Punam Mathur

By Nicole Lucht

Friday, July 24, 2009 | 3 a.m.

Punam Mathur is not just a businesswoman, but a mother of three, a champion for workplace diversity and an advocate for the less fortunate.

Most know Mathur through her work at MGM Mirage, where she helped lead the charge to improve the company’s diversity programs. She is the chairwoman of Three Square, a food bank that distributes food to local charities and schoolchildren.

Recently Mathur left MGM Mirage and joined NV Energy as the utility’s human resources director.

Mathur spoke with In Business Las Vegas about what drew her to the power company, how businesses can give back to the community and what she calls her treasures: the children she adopted through foster care.

IBLV: What does your role at Nevada Energy entail?

Mathur: The cool people call it NV Energy.

OK, NV Energy.

It is now Day 48 or 49 on the job, so, candidly, the answer to that is still evolving and emerging. Although in dog years that would be almost a year.

But here is what the job description says and here’s what the title of the business card says: vice president of human resources. There are a little over 3,200 employees of NV Energy working diligently throughout the state to make sure we safely and reliably deliver power to the 2 million customers. I have the privilege of trying to do the best by that group of 3,200.

Why did you decide to leave MGM Mirage to join NV Energy?

Normally that would be a really easy question to answer. I actually never made a choice to leave MGM Mirage. I still, to this day, don’t have a resume put together. I had 13 extraordinary years with an extraordinary company. I kind of viewed myself as a lifer. There was no reason, there was nothing wrong. It was a good gig. But sometimes life happens despite our best plans. I was eating lunch in a restaurant with someone from the community when (NV Energy) CEO Michael Yackira happened by. We had a two-minute table-side chat, and at the end of that time — I don’t know what happened — but he had some possibility emerge in his mind. It was a Friday. So I get back to the office late Friday afternoon and there’s a voice mail from Michael Yackira, who, incidentally, has never called me in his life. I’ve seen him at community events, charity events, business events, but he called me and left a somewhat cryptic message: “When I saw you a possibility emerged for me. Here are my numbers, please call me.”

So I made a note, it was very late on a Friday, I had other places to go, so I didn’t call him back. That Sunday was the Sunday that Dubai World filed a lawsuit against CityCenter (a joint project with MGM Mirage), so the Monday that I had planned, according to my Outlook (calendar), was not the Monday I lived.

Everything changes sometimes. Our schedules got moved, and we were very busy, and I didn’t call him. Tuesday morning, the woman I was eating lunch with at the restaurant when I originally saw Michael, she called me at 7:30 in the morning and said, “Why haven’t you called Michael Yackira back?”

Which was very odd, because why she would be in my business, I had no idea. But I trusted her, so I called him. That was on a Tuesday morning. We met for a cup of coffee that afternoon, and the best way I can convey it is there have been a few moments in my life when I’ve been very aware I’ve had no proximity to the steering wheel in terms of the direction my life is headed. In those moments, I know that my responsibility is to enjoy the ride and to just trust it.

From that initial cup of coffee with Michael, seven days later I walked to Jim Murren and my leaders at MGM Mirage and had to try to explain to them why I was going to be picking up my caboose and laying it down on a different track. And there was no good reason, because I was happy and everybody knew it and we were working well, and everybody knew that, too. But there are moments in life, and it was bigger than I was and there was something so compelling, so attractive, so right about making this move, that’s why I made it. It all unfolded within seven days.

One other major lesson in the power of destiny — I don’t mean to sound so airy-fairy — but it’s really the way it happened. The other major lesson for me is depicted in the faces you see on that wall. A decade ago I finally realized a dream and that was to become a foster parent, knowing full well that any child who came and stayed was meant to be my family. There are three human beings there who moved in as foster children, never left, and were now adopted, and we’re all family. They were my biggest lesson in destiny. I had no proximity to the steering wheel. I didn’t pick them, I didn’t lay specs down for what they were supposed to be. They showed up exactly as it was meant to be. So that was another major lesson. This has felt to me very similar.

