After over four decades in finance, a University of Chicago alum found his way towards solving a nearly lifelong puzzle through the Leadership and Society Initiative (LSI) fellowship.
Something always bugged Steve Blewitt about how hard it was to get a summer job. He was a University of Chicago undergrad, and an alumnus of Regis, a prestigious New York high school, but when he returned to Queens to find a job for summer, it was harder than it should have been. Some of that difficulty may have had to do with the school’s later dismissal or that the New York City economy of the late ‘70s was famously dismal. But there was something else that Steve, the son of Irish immigrants, couldn’t quite put his finger on.
That question stayed with Blewitt as he graduated from Chicago, moved to Boston, married his college girlfriend, got an MBA, and steadily rose the ranks at John Hancock, the only employer he’d ever have, where he finally retired, after 41 years and many different job titles, as Head of Private Markets. Then he started thinking about the challenges of youth employment even more.
Though his work at John Hancock had little to nothing to do with creating job opportunities, the issue stuck with him.
He read a book called When Work Disappears: The World of the New Urban Poor by William Julius Wilson, which explores the challenges of the residents of Chicago’s South Side. The book had an immediate impact on Blewitt. “I really made a big connection to it,” he recalls. It wasn’t just because Wilson’s work focused on the communities on the South Side of Chicago surrounding Blewitt’s alma mater, but “because it was a topic that I was really interested in. It was something that I thought about a lot. ‘Okay, how do you help young people find meaningful work?’”
Blewitt and his wife, Maria, who’d been an environmental science educator, knew it was an issue they’d want to try to address after they both retired. They’d supported various mission-driven organizations financially, but now they wanted to make a more active impact. “We support programs to advance opportunities for folks,” Steve says. “But we didn’t really, you know, get in and do it.” Now, they knew the issue, and the challenge they wanted to work on, but just what form it would take was unclear.
So at 63, Steve Blewitt went back to the University of Chicago, only this time to participate in the Leadership & Society Initiative (LSI). He hadn’t been a student since 1987, when he’d gotten his MBA at Boston University, while working full-time at John Hancock. This time felt different, mainly because it wasn’t about grades or career advancement. “You’re not doing it to get a grade,” he says. “You’re doing it for the learning, so you take a different approach.”
Also, this time he had a deep sense of purpose—to figure out how to channel his energy and intention around youth employment. “I felt that a program like this would give me the structure to think through what I wanted to do,” he says, “and that’s exactly what happened.”
There wasn’t one miraculous light bulb moment in his nine months in Chicago—Blewitt’s thinking was shaped as much by the classes he audited as the ones that were part of the core curriculum, as well as by his peers—but there was one class in particular, How to Think Sociologically with Associate Professor Marco Garrido, which introduced a concept that both explained Blewitt’s past and helped determine his future.
“There was a lot of talk about social capital,” he says. “And it was in that class that I realized what I was really driving for in my initiative. In some ways, it gave me the language to be able to talk about it.” Blewitt came to understand that social capital was a crucial, often missing component that determines youth employment. It was a big part of why he (and his wife) struggled to find summer jobs. “The LSI fellowship helped me realize that it was the lack of connections that I had. My parents were immigrants from Ireland, and for them everything was about education and work. And they didn’t have the connections, and didn’t think that was something important.”
Blewitt and his wife had moved to North Carolina after they both retired a few years earlier, with Blewitt moving to Chicago for the LSI program. Then, he had a lifelong learner’s version of senioritis: Once he had his social capital epiphany and had found, through LSI, the direction for his future initiative, he was eager to get back home and start putting it in action.
Back in North Carolina, the Blewitts soon formed Youth.Work.Connect, an organization to help students from typically underserved communities use social connections for career opportunities and economic mobility.
This spring, they ran their first workshop for about thirty students at a Christo Rey school in North Carolina, which incorporates a class/work model to promote employment and better train their students for a professional life after high school. They focused on informational interviews and how to handle them.
“The energy level in the room was super high,” Steve says, reflecting that enthusiasm himself. “The kids really, really liked it. We did a survey and based on our data, they said they learned a lot, which was great. It’s slow, but we’ve written some good curriculum. We’ve had at least one test case, which was, I would say, successful. So we’re energized.”
The Blewitts’ outreach is not limited to students, but to adults as well. “A lot of what we’re trying to do is help young people through adults,” he explains. “We’re encouraging adults to be very intentional about sharing their social capital and having the kids think about asking for it.”
Steve and Maria are just getting started. After all, it was only a year ago that Steve was, once again, a student at the University of Chicago trying to figure out what to do with the rest of his life.
The University of Chicago Leadership and Society Initiative (LSI) supports accomplished leaders in successfully transitioning from their longstanding careers toward purposeful next chapters. LSI Fellows immerse themselves in UChicago’s unparalleled environment of big ideas and multigenerational dialogue, gaining frameworks for learning from their past and planning for their futures.
Contact us to learn more about LSI.
This piece was developed in partnership with ROAR Forward. Learn more about ROAR Forward here.
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