Inspiring Healing in Society
“What’s that?” my husband asked, pointing at some brightly lit skyscrapers as we sped down the freeway with some friends. We had just moved to New Jersey from California in 1999, and a couple whom we had recently befriended had graciously offered to take us out to dinner. “Oh, that’s just Newark,” came the reply, “you don’t want to go there.” This comment stuck with me--how could the largest city in the state be a place where nobody wanted to go? Why did all of the freeways just skirt around this city?
Ever since I moved to the United States as a teenager, I had been struck by this paradox: how could America, with all of its prosperity and promise, also be a place with such suffering, division and indifference? As a poor immigrant from Malaysia growing up in Queens, NJ, I had experienced this suffering first hand. Yet here I was now, a successful professional with an advanced engineering degree and a comfortable life in a wealthy suburb, and these questions continued to haunt me.
I wondered, “Are the rich and poor doomed to separate into camps of mutual misunderstanding and distrust? Is there any hope for alleviating suffering and injustice?”
One winter, my husband and I volunteered with a small church in Newark to deliver Christmas gifts to the children of incarcerated parents. Many of the presents needed to be delivered to Pennington Court. Occupying an entire city block, Pennington court comprised of four low-rise buildings which stands reservedly amongst newly renovated lofts and townhouses. It was originally built in 1940 as part of the Newark Housing Authority Project. Almost 80 years later, it is still home to hundreds of the city’s poorest families.
Our first encounter with the residents of Pennington Court felt foreign and uncomfortable. Yet, the leaders of that community reached out to us in friendship and helped us organize “Hope Fairs”. In the middle of their courtyard, we shared food, played games, painted the children’s faces, and started to form relationships.
Amongst the volunteers there were big differences in socio-economic backgrounds. One family I met lived in an apartment so small that it could have easily fit into my living room at the time. Still, that knowledge did not cause them to hold back from graciously hosting weekly get-togethers. They gladly provided all the refreshments and even allowed us to sit on their beds when they ran out of chairs. Through their generosity, I learned what true hospitality looks like. I was freed from the embarrassment which had kept me from hosting parties at my 2-bedroom townhome in my affluent suburb.
This community forever changed my perspective. I began to see myself as one who needed to be helped as much as I wanted to give help. Also, I began to see this foreign community as my family.
I was gaining so much through this community that I was inspired to look for ways to give back. One of the things I learned from my newfound community in Newark, is that the injustice suffered by the poor was not simply due to differences in material wealth. Huge barriers blocked access to social networks and tools critical to developing the success mindset.
In my own life, I had the privilege of being born into a high achieving family and social network. My mother taught me to excel in math and science. She also started me on piano lessons at a very young age. Learning how to play the piano was more than about music. It was about learning life skill and developing social networks which helped me navigate life’s challenges and succeed in all areas of my life. Through piano I learned to love the discipline of hard work and the feelings of accomplishment. Performing taught me how to calm my nerves in high stakes situations. Memorizing music taught me how to make sense of complex compositions. Piano competitions taught me how to prepare systematically over several months. Losing taught me how to recover emotionally from devastating disappointments. My piano teacher became my inspiration and guide as she mentored me through the last years of high school after my mother died. I learned to see myself as someone special and capable of achieving anything I put my mind to doing. This is the success-oriented heritage which I am passing on to my children. But now, I began to feel a growing desire to share this gift with others who have become precious to me.
I founded Keys 2 Success to bring that same rigorous musical training I am giving to my own children to the children in Newark. It is not necessarily a unique mission. But what sets us apart is the way we have integrate communities at all levels. We deliberately seek out opportunities for teachers and students from vastly different backgrounds to connect as peers, which help us see the community we serve as “family”.
Having gained so much from trading in my comfortable social settings to live in a community whose culture was foreign to me, I organized Keys 2 Success in such a way that would allow others a chance to also experience an environment that turned the tables on the norms. For instance, piano lessons are conducted in a place that was familiar to the students, but foreign for most of our teachers. As our staff and volunteers learn to depend on those in the community, we have the opportunity to reconnect as peers.
The result has been truly inspiring. Volunteers who have developed such a keen sensitivity to the needs of the children that they have devised new ways to inspire growth in the children. Some have even taken the initiative to reach out through their social networks to recruit friends and family to sustain and grow Keys 2 Success.
I am convinced that acts of service themselves will never be enough to bring about the restoration I was seeking. We give more deeply and appropriately when we see others as our peers, as family. Healing will come when we reconnect as a society. Healing will come to the students, to the volunteers and staff, to the communities we live in.
I looked for hope and found it in inner city Newark. But it didn't happen the way I thought it would. It didn't come about through me and my acts of charitable service. Instead, it happened when I was welcomed by the people of Newark into their community on equal terms. Through loving and being loved, receiving and giving of myself I saw restoration taking shape. I also saw that this desire to be reconnected and transcend boundaries that separate us from one another, is not limited to only a few--it dwells in the hearts of many who long to participate in healing and restoration. My hope is that by sharing my story others will see that it is possible to address the suffering, division and indifference that plague our society and be inspired to pursue healing in their communities.
About the Author:
Jee-Hoon Krska is the founder of Keys 2 Success, a program that seeks to improve the lives of disadvantaged children in Newark through music education. She studied piano in the Juilliard pre-college program and at MIT (Ph.D. EECS). She has performed in concerts including at Boston Symphony Hall, Lincoln Center, and with Yo-Yo Ma. Dr. Krska spent twenty years in the semiconductor industry. During that time, she also actively worked to improve the lives of the youth in Pennington Court, a Newark Housing Authority (NHA) public housing community that is home to many of the poorest minority residents in Newark, through involvement in a series of projects aimed at fostering their intellectual development and social skills . It was through this experience that she saw first hand the effects of generational poverty and developed a passion for investing in the lives of youth which ultimately led to her decision in 2016 to work full time with the children of Newark by founding Keys 2 Success.