Now, there were some specific aspects of it that were compelling and more magnetic. The leadership of Michael was compelling to me. I met with some of the officers of the company and as individuals and as a collective, they were compelling to me. The industry is one that’s undergoing a lot of change. It’s at the top of the national agenda, it’s been at the top of the state’s agenda. It’s a very exciting place to be. I have a personal interest in our carbon footprint, energy and what kind of options we might explore. So that was compelling to me.

I guess the kicker was, I did diversity at MGM Mirage, and the centerpiece of the diversity initiative was a three-day training program that we called Diversity Champion Training. It has been talked about and written about all over the country. It was one of the things that we were the most proud of, and there were two organizations locally that emulated, and actually replicated, the diversity champion approach, including replicating the training. NV Energy was one, the city of Las Vegas was the other. What I knew is, that there were a thousand diversity champions in this company, and that was incredibly compelling because I think of all of that in the aggregate, bigger than I was, leadership, commitment, clarity and the team that was assembled was a privilege to be a part of, other than the fact that the culture here rocks. There are 3,200 turned-on, motivated people who are really driving based on their values. It was irresistible.

How can businesses give something back to the community they operate in?

It’s an interesting question. Let me take it in a slightly different direction. Most successful businesses define their relationship with the community in which they do business more broadly than just “I’m a business and you’re my customer,” because at the end of the day, each business being a boat, the water level determines where all of our boats are. The more enlightened and successful businesses that I know are ones that view business success as carrying with it a responsibility and opportunity to also be stewards of the community, to also invest in those things that their employees are passionate about. At the end of the day that is what will build stronger communities, and a stronger community creates stronger businesses. The most enlightened, leader companies are those that view success in business as coming part and parcel with the opportunity to be leaders and stewards in all dimensions of the community.

In these tough economic times, what are some alternatives for businesses that are looking to give back that don’t require money?

Especially in these tough economic times, where none of us have the disposable income that we did before the recession, hitting businesses probably more so than the rest of us, there are an awful lot of ways to add value to make a contribution, to strengthen our community’s ability to deal with our own challenges. Nothing beats the gift of time. I can give $100 or I can spend an hour with a person who needs hope. And I’m not sure at the end of the day which investment has more impact, especially now when a lot of people in our community are struggling and are bleeding hope. I think mobilizing employees is an incredibly important way to make a difference now more than ever for two reasons: One is it provides some hope to people that can’t be replicated through a monetary contribution, and second, all of us in business are struggling, too. And there is nothing that helps me more than getting outside my own junk for a minute. It is so effectively accomplished when I can think of someone else’s needs and subordinate my own circle of concern into just the recognition that but for the grace of God, I may be struggling harder or have the ability to know that I made a difference at a level higher than what I focus on every day. I think those are important inspirations that we need right now. I think there are a lot of ways.

Is there anything in Las Vegas that makes it a special challenge for groups trying to improve the community?

There are a couple of unique challenges that make it more difficult for us as a community to rally and defeat some of these challenges that we have.

Principally on that list is the fact that we don’t yet have a sense of community. What I mean by that (is) if I ask someone where are you from, very frequently they’ll say, “I’m from Ohio, but I’ve been here 18 years;” or “I’m from California, and I’ve been here 30 years;” or “I’m from Idaho, and I’ve been here two months.” The fact that we answer that question by declaring our allegiance to where we came from means we operate with sensibility locally, but it’s a little like how I feel about a rental car. There’s a big difference between how I operate a rental car and how I operate my own. Or how I live in a rental home versus how I take care of the one I’m in. Until we change the answer to the question “where am I from” and declare that this is where I’m from, as in committing to this place, laying our roots here, the investment rises emotionally. The desire to have it be good rises, the pride rises. We don’t have those things, not broadly. Certainly the people who are born and raised here have huge pride. But so many of us are still treating it like a rental car. That’s the single biggest issue that I see. We just don’t care as much as we need to. We just don’t feel a sense of collective accountability for where public education is going, for those in need in our community, how they get treated. We just don’t feel. It’s easy to disconnect. That’s someone else’s problem, and that’s the single biggest thing.

I also believe we struggle with leadership. To make major moves requires a tone from the top, and I think we struggled in terms of just having a vision that is offered up by leaders we elect to provide that vision and lead us to that vision. I think we struggled in trying to have that clarity and purpose because we’ve struggled in the leadership issues.

