Trafford Publishing: The Power of One: The Unsung Everyday Heroes Rescuing America's Cities

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The Power of One: The Unsung Everyday Heroes Rescuing America's Cities

by Debra J. Schweiger Berg

384 pages; quality trade paperback (softcover); catalogue #04-1028; ISBN 1-4120-3201-6; US$27.95, C$32.14, EUR22.96, £16.07

Can average Americans solve the country's social problems? Absolutely! Thirty-five altruistic Americans with 26 working solutions are featured as part of a new trend now saving taxpayers millions while changing lives worldwide.

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About the Book About the Author Excerpts Catalogue Information

About the Book

The Power of One: The Unsung Everyday Heroes Rescuing America's Cities
There's a new civic trend in America. The best estimates are that it began in the early eighties, but it's been growing even stronger in the new millennium. After a fifty-year stretch of less than effective, government-supplied social programs, unsung citizen heroes are now challenging the conventional wisdom, applying common sense to the country's social problems and creating more effective solutions!
The Power of One uncovers the true stories behind some of the country's most fascinating grassroots innovators. They range from businessmen to teenagers and housewives to the clergy. Crime, welfare dependency, and housing shortages are motivating these people to give up their high-paying jobs, their personal lives, and even personal safety to pursue their passion for coming to the rescue of their fellow human beings. Thanks in large part to the Internet, the inventions of these grassroots organizers are being replicated and "civic-franchised" across the country, even around the globe.
How effective are these new ideas and why haven't we heard more about them? How are they financed? The Power of One explores these and other questions about America's new civic culture. Those skeptical about the health of the nation's cities might be surprised to learn that social change is possible, even without a high price tag. The only challenges are ways to give these successful civic solutions broader exposure, a financial boost, and a speedier route to replication into more neighborhoods and cities.
Can an ordinary person pioneer a social cure? Absolutely! The 26 accounts in this book are the proof. America owes a great deal to its unsung "civic architects.' Their altruism, ingenuity, and compassion are restoring lives and saving millions in taxpayer dollars as they revitalize neighborhoods, support troubled youth, and liberate those going through life transitions. These secular and faith-based solutions are soon to become the social templates for restoring America's twenty-first century towns and cities from sea to shining sea!

About the Author

Debra Schweiger Berg has devoted herself to the subject of civic entrepreneurs since 1994. Entrepreneurial experience combined with a decade of public service formed her vision for the far-reaching potential of their social innovations.
A native of east-central Illinois, she studied at the University of Illinois, earning a B.A. with high distinction in political science and a masters degree in public administration (M.P.A.). While at the university, she was also recognized as a Charles E. Merriam Scholar for her research on local government in Illinois. She next sought practical experience working in Washington, D.C., as congressional staff to Representative Edward R. Madigan (R-IL) during the 1974 Watergate hearings and in 1975 for the U.S. Treasury Department.
From the mid-1970s to the early 1980s, when few women were employed on legislative staffs, she held positions in three states. She served as finance analyst for the Illinois Senate Appropriations and Local Government Committees and as budget and program analyst for the Kentucky Legislative Research Commission and the Minnesota Legislative Audit Commission where she co-authored studies on welfare, education, and chemical dependency.
Debra left the public policy arena when the largest HMO in Minnesota recruited her as senior finance analyst. At the same time, she used her financial skills to establish a successful marketing and training company spanning the U.S., Mexico, and the Netherlands reaching into the top two percent in sales volume for all U.S. micro-enterprise businesses. That experience led to her eventual recruitment by the wireless and protocol software industries.
Debra has reinvested her public policy and entrepreneurial experience in a better civil society by launching a national research effort, writing this book, and creating a web site, www.powerone.org, to shine much needed light on civic entrepreneurs and their highly effective and compassionate social solutions.

