Former Opera Singer Hits High Note Helping Newark’s Children

It is a cold Tuesday morning, and William Madsen has just arrived at the end of his commute. Each weekday he leaves his home in Maplewood, N.J., an affluent town of 24,000, for nearby Newark. The distance between the two places registers a scant five miles, but they are different worlds.

While Maplewood is a desirable address — Money magazine has called it one of the best places to live in the country — Newark is a place of innumerable woes, including stubbornly high unemployment, a dropout rate at public high schools that approaches 50 percent, and aging and deteriorating housing.

“You have kids growing up here who can’t even play outside because of the violence,” he says. “These kids face just unbelievable odds.”

Mr. Madsen, who works as associate director of Protestant Community Centers, part of the Community Agencies Corporation of New Jersey, would like to see those odds change. He oversees a program that links more than 450 school-age children per week with adult volunteers who work with them one-on-one, offering academic tutoring and personal guidance.

Each weekday, vans fan out across this city, collecting children from their elementary schools and delivering them to 26 locations in the cities and suburbs, including churches, community centers, and corporate offices, where they meet with the adult volunteers.

The Suburban Cultural Educational Enrichment Program, as it is called, is enormously successful, says Mr. Madsen. For the past 15 years, he says, of the children who participated for three years, at least 70 percent have made the honor rolls at their schools.

“What we try to do is open some doors for the kids who live here,” he says. “We’re not saving everyone. But we’re saving a lot.”

A Thousand Volunteers

Mr. Madsen, whom most people call by his nickname, Chip, is heading to his first destination of the day: a 10 a.m. appointment at McKinley Elementary School, in Newark’s North Ward. As he navigates traffic, his cellphone buzzes repeatedly. Mr. Madsen is in charge, either directly or indirectly, of more than 1,000 volunteers, and he hears from them all day long. They call to touch base, or just to say hello.

“I spend the majority of my time in the field,” says Mr. Madsen, “and the most important thing I can do is just listen.”

This morning, he is visiting the library at McKinley Elementary, site of a Reading Is Fundamental book distribution. Protestant Community Centers coordinates the free book giveaways, which take place three times a year at 52 sites in Newark. Mr. Madsen was named national volunteer of the year in 2001 by Reading Is Fundamental, the nonprofit children’s literacy organization.

Delia Cafaro, the media specialist at McKinley, is in charge of today’s book distribution, and she presides over a hive of activity. Half a dozen sixth-grade girls serve as de facto librarians, some helping their classmates select paperback books in English or Spanish, others preparing to write down the students’ choices. That information will be used to help Ms. Cafaro decide what to order for the next book distribution. “It’s very successful as a program,” she says. “The kids love it because they can pick any book they like, and it gets them reading.”

The process appears seamless. Ms. Cafaro reports to Mr. Madsen — or “Mr. Chip,” as nearly everyone here calls him — that her team has the books it needs, and that the survey of student choices is helping her make better selections. But getting free books into the hands of young Newark readers has not always been so simple, notes Mr. Madsen. When he became associate director of Protestant Community Centers 14 years ago, and assumed coordination of the Reading Is Fundamental program, he insisted on making many of the decisions himself. “I used to pick the books,” he says. “But what do I know about the books that kids like to read?”

Learning to let go, and trust the people with whom he works, has been part of his evolution as a manager of volunteers, says Mr. Madsen, and, more important, has freed him to think more creatively about his mission of getting books to young readers.

Case in point: a series of focus groups that his charity recently conducted at several Newark elementary schools.

“We asked students, ‘Where are you getting your books?’ and the answer was almost always ‘RIF,’” he says, “They don’t have books at home, and they don’t necessarily have access to libraries.”

City budget cuts have limited public-library hours, he says, and New Jersey’s push to move its neediest residents from welfare to work has left many families cash-strapped to the extent that even bus fare to the library is an extravagance. Mr. Madsen’s group is spearheading a drive to get people to donate books that will supplement the Reading Is Fundamental giveaways.

“We’re even asking kids to donate their old RIF books,” he says. “It’s working. I know that as a result of our efforts that more kids have books at home.”

A Revelation

Watching Mr. Madsen in a room full of elementary-school students, it is hard to believe that he came to this work relatively recently, and that for most of his life he nursed a dream of a very different sort: He wanted to be an opera singer. “I made a deal with myself that if I wasn’t at the Met by the time I hit 40 that I would do something else,” says the now 53-year-old Mr. Madsen. A lyric baritone, he spent years performing in Germany, and ultimately moved to Newark to be closer to the big performing centers of the Northeast.

But 15 years ago, while touring with a singing group called Men of Song, he had a revelation. On a trip through Chicago, he met a pastor who served that city’s notoriously tough South Side: “He told me about all of the work that he was doing with kids, about the lives he was saving, and I had to ask myself, ‘What am I doing?’”

While that meeting cast doubt on Mr. Madsen’s future as a performer, it placed an event from his past in important perspective.

While attending the University of South Florida as a music major in the 1970s, his music fraternity, Phi Mu Alpha, renovated a house in Ybor City, a neighborhood in Tampa, Fla. The fraternity brothers also taught neighborhood children how to read and perform music.

“It came back to me just how much I’d enjoyed doing that,” he says. “I realized that what I really wanted to do was work with kids.”