We have historically underfunded so many things that are critical dimensions of the well-being of our community. I think of education — we’re among the lowest per-pupil-funded public school systems in the nation. That’s horrible. We have a safety net for citizens who will fall, inevitably, that’s got gapping holes in it. That’s unconscionable. We have almost half of our children who go to public school here living in poverty and entitled to free and reduced meal programs. That should make us lose sleep at night. But none of it will unless it’s my home. So I think we first need to pledge allegiance to the well-being of this community. Then it’s a different approach. It creates a different dynamic in the conversation to try to address some of the very real issues. I just hope that one day we will get out of our own way to do that because the legacy that we are leaving for the kids who are coming behind us right now is not a legacy that I’m particularly proud of.

You once owned a small business. What lessons did you learn from that experience?

Boy, did I learn a lot of lessons! You know, sometimes the biggest failures in your life are absolutely the moments of most fertile learning. And that was certainly the experience with the business. It was a tour travel business. Although it was in the early ’80s, I learned a lot about the industry that was very valuable to me when I walked into the industry as an employee. I learned good information that helped me professionally. But I think, far more importantly, I learned the value of failure. That business ended up failing and at the time it caused me to frame very carefully what my relationship was going to be to failure.

Now the way I look at it is if I’m living on the edge a little bit, if I’m trying things that I’ve never tried before, if I’m daring to take some risks and move to the skinny branches on that tree, that’s where the sweetest fruit is. That’s where I’m going to discover and learn more than when I’m hugging the trunk of the tree. It’s also where I’m going to fail the most. Now the way I look at it is if I’m living my life the way I want to be, I should be regularly failing at things I try. But there’s a big difference between failing with outcomes and accepting failure as a definition or descriptor of who I am.

That was the really clear lesson that emerged through that business and that’s a lesson that I’m so grateful for. I wouldn’t change a minute, although going through it wasn’t easy and I certainly feel real empathy for any business that is struggling and ends up having to close its doors, because that’s what I did. But it is in the deepest valleys that you get to refine your character and really focus on what your convictions are and dig out the pearls of wisdom that serve you very well for the rest of your life. I am so proud of that failure now because it was a requisite for success.

What was your greatest accomplishment with MGM Mirage?

There’s a lot that I’m proud of. I am very proud of what 70,000 employees can do in terms of committing to and creating a culture that honors people, that values people, that allows every person to come in and try and make their full and highest contribution every day. That’s a big deal, and it’s not one person or one leader, although Terry Lanni set a tone from the top that without which it couldn’t have happened. His commitment was shared across the senior management team. His commitment was shared at the board level, so that was a big thrust.

At the end of the day, I’m really proud of the 70,000 human beings that it actually takes to change a culture, day in, day out, at every property, every department, every day. I’m really proud of that on one level. Therefore, when I look at some of the accolades and the fact that the company sits proudly on the 50 best companies in America for diversity, and at one time was one of the most admired companies in America, you can’t help but see that and click your heels as a cast of 70,000, because that’s good.

But personally, what I’m probably even more proud of is there are people who I will carry with me forever, who were people I met at MGM Mirage. I know that the promise made by the company to promote diversity, to allow people to rise to their highest aspiration, transformed lives. It is the individual employees who came and shared with me their personal stories, their aspirations, their gratitude at being given the shot to become visible, to create more, to do more, to live bigger because they wanted to demonstrate that as an example for their kids. Those are the employees who I will never forget. At the end of the day I will probably have much more pride in having some contribution, having played some little role in the achievement of those human beings than any of the other things that are much more celebrated and much more visible.

MGM Grand officials were criticized for their lack of diversity in employment, contracting and purchasing. Since then, the merged MGM Mirage has received a lot of praise for its diversity program. What did it take for the company to turn from an object of criticism to that of praise?

