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The Son Of A Single Mom, He Rose From Poverty To Lead One Of The World’s Largest Foundations

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Sam Reiman, the director of the $3.4 billion Pittsburgh-based Richard King Mellon Foundation, has given two careful interviews about the circumstances of his childhood. The director of one of the world’s 50 largest foundations, he is also the son of a single mom; he grew up poor and dropped out of high school.

But Reiman says he’s never told this particular story to a reporter. It goes to the heart of what it means to be poor in America, the lack of choices, the emotional devastation visited on children and their caregivers, and the narrowing paths for climbing out of poverty. We both get a little bit emotional when he tells it in his well-appointed office, housed in the BNY Mellon tower high above Pittsburgh.

The story’s setting is Lancaster, Pa., a down-at-the-heels apartment complex where his mom struggled to pay the rent. Sam was 11 then, one of three children; his parents had divorced when he was young. The only jobs his mother, Barbara, could find were in fast-food or retail, and they didn’t pay a living wage.

Night Classes

“She saw an advertisement for night classes, to get a commercial driver’s license,” Reiman says. “She was 5’2” and 120 lbs. It was still rare for a woman to be a truck driver.”

Backed into a corner, she took the risk. The classes were offered at night, so she could keep her fast-food job during the day. The family couldn’t afford for her to be without pay even for a week. She got the license.

The day she was to go on the road for the first time, Sam ran out to the parking lot, where she was sitting in the cab of her truck. He begged her not to go. She drove away, anyway.

“I still don’t like to go back to that moment,” he says. “I have an 11-year-old daughter myself now. I can only imagine what it would be like to drive away.”

It’s taken Reiman a long time to be able to speak about these experiences. It’s become normal to talk openly about the impact of race and gender lately; class diversity makes a difference, too. Class can be an emotional box that tells you not to hope. The people who figure out how to get out of the box have insights into the systems that tend to keep them there.

Reiman, who made that rare rise from poverty to wealth, is now in a place where he has the power, with the backing of this branch of the Mellon family, to widen opportunities for millions of people. His background, he says, “affects every decision I make, consciously or subconsciously.”

A Brief Aside On The Facts

For many years, the answer to why Americans could live with such poverty in such a wealthy country was that we also had high levels of economic mobility. But that’s no longer true. Inequality today is worse than it’s been since the 1920s – an increasingly rigid structure whose air gaps make it almost impossible to vault from one class to another.

In 1940, 90% of children would go on to out earn their parents; in 2019, we expect only 50% of millennials to do the same, according to the bipartisan House Committee on Economic Disparity and Fairness in Growth. It’s now easier to climb the economic ladder in Sweden, Germany, France and Japan than in the United States.

In 2019, the top 1% of Americans controlled 50% of the country’s wealth, and the gaps may widen, as the top quintile of earners increasingly takes share from everybody below. Opening a business or getting an education – the two great levers of economic mobility — are much harder, today, if you’re poor. These problems are compounded by the breakdown in the financing system for small businesses, as Seth Levine and I wrote in The New Builders.

Avoiding the Hero Trap

All this makes Sam Reiman’s story important, which is one thing that compels him to talk about it: “There are a lot of people who need to hear that story,” he says. “There’s an assumption that there’s only one path.”

He states: “There’s more than one path.”

But he doesn’t hold himself up as the hero. That’s a danger we hope to avoid. In a narcissistic age, stories about grit tend to become stories about heroes, and the internal lesson that people draw is not about fixing the system or persisting, but that singular heroes should be admired.

That’s the not the point. Reiman figured out quickly that if he wanted to get the jobs he wanted, he needed to fit into upper-middle-class cultures.

“I never wanted to get a job because of my story,” Reiman says. “There’s a persistent desire for normalcy. Other people don’t have to lead with their story.”

When I asked Reiman, in an email follow-up, how we could reduce the shame that surrounds poverty, he answered:

“That is a complex question! As a society we need to rediscover the meaning of empathy,” he wrote. “We must believe in the potential of every person, regardless of their race, gender, or zip code. And we must acknowledge that economic success is only one metric in our lives, and that achieving it, or not, doesn’t define us. Our legacy is in how we support each other.

“Being good in our relationships is free.”

