Faye Clarke: Educational Philanthropist
In 1991, Faye Clarke founded the Educate the Children Foundation with her husband Frank Clarke, supporting rural and impoverished school districts across America by donating books, furniture, and other vital educational supplies. They targeted 100 of the nation’s poorest school districts, working to establish computer labs in schools across the United States, including Native American reservations in North and South Dakota. Image Credit: www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net Faye Wilma Robinson was born on August 6, 1931, in Pine Bluff, Arkansas, to Eariest and Jerimah Robinson. Robinson was an Arkansas National Merit Scholar in high school. After high school, she graduated from the Hampton Institute (now known as Hampton University) in Virginia. She attended a one-year business program at Radcliffe College in Cambridge, Massachusetts, taught by professors from the Harvard Business School. Though women were not yet allowed at Harvard Business School, Robinson became the first African American woman to graduate from the one-year business program. She soon got a job at Aramark, a company that provides food service, facilities, and uniform services to hospitals, universities, school districts, stadiums, and other businesses across the United States and around the world. She eventually climbed the ranks, becoming one of the company’s regional vice presidents. While working at Aramark, she assisted in organizing services for the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, California. In 1982, Robinson married Frank Clarke, a radio advertising salesman. Together they had eight children. During her sales trip to the South, Clarke and her husband, who often accompanied her after his retirement, were devastated by the extreme poverty they saw in some of the low-income school districts they visited to secure food service contracts. Clarke and her husband later met the Superintendent of Public Instruction for Mississippi at an administrator’s conference and were invited to tour schools in the Mississippi Delta region, where poverty is widespread. The Clarkes returned home to Cincinnati, Ohio, appalled by the conditions they saw. So, they got to work, donating books and calculators to districts in need all across the South. In 1991, Clarke retired. She and her husband used most of her $300,000 retirement fund to create the Alabama-Mississippi Education Improvement Fund, where Clarke was the executive director. They sought out schools with leaky roofs, inadequate staffing, and textbook and toilet paper shortages. In 1993, the Alabama-Mississippi Education Improvement Fund was renamed the Educate the Children Foundation. Its mission was to provide books and other materials to impoverished school districts that lacked basic school supplies and the means to secure them. It assists school districts by obtaining surplus books and materials from educational publishers and discarded furniture from wealthier school districts. According to Eli Seaborn, superintendent of the Lowndes School District in Montgomery, Alabama, one of the beneficiaries, “Things came here by the truckload. I don’t know how they got those things.”The foundation soon opened warehouses in Montgomery, Alabama; New Orleans, Louisiana; Atlanta, Georgia; and Greenville, Mississippi. As the costs started to mount, the couple could no longer support the foundation. So, they found a benefactor. They were introduced to John Walton, heir to the Walmart discount chain, and obtained a multiyear grant from the Walton family foundation. Family ties brought the Clarkes to Long Beach, California, where they continued their work from a donated office in the Huntington Beach headquarters of Vascular Logic, a medical supplier. In 1997, they opened a computer-oriented summer camp for children in Compton, California. The Clarkes commuted to Enterprise Middle School from Long Beach, teaching two classrooms full of 30 eager middle schoolers during morning and afternoon classes on basic computer skills. The Clarkes also recruited a small army of volunteers, including family members and graduates of earlier ETC training programs, to help provide training on donated computers and help distribute goods. They also found creative ways to increase their number of volunteers using prisoners across the South. East Tennessee prisoners developed new skills in refurbishing donated classroom furniture before it was sent to needy schools. Prisoners in Mississippi and New Orleans learned warehousing skills by working in storage spaces donated to ETC. By 1999, the Clarkes had distributed over $20 million worth of books and other equipment to schools in nine states, including Washington DC, the U.S. Virgin Islands, Haiti, and Ghana. Targeting 100 of the nation’s poorest school districts, they worked to establish computer labs in schools across the United States, including Native American reservations in North and South Dakota. In 1996, Faye and Frank Clarke received the President’s Service Award from President Bill Clinton for their service to impoverished school districts across America. In 1997, they received the National Caring Award. In 2002, Clarke was inducted into the Arkansas Black Hall of Fame. She and her husband still live in Long Beach, California. Sources: www.encyclopediaofarkansas.net - Faye Clarke (1931–) www.lasvegassun.com - A Couple's Quest to Aid Poor Schools www.latimes.com - Couple’s View of Philanthropy: Give Till It Helps www.arblackhalloffame.org - Faye Clarke Written by: Ninfa O. Barnard