There was criticism that came out through the merger, and that was in the public comment period of the regulatory hearings, part of the merger. It actually caught everybody by surprise. It was one local African-American activist who made observations expressing his concern. What it did was cause the chairman, Terry Lanni at the time, to pay attention. It wasn’t that it was a topic that the company had made a choice not to value, it just had never come up. But what Terry Lanni declared before the Gaming Control Board was, “I have huge strong and personal beliefs. I cannot answer any of these questions, but I’m absolutely comfortable being held fully accountable for where we move.” And then he came back and said, find out where we stand — he said that to all of us — and let us be better. That was the leadership commitment he declared. He didn’t say we are broken, fix it. He didn’t say that at all.

What we discovered is that we naturally did well, we just didn’t call it diversity. But what we also realized was that we didn’t have a strategic framework to advance that. The more we learned diversity, the more clear it became that it’s not just about it’s the right thing to do, it is a significant competitive advantage in a fiercely competitive business. So when you’ve got six to eight convenient locations to serve you and you’re expressing an invitation to markets to come and visit, you need to deliver with sincerity on the promise that you make. So, in order to really be the best at delivering customer service, and delivering the promise of hospitality, you’ve got to live the values of diversity.

The emerging markets are huge right now. Huge. The marketplace is very different from what it used to be. That became very compelling. If you’re going to be successful in expressing an invitation to new markets and then delivering with sincerity, it is not OK to say please come and stay at our properties but we won’t do business with you. Please come and stay at our properties, but we won’t invest in those issues in your local community that are of consequence to you.

Values are funny things. You can’t declare them and adhere to them on Tuesdays and Thursdays. If you declare a value, you accept the obligation to live it all the time in every decision that you make, in every practice you have, and that’s what the work became in diversity. To align every process, every internal system, the culture, to make sure that our walk and our talk were aligned in diversity.

Frankly, that’s what I think the company did very well. The leadership commitment was clear, it was unequivocal, it wasn’t a pursuit based on defensiveness. It was a pursuit based on building and strengthening the fabric of our business so that we can be more competitive in the marketplace — and it worked. I think the success has been evidenced, not just because of the accolades, those are nice to receive, but it’s really about what you’re really doing, the success that the company enjoyed in terms of attracting conventions that it had never previously attracted. Being destinations of choice for consumer markets that never had declared it a destination of choice. Those are the ways that you win.

The other half of it, as you look at what’s happening in the labor market, the labor market is tightening. Top talent is increasingly faced with many more choices. As an employer, it used to be that if I had a job I wielded the leverage. Employees had to line up and convince me that they are the best candidate for my job. The tables are turning because the labor market is changing. As Baby Boomers age out — there are 77 million Baby Boomers in this country — as they leave, there’s only 43 million coming in behind them. There simply will not be a one-for-one substitution possible on the field. So as the Baby Boomers leave, only those companies that have been able to answer the question what can we do to be worthy of attracting talent, retaining talent, engaging talent, inspiring talent will win. Only those organizations. I think for us in general, certainly here at NV Energy, there’s a very clear recognition that being an employer of choice pays huge dividends to the company, to the individual employees, the customers and to the citizens in Nevada. That was the dogged pursuit of diversity at MGM Mirage. That’s what I think made it very successful. That is exactly the pursuit for NV Energy. We want to be the best organization we can be, delivering power, more safely, more reliably, to the consumers it is our privilege to serve.

You can’t do that if you’ve got second-rate talent. You can’t do that if you’re not thinking innovatively. So diversity of thought in the workplace is the bull’s-eye, and you’re not going to achieve that diversity of thought, that innovation, that new and fresh ways of looking at same old things unless you reach out and attract talent that comes with all different perspectives, all different life experiences, all different values, all different ways, experiences, professional expertise. You just can’t achieve it.

Can you tell me about MGM Mirage’s Champions of Diversity program and how wide-reaching it was?

Seven years ago the MGM Mirage chairman declared a voluntary priority to pursue and advance diversity at MGM Mirage in May of 2000 — that is when the merger happened. By 2002 we realized the real work is in changing the way people define it and then how they behave. Everything about adult learning says you can take me into a class and make a very compelling case and I will intellectually support you. It doesn’t change a single bit of my behavior. Adult learning also tells us the only way to change a behavior is to engage adults in an experiential learning process in which they can make their own decisions about living and being different. That was the impetus to create the Diversity Champion Training program. It is a three-day, incredibly intense, high experiential — it’s a life-altering event. We call it Diversity Champion Training. It is equal parts diversity, leadership, personal convictions, what’s your passion, what will your legacy be. It is big stuff that human beings can really use as a tool to live their best lives. That’s what it became.

