“Pray about it,” Brother Leon said before I could breathe a word of response. “You don’t have to give us an answer now. We don’t want you to think that this is something you have to do. Think about it for a week and then give us an answer.”
“Okay,” I said, flattered and at a loss of words. “I just want to say thank you for all you have done and for considering me for the job.”
I admired and respected these men with an almost saint-like reverence and felt as if I were being selected to be a member of the Supreme Court.
“Let’s schedule a meeting a week from now in my office,” Leon said. “You can give me an answer then.”
A week later, I rode the 71C bus down Penn Avenue and got off in front of a sign that read, Welcome to Wilkinsburg. The butterflies flapped their wings, and the birds sang their praises as I walked past the McDonald’s, then the Burger King up to Wallace Avenue.
Brother Leon’s office was on the third floor of the once abandoned Horner School, now transformed into the Hosanna House Community Center. I was met by an attractive secretary, who called to inform him of my arrival. I felt as if I were doing something important, as if this were very serious business, a solemn contrast to the work I was performing at Technical Services. After the call, the secretary smiled, then gave the okay for me to go down the hall to his office.
Garnished with a black African motif, the office walls were decorated with colorful wallpaper. Tiny wooden sculptures stood on the end tables. To my left hung a bulky painting of a dark-skinned warrior wearing golden body armor and holding a spear while standing at his post in front of an intricately designed, arched gate.
I thought it to be the perfect symbolic image of Brother Leon. In the middle of the office, there was a desk with two chairs in front and a leather seat against the wall. On the other side of the desk sat Brother Leon. Behind him was a shelf which housed a baseball bat and a football, each covered with the signatures of the players from the Pittsburgh Steelers and Pirates franchises. Humbled, I sat in the left chair in front of his desk.
“Hey, Von!” he said, turning toward me with a large smile on his face, revealing his white teeth, “Give me one second here.”
As he went through some papers on his desk, my palms began to sweat. I felt so small in his office, yet I admired his style. He finally settled, leaned back in his chair, and waited for me to speak.
“I decided to accept the Brothers Keepers Program Coordinator position,” I said. “I’ve given my job at Facilities Management a two weeks’ notice, so I can start work any time after then.”
“This position requires a two-year commitment because of the funding component,” he said. “Will you be able to make that commitment?”
“Yes, I’ll commit to two years,” I responded in a pact that would haunt me for years to come.
On my first day of employment as the official program coordinator of BK, my second real job since graduation after I had left Technical Services, and several years after I began volunteering as a big brother, I spent most of the day walking back and forth, and up and down Wallace Avenue in Wilkinsburg, between Hosanna House and the historic Wood Street church building.
CCOP used to hold its services at that location, but since the recent construction of a new church site on Andrews Drive in the East End, the old location was only used as a business office for smaller activities like the Youth or Singles Ministries and the main sanctuary for weddings and funerals.
From its very beginning, BK traditionally held its Wednesday evening meetings at the Wood Street Church in an area behind the main sanctuary. Functionally, the program was an auxiliary ministry within CCOP and therefore utilized many of the church’s resources. For example, most of the big brothers were members of CCOP, and a requirement of acceptance into the program for big and little brothers alike was church attendance.
However, due to the increased growth of Hosanna House, many of the facilities like the gymnasium and recreational centers were used by BK more and more.
The position of program coordinator was the first of its kind. Never in the history of BK had someone been paid to perform the duties of managing and supervising all its responsibilities. Brother Gil had taken on the task as a volunteer, using his own time and money over the years, doing what he often referred to as the service of God. So, as I waited for many of the administrative details to come together, my patience was often stretched beyond its normal limits. Unlike Pitt, where many of its departments had been around for over a century, BK, moving under the umbrella of a grant-funded program with a financed manager, was only in its infantile stages.
During several planning sessions about the further development of BK, the topic of change and taking the program to another level of ministry had often surfaced.
As program coordinator, I recognized that an important first step in this direction would be to move the center of operations away from the Wood Street facility and into the Hosanna House Community Center. I believed the perfect rationale for such a move was that the location change would ultimately make BK more accessible to the community.
When I talked with Brother Leon about my office, he said that a space would be set up for me at the Wood Street business office, but I asked him if I could have an office in Hosanna House. I argued that BK seemed to occupy the rear sanctuary at Wood Street for the Wednesday evening meetings just as much as it had done at Hosanna House for activity, recreation nights, and other events, and he agreed. In my mind, if I was truly serious about moving the program away from the church, why not start with the program coordinator?
Instead of having my own office, I ended up sharing a space with Brother David Baird in the Youth Center on the first floor of Hosanna House. He had the responsibility of directing a school-based youth program in the Wilkinsburg Middle School next door, in addition to his youth leadership role at CCOP. I couldn’t believe it. The importance of the level of my new job quickly began to sink in as I found myself next to Brother David, who I still saw as Pastor David from my days of being involved with the Youth Ministry.
The office was located in the back of a recreation room. It had no windows, and the walls were thickly painted concrete blocks. A door was the only barrier separating us from the chaos of the pool, air hockey and foosball tables outside.
On the third floor of Hosanna House, there was a yet-to-be renovated auditorium—minus the theater seats—used as a storage area for furniture and other office related items. Piles and piles of donated equipment loomed in every direction. As far as the eye could see, there were dusty desks, tables, chairs, computer monitors, hard drives, office equipment, and boxes full of all the things that made a community center operate.
I was told to choose a desk to place in the office. Two immaculate cherry oak executive desks immediately caught my attention. When the movers brought one of them down to the office, I noticed that it barely fit through the door and looked totally out of place. Having them in the recreation room office was kind of like an auto mechanic wearing a suit. When Brother David saw the desk, he said he wanted one too, and the next day, the other was placed inside. A Hosanna House phone line and a voice messaging system was set up for BK—another progressive action to move the program away from Wood Street—although there had been one already set up at the church.
The biggest problem that I encountered during the early developmental stages of the BK program coordinator position was the lack of my ability, and the nonexistent support of others in the program to understand the patterns of the job and therefore create a work schedule to accomplish its tasks. When I was employed at Technical Services, I had gotten used to a standard nine to five shift. Unfortunately, this time frame wasn’t practical for BK. Shortly after I was hired, Brother Leon gave me a warning about not filling up my plate with too much of all the work that there was to do around Hosanna House, and at the time, I mistakenly thought I’d be able to handle whatever it was that he was suggesting. But he was right. Before long, I found myself being pulled in many different