LITMIR.BIZ

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a single action on a single day can set an example. In the case of former Philadelphia Mayor W. Wilson Goode Sr., the way his mother responded to an isolated situation when he was twelve years old influenced the homelessness program he established decades later.

      When Goode was growing up on a tenant farm in North Carolina, a man knocked at the family’s door at dusk one evening. “He said to my mother, who was cooking supper, ‘I’m hungry,’ and my mother, without hesitation, invited him in and shared our supper with him,” Goode says.

      “As a twelve-year-old at the time, I initially had an attitude about him eating up all of our supper. I was struck by the fact that she fed this man and did not even think about the fact that she had eight other people to feed and we had next to nothing.”

      But over the course of the meal, Wilson got over his “attitude” and felt his own stirrings of generosity. “I had saved about a dollar in nickels and pennies and dimes and had it stuck under my bed, and as he left I ran after him and said, ‘Mr. Hobo,’ and I gave him all the money I had in the world.”

      Three decades later, while Goode was serving as managing director for the city of Philadelphia in the early 1980s, he felt the same stirrings one evening when he got a call from the health commissioner, whose office was in the same building as his.

      “Director, look at Love Park,” the commissioner said.

      Goode looked out his window at the park across the street. In the dusk, he could see that about fifty homeless men had taken up residence there. Recalling another encounter with homelessness that occurred in the dusk of a long-ago evening, he knew what he had to do.

      Goode mobilized his team, and that same night they found a space in the basement of one of the city’s firehouses, equipped it with cots and stocked it with food. Within a few hours, they’d created a temporary shelter and begun the city’s first homeless program. Goode hadn’t even taken the time to run the idea past the mayor.

      “It came to my head because I needed to respond to a human condition that existed,” he says. “After watching this man come and beg for food when I was twelve and watching my mother respond, I knew I had to respond to what I saw in front of me without hesitation.”

      Today, countless homeless people in Philadelphia have that single act of kindness by Goode’s mother to thank for the help they’ve received. The city’s comprehensive homeless assistance program grew significantly under Goode’s administration and offers services that include homelessness prevention, emergency housing and a personal care home with residential care. Who knew that inviting someone to dinner could have such far-reaching effects?

       MONDAYS WITH MAURICE

      For Laura Schroff and Maurice Mazyck, a lunch at McDonald’s was the meal that would make a dramatic impact on their lives. And it almost didn’t happen.

      “Excuse me, lady, do you have any spare change? I’m hungry,” Maurice said on a September day in 1986.

      Normally, Laura would have just kept walking. It was Manhattan, and it was easy to ignore people asking for money. “They were just so prevalent that most people simply looked the other way,” she says in her inspiring book An Invisible Thread. “The problem seemed so vast, so endemic, that stopping to help a single panhandler could feel all but pointless. And so we swept past them every day, great waves of us going on with our lives and accepting that there was nothing we could really do to help.”

      And she did sweep past him. But then she stopped.

      He said he was hungry.

      She’d noticed he was young, but when she walked back to him, she saw that he was only a boy.

      “Excuse me, lady, do you have any spare change? I’m hungry.”

      Laura didn’t want to give him money and offered to take him to McDonald’s instead. So the thirty-five-year-old advertising executive and the eleven-year-old panhandler in his dirty sweat suit and beat-up sneakers went to the Golden Arches for burgers, fries and chocolate shakes.

      After lunch, Laura and Maurice walked through a nearby park, got ice cream and played some video games at an arcade. Then Laura gave him her business card and told him he could call if he needed anything. Over the next few days, she couldn’t get him out of her mind, and when he didn’t call, she realized he probably didn’t have a quarter for a pay phone and went looking for him.

      She found him close to the corner where they’d met. He said he’d been hoping she’d find him, so they went to McDonald’s for burgers and fries again.

      “Do you want to meet me on the corner next Monday night?” Laura asked as they ate. “I’ll take you to the Hard Rock Cafe.”

      Maurice gave a big smile but hesitated. “Could I wear the clothes that I have on? They’re the only clothes I own.”

      “Of course.”

      When he arrived Monday night, his face was sparkling clean and so were his burgundy sweats. He’d obviously gone all out for the occasion.

      They went on to have a great time and decided to start meeting for dinner on Mondays on a regular basis—a tradition had been born.

      It was a union of two worlds. Maurice lived in public housing in a one-room apartment filled with a rotating cast of relatives and drug addicts. It was a violent and chaotic home, and he was more or less responsible for himself. Meanwhile, two blocks away, Laura lived in a high-rise building that had a doorman—a true escape for Maurice in every way.

      The first time he stepped into her world, though, there was tension on both sides. After about a half dozen get-togethers, Laura thought it was time to invite him for a home-cooked meal, but her friends told her it could be dangerous to allow a street kid into her home. As for Maurice, he couldn’t have been more uncomfortable as he sat at the end of the couch, putting as much distance between them as possible. (Although Laura didn’t know it at the time, he’d brought a box cutter he’d stolen because he thought there was some kind of catch to her generosity and he had no idea what it might be.) Wanting to clear the air and put them both at ease, Laura cut to the chase.

      “The reason why I’ve invited you to my home is I consider you a friend, and friendship is built on trust. I want you to understand we’re never going to have this conversation again, but if anything is ever missing from my apartment, we will no longer be friends.”

      Maurice looked mystified.

      “Do you understand what I’m saying?”

      “Miss Laura, you just want to be my friend? That’s it?”

      “Well, of course.”

      His face relaxed. “Miss Laura, a deal is a deal.” Then he stood up and they shook on it.

      During their weekly get-togethers, Laura and Maurice would have lunch, bake cookies, watch TV and read. Maurice would also take naps on Laura’s couch and generally relish the chance to do what he wanted to do without anyone bothering him. It was a routine they both looked forward to, and it seemed to get Maurice through the week—until he showed up at Laura’s apartment unexpectedly one Saturday. “I’m sorry to bother you, but I’m really hungry. Could we get something to eat?”

      Laura fed him and learned that he hadn’t had any food for two days. She also learned that this wasn’t unusual—he often went without food. Sometimes he’d be so hungry that he felt like he’d been punched in the stomach.

      Laura couldn’t accept this and came up with a plan. “Look, Maurice, I can’t bear the thought of you not eating every day, so this is what we can do: I can either give you some money for the week—and you’ll have to be really careful how you spend it—or, if you prefer, on Monday nights we can go to the supermarket and I can buy all the things you like to eat and make you lunch for the week. I’ll leave it with the doorman, and on the way to school you can swing by and pick it up.”

      “If you make me lunch, are you going to put it in a

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