So that is what Mr. Madsen did, first volunteering for Protestant Community Centers in 1990, then accepting a coordinator position three months later, and taking the job of associate director in 1991.

While overseeing an immense fleet of volunteers may seem nothing like a career on the stage, he insists that his performance training has turned out to be ideal preparation for his current job.

“A lot of my job is performing,” he says. “I’m speaking to people at churches and in the community, encouraging them to volunteer and to support our mission.”

The two careers share in common something else as well. Mr. Madsen notes: They both require an eye — or an ear — for detail. “There are so many pieces, so many steps,” he says. “You have to make sure that every single thing falls into place.”

The Perfect Match

The town house where Protestant Community Centers keeps its headquarters is the product of yet another donation, this one by a member of the charity’s board. The organization uses every bit of its three stories, from the basement, which houses a food pantry and piles of books waiting to be sorted by a local Girl Scout troop, to the top floor, where Mr. Madsen sees to the business of managing his fleet of volunteers.

To keep track of them all, he relies on technology, using a database that is continually updated by staff members. He also keeps in touch via quarterly newsletters and a yearly reception to honor the people who donate their time and energy to the charity. But before a single volunteer’s information can be entered into the system, Mr. Madsen insists on meeting him or her.

“The first thing I do is find out what the person’s interests are,” he says. “What are they really passionate about? Then I try to match those passions with our needs.”

In addition to overseeing volunteers, Mr. Madsen must always be on the lookout for new recruits to keep his charity’s programs running.

Today he is making use of the time between later-morning appointments to follow up on some possibilities. Last week, for example, after speaking to a local Rotary Club about the power of volunteering one-on-one to help youngsters, he was approached by a retired National Football League referee who was interested in working with young people in Newark.

“I immediately thought: Let’s get him into the high schools,” says Mr. Madsen. “Think what a difference it could make to those kids to hear this guy talk.”

Mr. Madsen credits his faith with helping him to do his job. He is an active member of a Methodist congregation in Maplewood. He is also proud to note that his church is the site of a Protestant Community Centers mentor program.

But, as he is the first to admit, Newark is not an easy place to keep one’s faith, and every day presents its own tests.

If the book-distribution program at McKinley Elementary shows how a charity can successfully touch the lives of poor schoolchildren, Mr. Madsen’s next stop, an early-afternoon visit to an organization called Project Babies, or Boarder and Abandoned Babies: Intervention, Education and Support Services — one of his charity’s projects — offers a demonstration of the profound obstacles that many of these children face.

“Boarder babies” is the name given to infants born to drug-addicted mothers. State law requires that such babies be removed from the care of their mothers just days after they have been born. Some of the infants will end up here at Project Babies, where they will be nurtured until they can be reunited with their mothers, adopted, or placed in foster care.

Mr. Madsen is a regular presence here. The donated townhouse that houses the tiny charges is not far from Protestant Community Centers’ headquarters. He stops by to visit Karen Towns, who oversees both Project Babies and a program for homeless teenagers, to make sure that she has the supplies she needs and whatever volunteer labor she can use. The Newark Junior League recently redecorated the nursery where the infants sleep. And he drops in to look in on the babies.

The house is equipped to care for four children at a time, and today there is a new arrival — a week-old infant still struggling to shake off the effects of the heroin that his mother was addicted to.

“This would make some people angry,” says Mr. Madsen, reaching down to stroke the cheek of a sleeping infant. It is clear that the situation makes him angry, too, but he says that he is able to channel that anger into something else: the motivation to help and to make this one part of the world a little better. “I guess in some sense this is what fuels me,” he says.

The World of Work

In recent years, downtown Newark has undergone a renaissance of sorts. It is now home to the New Jersey Performing Arts Center, along with a handful of gleaming corporate office towers. It is 4 p.m., and Mr. Madsen’s last visit of the day is to one of these, the headquarters of Prudential Financial, site of one of Protestant Community Centers’ mentor programs. Three dozen sixth graders from the Morton Street Middle School are ensconced in the Prudential cafeteria, working with some of the company’s 35 volunteer mentors.

The students make the trip to corporate headquarters once a week for three years — enough time for them to develop a long-term relationship with their adult mentors, says Mary O’Malley, vice president of local initiatives at Prudential Financial.

“These volunteers are more than tutors,” she says. “Maybe they’re helping a student prepare for a test, but when they bring that child into their cubicle, they are mentoring them in other ways as well.”

Mr. Madsen has stopped by to talk with the program’s coordinator, Jeff Roberson, a full-time purchasing manager at Prudential who started out as a volunteer tutor more than 10 years ago. Today he wants some advice.

A parent has pulled a student from the program after just four months because her grades have not yet begun to improve. Mr. Roberson wants Mr. Madsen to contact the girl’s parent and encourage her to put the student back in the program. They talk over possible arguments that might move the parent. Mr. Madsen suggests making clear that taking tutoring away from a child with poor grades is likely to be the equivalent of an academic death sentence.

While the two men run down the list of students — who is doing well, who finally began to speak after weeks of silence, who may need glasses — the children around them are focused on their schoolwork. At a nearby table, two girls work with a tutor on math problems, converting fractions to decimals, decimals to percentage points, numbers to bar graphs. The girls scribble on notepads, then show their work to the tutor. The sound of giggling fills the room. Outside, a light rain has begun to fall.