Working For One of the Wealthiest Families

Under the leadership of Reiman and Richard A. Mellon, who took over chairmanship in 2019, the foundation has been giving away more money, and taking more risks. Founded in 1947 by the grandson of Thomas Mellon, founder of an immense family fortune that grew by banking and heavy industry, the Richard King Mellon Foundation is decidedly entrepreneurial – and it’s creating more opportunity for entrepreneurs in Pittsburgh. Over the past two years, the foundation invested $300 million, by far its largest gift ever, via Carnegie Mellon and the University of Pittsburgh in Hazelwood Green, a 178-acre research campus likely to become a hub for biomedical companies, with housing and shops on the site of an old coke works. It also launched a for-profit social impact pitch competition and began actively soliciting proposals from the community, seeing the number more than double. And, it’s become cautiously more open about its own image, telling more stories about its work.

“They’re doing really remarkable things at RK Mellon,” said Patty Tascarella, senior reporter at the Pittsburgh Business Times, by email. The foundation is shedding its reserved image, she said, pointing to its public introduction of its latest strategic plan and its investments in for-profit social impact companies like Day Owl, which makes backpacks from old plastic bottles.

“The more you learn about Sam, the more unusual he is in the traditional foundation world,” she said.

Reiman says his background gives him a deep awareness of how complicated and systemic poverty is, awareness he brings to his job in philanthropy. He remembers what enabled his mother to take the CDL course: the classes were offered at night. He knows why he dropped out of school: Labeled a low achiever from an early age, the sensitive kid also felt it deeply when his family couldn’t afford the same clothes and shoes other kids had. And after his mother became a truck triver, his older brother, Doug, held the family together at the age of 17 – which meant a constant level of chaos.

The Slow, Quiet Climb Out

His brother, Doug, also attended a nearby school, Harrisburg Area Community College. While he worked a series of low-wage jobs, more than 20 over the years of his late teens, Sam Reiman borrowed his brother’s textbooks and began to read and write. Eventually, he sat for his GED and went to HACC himself.

He told some of this story to the Lancaster Intelligencer Journal in June 1999, when he got a work-scholarship to Franklin & Marshall College, a top private school nearby. He had to clean the park next door. Deep on his LinkedIn page, he includes a quote from his organic chemistry professor: "Didn't I see you earlier today carrying around a weed wacker?"

From there he borrowed money and worked to go to graduate school at Carnegie Mellon, where he landed a summer internship at the Forbes Funds, an organization that works with nonprofit leaders.

He loved it so much that he volunteered there, even after he got his first job. His early career helped him understand how important it was to him to have a sense of calling. In the world of nonprofits and foundations, he was heartened by what he found. “People were especially empathetic around the human experience,” he said. “They were quick and responsive and thoughtful.”

He started at the Richard King Mellon Foundation seven years ago, as the foundation was beginning its search for a replacement for Scott Izzo, the previous director.

In Reiman, “they found the perfect Pennsylvanian, who knows these hills and valleys, who understands the issues that cut across a rural and urban divide, and what it’s like to go through decades long economic transformation and comeback,” says Gregg Behr, executive director of the Grable Foundation, who worked with Reiman at the Forbes Funds. (Pittsburgh, by virtue of its industrial might a century ago, has 2,500 foundations, more than all but three other cities in the United States).

“I think he’s incredibly vulnerable to share his story. And it probably is not far afield from what many people in Pittsburgh have experienced.”

What Enables Someone to Rise

In 2020, Reiman told part of his story to Tascarella. He casually mentioned that he’d had 20 jobs in his teens. “What reporter wouldn’t want to know more?” she told me in an email.

She wrote a story about the long road Reiman had traveled, which Reiman posted on LinkedIn, with a note about how important community colleges are. I saw it there, put it together with some of the innovative projects I’d seen RK Mellon Foundation fund, and when I traveled to Pittsburgh as a part of a reporting project sponsored by Armory Square Ventures, I wanted to interview him.

Reiman, met his wife, an immigrant from Colombia, in Lancaster, and became engaged to her when they were both 19. She helped put him through graduate school. They now have two daughters.

His mother became an LPN; later he brought her to live with him in in-law quarters at his house. His brother, who held the small family together as a teenager, died in a car accident at 29.

Reiman is very aware of all the things that made him who he is: the community college system, for instance. And his father’s veterans benefits that he used to help pay for more of graduate school (he still graduated with debt).

And his mom’s ability to drive away, on that day when he was 11. She still feels regret about having to leave her family to earn a living, Reiman says. “We will never get that time back together. Many single mothers feel that same way.

“Yet when I revisit that moment, I remind myself that the alternative - us struggling to make rent and utility payments each month, relying on friends to help purchase groceries when we were short on cash, or thinking that my mom would find a reliable adult male partner who could help, and not further drain our resources - wasn’t sustainable.

“We also share those stories with my daughters so that they know how difficult it was to make it out of poverty, and to never take what we now have for granted.”

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