New Math
by Larissa MacFarquhar
Fourteen-year-olds frequently accuse their parents of moral dereliction; parents do not frequently respond by selling their house and donating half the proceeds to villagers in Ghana. But such was the response of Kevin and Joan Salwen, of Atlanta, to their daughter, Hannah. Kevin and Hannah went on to write a book, “The Power of Half,” in which they encourage other families to do something similar. And recently they carried this incendiary message to the teen-agers of Marymount, a private Catholic girls’ school on Fifth Avenue, across from the Met.
The Salwens stood in the school chapel. They wore jeans; the Marymount girls wore kilts. They told their story. One day in 2006, Kevin and Hannah pulled up at a stoplight. To their left was a homeless man, to their right a guy in a Mercedes coupé. Hannah said, “Dad, if that man didn’t have such a nice car, then that homeless man could have a meal.” Kevin said, “Yes, but if we didn’t have such a nice car that man could have a meal.” This sank in rather more deeply than he’d intended. By dinnertime, Hannah was all worked up. She didn’t want to be a family that just talked about doing good, she said. She wanted to be a family that actually did something. Kevin and Joan explained that they did a lot: they volunteered at the food bank; they wrote big checks to charities; after Hurricane Katrina, they let a family of refugees stay in their basement. Hannah rolled her eyes. That was annoying, so Joan said, “What do you want to do, sell the house?” And Hannah said, “Yeah! That is exactly what I want to do.”
“We don’t expect anyone else to sell their house,” Hannah assured the Marymount girls, whose parents might not have appreciated a demand by their offspring to donate eight hundred thousand dollars (half the value of the Salwens’ house) to charity. “We know that’s a ridiculous thing to do. But everyone has something they can afford to give away. If you watch six hours of TV a week, maybe you cut that down to three hours and spend three with your family volunteering at a homeless shelter.”
A girl with a ponytail raised her hand. “Have you ever regretted selling your house?” she asked.
“There are some things that I miss,” Hannah said. “We had an elevator that led up to my room, and it was really cool, because nobody else had an elevator in their room. My friends would say, ‘Let’s ride in the elevator!’ But it really doesn’t matter.”
A woman in a red sweater asked how their friends had reacted. This had been a problem. Friends had been baffled, or worse. One close friend of Joan’s had started to cry and said, “This is not my family’s reality.” That friendship withered. For a while, tired of feeling like freaks, the Salwens kept the whole thing secret. Then they appeared on television, and while most commenters on the shows’ Web sites were nice, many were angry that the Salwens had chosen to spend the money in Africa rather than in the United States, and some just thought the whole thing sounded inane. “What kind of ass clown works his tail off, and busts his hump getting a decent education, only to listen to his kid suggest they give away the house?” one wrote.
“Most people are supportive,” Kevin told the audience, “and a few are very uncomfortable.”
A couple of days later, Hannah and Kevin reflected on the difficulties of explaining what they’d done. If they got too evangelical, they might sound as if they were judging people for not doing the same; but if they said they didn’t expect other people to sell their house, that could sound as if they thought nobody else was as good as they were.
“When I tell people, I try so hard not to come off as boasty,” Hannah says. “I want people to feel, like, ‘That’s actually cool. I want to do something like that in my family.’ ”
Kevin feels that in the early days their messaging was off, and they’ve worked hard on that. “We know this is a lot of money, but we rarely lead with the amount,” he says. “We certainly don’t challenge people now.”
“We do challenge people!” Hannah protested.
“Well, we never go over to the Stones’ house and say, ‘Who the hell needs this?’ ”
Soon afterward, Hannah and Kevin received an e-mail from a student that, to them, made it all worthwhile. “I have dreamed of living in a huge mansion and marrying a millionaire,” she wrote.
“But now, I see that the world is a largely connected community. I owe that to you. Today, I took out clothing from my closets that were too small or that I didn’t wear. . . . You’re making a difference!”
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