This is a very special honor for me and I wish to express my heartfelt thanks to the Board of AIDS Action. I particularly want to mention the support that is given me by my wife and children at home and my other family of co-workers at the Bank. I am especially proud to share the evening with the other honorees. For those unsung heroes are truly the stars...and to them I would like to say: 'I once knew a philanthropist who said I envy the misanthrope his hard hearted ways and pity liberals like me who try to help but can never help enough. To all the unsung heroes: you have helped enough and I for one am profoundly grateful.'...I know I share with this audience many memories from the AIDS Pledge Walk. Over the past few years my participation in this event has become a family affair with one or the other of my children accompanying me on these walks....

The overlay of social justice into the corporate entity is probably the quintessential oxymoron and mystifies most folks who come into contact with it. Those who are not mystified believe that Wainwright Bank, which I co-founded with John Plukas, was conceived as a noble experiment around a social agenda. Neither view would be entirely accurate in that the Bank came into existence in 1987 much like other new entrants. Along with many other startup institutions, we faced a turbulent economy. In the late '80s many of these institutions started to flounder and had it not been for the significant amount of equity that we had, we too would have had difficulty. (It is interesting to look back on this period in light of the success we now enjoy).

It was against this backdrop that I was asked to take the podium in front of an audience of a few hundred business people. Conventional wisdom might have had me talk about the Bank's earnings.... As I pondered this for a while, I decided that I would speak about none of the conventional bank topics that night, but instead I spoke of social justice, a concept that played a large role in my personal life but not heretofore in my business career. (Now I had a platform to give voice to my beliefs.) Admittedly, I was preaching a radical message to the intensely uninterested. Their concept of social justice was the concession they had to make to the ladies' tee on the third hole of their country club golf course. That night, in the late '80s, I started down a path that ultimately transformed the Bank. As my talks increasingly focused on issues of affordable housing, the AIDS crisis, homelessness and diversity, I had no idea how far this would go, but the vision did take hold as more and more of the Board, staff and customers of the Bank embraced the concept of social justice.

Some of the more tangible dividends involved ultimately committing $50 million to local community development loans, which is equivalent to $10 billion if extrapolated to the assets of the larger Boston banking institutions. Another byproduct was the development of a culture of diversity that allowed all of our employees the freedom to be themselves.

In the pursuit of social justice much of the leverage comes not from ones' financial resources (either as an individual or an institution) but rather from ones' willingness to be visibly associated with this pursuit. Additional leverage comes from staying power and persistence...

On an individual level I indeed feel fortunate in that my business activities, philanthropic pursuits and personal beliefs are all able to converge around a single theme - social justice. The historical connection for me goes back to the Army/McCarthy hearings, which I watched as a child. From there, I saw the same voices of intolerance arrayed against the civil rights movement, the anti-war movement, the women's movement, gay rights and the civil liberties of people with AIDS. For me the rights of these groups are all connected threads that weave the fabric of a just society. Indeed none of us journeys alone.

I would like to share with you a rich and timeless quote that appeared in a book entitled Understanding the Nature of Poverty in Urban America*:

"Such poverty as we have today in all our great cities degrades the poor, and infects with its degradation the whole neighborhood in which they live. And whatever can degrade a neighborhood can degrade a country and a continent and finally the whole civilized world, which is only a large neighborhood. Its bad effects cannot be escaped by the rich. When poverty produces outbreaks of virulent infectious disease, as it always does sooner or later, the rich catch the disease and see their children die of it. When it produces crime and violence the rich go in fear of both, and are put to a good deal of expense to protect their persons and property. When it produces bad manners and bad language the children of the rich pick them up no matter how carefully they are secluded; and such seclusion does them more harm than good... The old notion that people can "keep themselves to themselves" and not be touched by what is happening to their neighbors, or even to the people who live a hundred miles off, is a most dangerous mistake...though the rich end of town can avoid living with the poor end, it cannot avoid dying with it when the plague comes."

It may surprise you to learn that this is not a contemporary quote (allegory) about the AIDS crisis but rather underscores a broader concept of social justice written nearly three-quarters of a century ago by the English playwright George Bernard Shaw.

As recent news reports have indicated, the epidemic's landscape has radically shifted. New drug cocktails of unknown staying power have brought a measure of relief and considerable hope to some AIDS patients. Simultaneously there is a rising awareness that the virus is exploding among populations in both America and developing nations that are beyond the reach of the old AIDS treatments and preventive measures, let alone any expensive new ones. As the center of gravity of this debate has shifted, one must be mindful of Shaw's words so that the allocation of resources do not occur along the fault lines of race, class and wealth. We must not retreat to our individual islands of self-interest. In the context of social justice we will not be liberated until all are cured.

I would like to thank you for this special honor and close by saying....Each of us conducts our daily affairs in a kind of prose but when together we speak of social justice we elevate that dialogue to poetry...

*James Jennings, 'Understanding the Nature of Poverty in Urban America', 'Prepared under the auspices of the William Monroe Trotter Institute, the University of Massachusetts at Boston. In cooperation with the Boston Foundation's Persistent Poverty Project'.

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