Excerpts

Founder: Parry Aftab
Ex-Corporate Advocate
WiredSafety.org
www.wiredsafety.org
Location: New Jersey
Year Founded: 1998
Problem: As the public's use of the Internet grows, so does the incidence of cyberstalking, cyberporn, and cyberscamming. Children, adults, and even those in law enforcement lack training on cybercrime prevention and investigative techniques. Governments have not instituted adequate cybercrime laws nor have they trained law enforcement personnel in cybercrime methods. The lag time between the public going on-line and the establishment of cybercrime safeguards and educational awareness campaigns has put many innocent users at great risk.
Solution: Create an Internet education and crime-solving web site that links the average user and law enforcement with cyberexperts. Train volunteers with the skills to thwart predators and stalkers and connect their victims with trained law enforcement personnel. Use the web site to instruct families on Internet safety. And educate public policy leaders on reforms needed to control cybercrime.
______________________________________
Why would a highly paid Internet attorney leave her lucrative group practice to lead the cause of counteracting cybercrime and do it without pay? Was it a case of temporary insanity? No, Parry had her wits about her. She's quite clear about why she made the switch. Through a series of events, the cause of Internet security found her, and she's been leading it ever since.
Since the World Wide Web was launched in 1993, 600 million people have entered the ether of cyberspace. Most of those people are completely unfamiliar with its crime-laden potential. While the Internet has since become an integral part of everyday life for many, technology, coupled with all those novice users, has created a ripe environment for cybercriminals. In her experience as one of the first five Internet attorneys in the world, Parry Aftab met up with that reality on a daily basis. But her expertise had exposed her to just one side of Internet crime. She hadn't quite realized the personal torment those in her case files had been subjected to until the day she came face to face with one pedophilia web site and one of its victims.
In 1998, while Parry was investigating a case of cybercrime, a woman sent her an e-mail with a URL of a pedophilia web site. The letter urged her to shut it down and throw the criminals in jail. Curious, Parry typed in the address, which displayed a list of photo links. When she clicked on one of the links, a picture opened showing a tiny three-year-old girl being raped.
That photo changed Parry's life. She recalls the expression on the little girl's face. "Her eyes were closed," she recalls, "looking the way little girls do when they want to pretend that they're somewhere else." After crying for an hour and becoming physically ill, Parry decided to reconsider an offer to head up a fledgling cybercrime web site. She'd previously said no because of her full-time law practice and the fact that the web site position carried no salary. But now the Internet had shown her the face of an innocent child being victimized. Time and money seemed less important. Parry knew that now she had to take action.
A fledgling site named Cyberangels was an offshoot of the New York Guardian Angels and had attracted a few volunteers. Curtis Sliwa, the head of the Guardian Angels begged Parry to run the site for him. After her experience with the pedophile site, she decided to take the nonprofit to the next level. Her only stipulation was that she be allowed to run it independently from the Guardian Angels. However, while she knew Internet law hands-down, Parry lacked the skills for tracking and tracing someone on the Web. Fortunately, one of her volunteers, Kelly Beatty, now her second in command, understood the technology and helped her learn the ropes. Parry still can't imagine how she would have furthered the cause had it not been for Kelly and the help of the other Web-savvy volunteers who came on early in the nonprofit's history. Their training was invaluable and proved well worth the time investment for the busy attorney, who was intent on doing whatever it took to save the lives of innocent children.
Ease of access to the Internet provides criminals a free advertising venue for activities like pornography and cyberstalking. Even an innocent visit to a chat room or a naive personal disclosure in an e-mail can present an open invitation for a stalker or predator. Since the average Web surfer tends to offer more personal details than they should about themselves, they become vulnerable to criminals. Especially in chat rooms, people tend to let their guard down because the other party's physical response cues are hidden. As a result, what began as a friendly chat can later turn into regret over offering too much personal information to a stranger.
Unfortunately that scenario happens every day. Gary, a young victim of cyberstalking (defined as any unwanted advances online) was sexually harassed for four long months by a stalker who'd tracked down his address and telephone number. Unwilling to play along with his harasser, Gary became the victim of repeated threats and even had his name posted on a pedophile web site. Eventually, he was so barraged by hate mail from the stalker that his Internet Service Provider canceled his e-mail address. A WiredSafety volunteer, one of hundreds on-line at any given time, learned of Gary's plight in an on-line chat room and gave him the information he needed to trace the predator's location. Gary followed the steps, tracked him down, and blew his cover. The harassment ceased and Gary got his life back. But knowing the stalker was still "out there" and cornering other innocent victims, turned Gary into a WiredSafety volunteer, part of the corps that now assists 200 stalker victims a day.
U.S. Justice Department annual estimates are imprecise, but the number of people directly affected by cybercrime has spiraled into the hundreds of thousands. Even though 70 percent of the country is now on-line, many users are Internet-uneducated. Despite the fact that the U.S. has historically been the heaviest Internet user, both federal and state governments have been slow to get up to speed with legal protections and funding. Other countries took to the Web more slowly, but they've addressed the issue of cybercrime more quickly with greater emphasis on law enforcement training.
The irony is that while governments in the U.S. have been slower to train law enforcement, Parry's cybercrime programs are the most in demand worldwide. New York-based WiredSafety.org (now reorganized from Cyberangels), a nonprofit and nongovernmental organization, has become the world's largest Internet help, safety, and education organization. In only a few years, the group has grown to over 10,000 volunteers (6,000 in the U.S.) from 76 countries of the world. Despite the millions spent by foreign governments on their own country's internal Internet safety programs, leaders worldwide regularly seek out assistance from Parry and the WiredSafety volunteers.
After several years of juggling her profession and the cause, Parry gave up her law practice in 2001 to work full time as WiredSafety's executive director. She decided that if the group were to remain afloat it would require her undivided attention for speaking and maintaining an on-line presence. Adept at answering a thousand e-mails a day from visitors to the web site, Parry takes no salary for her work and the organization has no overhead. Travel, training, and Parry's living expenses have been financed from personal savings, an occasional legal case, and the sale of her house. Key volunteers have also made financial sacrifices: when they should be working regular jobs, they've been tracking cybercriminals, some even to the point of not meeting their utility bills.
Why do they do it? Much of the motivation comes as the result of personal experience. Fifty percent of WiredSafety volunteers have either been victims of an on-line stalker or other personally invasive episode, like identify theft, or know someone who was. Parry suspects that the other 50 percent of volunteers may have been victims of some abuse outside the cyber environment. In their minds, it's the desperate need of those in trouble that keeps them devoted to the cause, which often supersedes their own financial comfort.
A WiredSafety volunteer from the United Kingdom grew concerned for her kids when her babysitter's boy friend was arrested for possession of child pornography. Webangel (her WiredSafety.org name) was horrified at knowing that, on several occasions, her two children had been left alone with him. Parry and the volunteers offered her legal counsel and moral support that motivated her (she was already a web designer by profession) to become a part of the WiredSafety's all-volunteer web development team.

Catalogue Information