care whether someone loves their kids.

High Touch Against High Tech

Asked about AI in schools, Milliken didn't reach for either fear or hype. “The warfare in our lifetime is between high touch and high tech,” he said. “If you don't combine them, then we become, in essence, robots ourselves.” He's in conversation with people building bots that could tutor kids without embarrassing or shaming them when they get something wrong — and he's clear-eyed that only four or five companies currently control this technology, and none of them are oriented around the relational side of it. His answer isn't to reject the tools but to build an army of volunteers — CIS already has three to four hundred thousand — who bring the touch that no bot can.

Near the end of the call, someone asked what it's like to see the impact of a life's work. Milliken admitted he's spent the last five years in therapy learning to receive it — a friend from the music industry has spent that time getting him to take in gratitude rather than deflect it. He still remembers being seventeen, kicked out of school, accepted only in a pool hall, told by the man who turned him around: you've got great organizing skills — if you could just use them for good instead of negative. “That gave me hope,” he said. “Hey, I do have a skill.”

Milliken closed by returning to his mosquitoes — a small idea, replicated small, everywhere. “There's a lot of them,” he said. “We need other mosquitoes joining us across the world.”