So, eight years ago MGM Mirage developed this program in consultation with a firm we had brought in from the outside. To date I think there are close to 6,000 people who have gone through this. Now to create that kind of safety, to let people do the deep work, you can only move 25 people at a time. It is a very slow, very expensive way to transform culture, but I would offer it is the only way to transform culture, because it transforms people.

A couple years into it, the leaders at NV Energy committed to transforming the workplace culture here, came to MGM Mirage, and said, “Tell us what you’re doing, we’ve heard about this.” So Walt Higgins and some of the leadership team came over and talked about it and witnessed some of it and talked to the chairman and the question was, “Would you mind if we stole the idea?” And Terry Lanni’s response was, “Please. Please do. It would be a very high compliment.” And that then caused this company to graduate the first class of diversity champions at NV Energy in 2004. So it’s been five years that this company has been pursuing it, and at NV Energy, now there are 1,000 diversity champions. These are people who are on fire, they’re on fire, they’re passionate and it’s about their values. They’ve done a self-evaluation. They are more clear about what their convictions are, what their values are, where the lines of compromise are and are not. And they’re ardent advocates. They’re the grass-root agents of change in a workplace culture. It’s an amazing, amazing thing.

You can tell it’s a hard thing to describe. You have to see it to believe it. I’ve heard from employees who have gone through it and said, “I know it was to make me a better employee, but it’s made me a better human being. I am a better parent, I’m a better mate, I’m a better church member, I’m a better citizen.” Those are wonderful and extraordinary byproducts. I think this time especially, given the depths of this recession and the toll it’s taken, I think as human beings we need to revert to some of the things that are truly meaningful to us. We need to reacquaint with those things. We have to reaffirm those things, and we’ve got to use them as rudders in our lives, because over the last decade, 15, 20 years in this country, we can see how horribly lost we get when we abandon the principles, we abandon compassion and humanity and a sense of connection, in lieu of pursuit of stuff, in lieu of gain, in lieu of personal advancement. It hasn’t worked so well for this country. I think now, more than ever before, organizations can help employees refocus on the things that actually define us as human beings, and it is a really important outcome for us as individuals and just as important as an outcome for a company. Because those human beings, if they’re living better, truer, more inspired lives, are also far more productive in the 40 hours a week that the company benefits from.

What do you hope to accomplish here at NV Energy?

There’s a part of it that just doesn’t want to mess anything up (laughs). It’s such an extraordinary organization. What I hope is that we can use the extraordinary best practices that are really pervasive around this organization and dial them up a notch. I hope that we can take the enthusiasm and the excellence of this group of employees and dial it up a notch. I just hope to be part of a team that can take us to the collective next level. I hope just to make a meaningful contribution to doing that. There isn’t a specific list of things to do, but evolution doesn’t have destinations, it’s just part of the process. One of the better beliefs of this organization is continuous improvement. Celebrate for a second the accomplishment, but then don’t be resting up on that laurel for too long. Start moving to the next place. Start constantly evolving, refining, being better. And I just hope to add to that momentum and to, maybe, add a couple of new thoughts.

Across the board, human resources professionals are looking for ways to save money. What advice can you give managers and human resources professionals to survive in this economy?

Human resources is an interesting discipline because I think that it, too, is going through some transformation. In years past, the human resources function was primarily a personnel function, heavily based in issues related to compliance and policies, all of which are critically important because without those fundamental, foundational elements in place, you are vulnerable as a company. There must be complete competence. But I think anymore what all the research suggests, no matter what you do for a living as a company, over any period of time there will never be any larger investment that you will make than in your people. Ever. It doesn’t matter how many power plants you build, how many miles of cable you run, how many metered boxes you buy, ultimately there’s never going to be any larger investment than in the human beings. How can you inspire people to do more? To offer more of their ideas? To support each other better? To dream about new places that they have never gone?

Those are powerful outcomes for companies. The challenge for human resources professionals is how do we meet that need? How can we be allies to the operational leaders because that’s who serves the customer. Our value proposition is going to be answered based on how much value we can contribute to helping our operational leaders be more successful. How can we train better to help our employees be better equipped to do the job that they can do? How can we remove the barriers that get in their way?

All of us as employees have gone home, sat at the dinner table and then offered up all the great ideas, because there was no one at work that would hear them. And we’ve thought, “If only they would have asked me! I could have told them.”

We’ve all had that experience. How many times have we sat at the dinner table and said, “Pfew! The barriers! I just hit walls today, that’s all I did.”

Well, I view our role as the allies for the operators. Let’s remove the barriers. What are they, let’s figure out how to remove them. We’re the tools the employees need today, tomorrow, the next day. Let’s equip them. What are the reinforcements and rewards that employees deserve for showing up in this new way? Let’s figure out how to answer those things. That’s much more of an art form than the science that HR used to be previously. I think all of us as HR leaders are struggling with how best to answer that question. It’s a new world, it’s a changing world. The diversity of the workplace is very different from ever before. We haven’t yet figured out what the new HR practices need to be.

There are some leading-edge companies that are answering that better than others. All of us are shameless, I would say stealing, but it’s really research. We are all researching from those cutting-edge companies in order to deliver that value in a different way back home.

Let’s talk about Three Square food bank. What is your involvement there and are there any new initiatives?

I’m the founding chairman of the board, so I’ve had the privilege for the past three years that the organization has been alive. I was there when Eric Hilton said, “Let’s do this.” And then he turned and he said, “Punam, would you chair the board of trustees and do it?” And I said, “On one condition and that is you hire Julie Murray as the CEO.” And they’ve all worked. So Julie and Eric and I have been in it from the beginning. Today there is a remarkably committed board of trustees, there’s a very broad base of community leaders from every sector, every corner. There’s armies of volunteers and there are 250 nonprofit partner agencies who are actually the community angels that serve hundreds of people.

It is growing very quickly overnight. When we sat and conceived it and started creating this plan to create this organization, we did not know that we would be walking into the worst recession in our lifetime. We had no idea. But boy, what a fortuitous thing that we were already in business. It will be two years this December (when) we moved into a 50,000-square-foot warehouse that was gifted to us by Clark County. That put the food bank into business. The week after we moved in, there was a warehouse available for sale next door. We knew that to meet the needs of the community, 50,000 square feet wouldn’t be enough, so we bought the building. I’m proud to tell you that June 1st, that kitchen in the new building was given the green light by Nevada to be a place where summer meals will be prepared for children who otherwise don’t eat when school is out. As we speak, there are 5,000 meals a week being prepared and being delivered to children. That’s been the newest initiative.

As we start to use the building for more food banking, we know it won’t amp up the volume of food that goes out the door to the 250 community angels that are out there serving hungry people. As rapidly as Three Square is growing, the one thing that is growing faster is the need for food. Hunger is a scourge in this community and I don’t think any of us really think about it.

Here are some of the statistics: Before the recession, 10.5 percent of the people living in Southern Nevada lived in poverty. So if you look at 2 million, roughly the population, we had a little over 200,000 men, women and children living in poverty. That was before the recession. That was when unemployment was under 5 percent. Today it’s over 11 (percent). So I don’t know how much higher that’s gone. It’s changing so quickly no one can wrap our arms around it. I think it’s safe to say there’s a lot more insecurity in terms of food and life than ever before. But, even at those prerecession levels, here’s what we know: 200,000 people living in poverty, means, based on what the (Agriculture Department) tells us, your 234 pounds of food that person is going to need from outside sources, through food stamps, food banks, churches, neighbors, it doesn’t matter from where it comes, they are going to need 234 pounds of food per person per year. If I roll up that now, it means that the need in this community before the recession was almost 50 million pounds of food a year.

The first year that we opened that food bank we broke every national record for how far and fast the food bank grew. At the end of Year 1, we were moving 10 million pounds of food. So, as proud as all of us are of what Three Square has been able to accomplish in a very short time, none of us feels any sense of satisfaction because year-to-date we’re at 8 million (pounds of food), and it’s June. All of last year, we were 10 million.

It gives you a sense, every church, faith-based organization out there, every nonprofit organization out there, these are the folks in the trenches serving folks that have needs every day. They tell us that when they get to the office in the morning, there’s a line two and three deep waiting to access services, waiting to get to the food bank. It keeps us up at night. We are drumming fingers. It is a tough economic time to be fundraising to keep food on the shelves, but we’re doing it and we do everything we can. But we’re struggling like everybody else.

There are about 6,000 backpacks every Friday that are delivered to elementary schools in Clark County. Food that donors have facilitated the purchase of. Food that has been collated into little individual bags by volunteers who care. Those 6,000 bags are delivered to little children Friday afternoon, placed into backpacks, because we know that may be the only way that little child is going to eat all weekend. They come to school on Monday and they receive their free breakfast, they eat their free lunch on Friday afternoon, and what teachers and administrators and counselors at all of those schools report is that on Friday afternoon at lunchtime, they’ll look the other way because they know the kids are going to be taking granola bars and tucking them into their socks. They’re going to be taking bananas and pushing them up their sleeves because that’s the only way they are going to eat. It is absolutely unconscionable to me that in this community in this day and age any little child goes home on a Friday and doesn’t eat, (emotionally chokes up) excuse me, and doesn’t eat again until Monday.

So, I’m really proud of where Three Square has been, I’m incredibly proud of what it’s accomplished, but I don’t have any feeling that is sanguine about where we are as a community relative to this scourge called hunger that right now is growing at a pace that none of us can even calculate.

Do you think the new state law that prevents suing over donated food will help?

No good deed goes unpunished and the way that the laws were written before good deeds could have gone punished. So I think absolutely that helps. The one thing that Three Square has made abundantly clear to me is that capacity some people in our community have for caring. The fact that we’ve got thousands of volunteers to show up to do something because they want to is astonishing to me. The fact that in this recession we were able to raise over $19 million to build a building, to equip a building to make sure 5,000 kids would eat in the summer is astonishing to me.

Every step that we can take to remove a barrier to allow a citizen who wants to be part of a solution, to remove the barrier between them and the solution is a very good thing.

You know, time will tell in terms of practically what that means, how much food, but the restaurant community is fully engaged and they have been from the beginning. The chefs, and the food and beverage leaders up and down the Strip have been incredibly supportive from the beginning. So if this can knock another couple of barriers out for people, terrific, because it means a little bit more food will get out to hungry people.

You mentioned earlier your adopted children and your involvement in fostering and foster programs. Can you tell me more about your involvement with that?

I fostered my children because I didn’t have a biological clock ticking, but I had a yearning to be a mother. For me, it was my first choice because somewhere in my soul I knew, I’d always known, that was what I needed to do. Fostering, for me, and adopting, for me, was not my last option. It was my first and I think that makes me different from a lot of people.

Second, I’ve got three remarkable human beings who are my destiny. There is not a day that I don’t remember that. They are my gift. But I can’t tell you how many times in the last 10 years when I say to someone, they are my foster kids and my adoptive kids, and the initial reaction of people is, “Oh, they’re so lucky to have you.” “You saved them,” is sort of what I hear implied as somehow their (biological) parents were bad and I became the angel who rescued them. Over time, I found that really awkward because I look at the birthparents that gave me my three biggest gifts, and I can only feel gratitude and I can only want to respect them.

I’ve also had the benefit of seeing some of the documentation in their files. Here’s what I know: I know my two little children who were born at (University Medical Center) tested positive for cocktail street drugs at birth to mothers who in both instances previously had children taken away from them. I know that society judges those mothers very harshly — and I can’t because without those mothers I wouldn’t have received my treasures. But as I look at their files, I’m not sure that if I had been sexually abused beginning at age 3, I’m not sure I wouldn’t have dealt with my pain with drugs. I think as a community we look at the child welfare system and underneath it there’s this basic assumption that parents are bad, and we, as a community, need to ride in on our white horse and rescue that child. We need to swoop them up and place them where they’re safe so that we can feel better.

It’s not the perfect answer because the research says that the developmental damage you do to that little child, that pulling them out of the only stability that they know, is incalculable.

Within seven days of being plucked, the vast majority of our children go back to the home they came from. So, what have we just done? Because we have this judgment about these families. We swoop and do incalculable damage first, give them back within a week, and never bring any supports to make that family a little stronger, a little more capable. We’ve just hurt the child, we’ve completely disrespected that parent.

And here’s what I believe about all parents: We wake up and our basic need and desire is to be good parents. None of us plan to let our kids down. None of us plan to be overwhelmed by our own life’s issues. None of us contemplate and predict addictions. None of us make choices to be stuck in horribly abusive situations. None of us choose that. That is life and when we get into those dark places in life what we deserve is help. In fact, what our child welfare system does is punish. And that’s wrong.

I think fundamentally there’s a paradigm shift. Families deserve our support. The best way to achieve the welfare of children is to achieve the welfare of their family because I know, as much as my children love me and as much as I love my children, if I could crawl into the deepest, darkest recesses of their heart what I will probably discover is that all that they would really want is to be raised where they were born. As human beings, I think that is our innate desire.

There are a group of similarly minded people. The way that we have developed our delivery system is all around that basic assumption. We pluck you, parent, you’re bad, go get the services and we’ll hold your child until you prove you’re ready. We don’t make those (services) easy to navigate. We don’t do it in a way that honors or lifts up that parent. We shouldn’t beat them down more, because everywhere you go you wait for three hours. Everywhere you go you’re going to have to demonstrate who you are. Prove it. Show us the documentation. Prove you have a need, because we just presume you’re bad.

I served on the Governor’s Welfare Reform Task Force in the early 1990s, part of what I had the benefit of hearing were from the welfare moms. And, to a person, in hours of hours of testimony, what they said was, “I was hurting and what I needed was help and every interaction with the system I got further hurt.” It’s so backward and then we get surprised that people aren’t self-sufficient more quickly. Well, we shouldn’t be surprised. We’ve disrespected them at every turn. We’ve not delivered services in a way that honors their need or is holistic.

I don’t know why we can’t locate all services under one roof. Costco does it. I shop at my neighborhood Costco and they know everything about me, their customer, and they put it all under one roof and I keep going there. Why? Because they honor me, they’re meeting my needs. Why can’t we apply that paradigm to the nature of social services delivery?

Today, if I’m newly unemployed, and I’m about to have my family fall down, I go and spend — it could be eight hours — (only) to come back the next day to Clark County Social Service. And that’s not because Clark County doesn’t want to do better, that’s because that’s just the volume (of applicants). But I’m going to have to go there first because a lot of the critical services I can only get there. But you know what? I cannot sign up for unemployment. So now I’m either going to sit on the phone or try and find access to a computer or wait in the state of Nevada office for who knows how long to get that.

Now I’m being told that in order for me to get another job I need to upgrade my job skills. So now I get the ability to navigate through this labyrinth of nonprofit organizations, if those people have those such self-determination. If they have confidence in themselves, if they had the ability and the clarity to plan and navigate, they wouldn’t have fallen down. So at a time when we need to honor and dignify human beings and build them up, we just slap them silly and that is a fundamental flaw.

The children that we believe we are helping we are ultimately hurting and it’s the most inefficient way to invest tax money. We are not preventing anything. We are not solving this problem at all, and then we get surprised when we hear the bad indicators are up a little over last year.

Insanity is repeating the same thing over and over again expecting different results.

There’s been a group that’s been meeting for a long time to try to change that fundamental sensibility about families are worth helping, that we meet families and we accept them wherever they are. We don’t judge them for their pain, we don’t judge them for their responses to the pain, we don’t judge them for all the choices they’ve made, we just acknowledge that they are in need and they need us to help them. Until we can do that, nothing else changes.

What is this group?

We were meeting formally, and then a lot of changes, but it’s really been Tom Morton (Clark County Family Services director), who’s been leading the charge, and he’s been leading since the day he’s been here. I think Clark County has shown a lot of leadership on this topic. There are many in the community who have stepped up to assist Tom, and that is what I was proud to do on behalf of MGM Mirage.