Preview: The Other Wes Moore

by: admin

Wes Moore may owe his very existence to a few wise choices. An uncanny opportunity to sight down the Road Not Taken prompted the successful investment specialist, international relations expert and army captain to share what he saw from that crossroads with others.

Making good choices—and providing the means to help others make them—is essential if one is to lead a productive, meaningful life, Moore asserts. His message: “Public service does not have to be an occupation, but it must be a way of life.”

Moore, whose story was the inspiration for this year’s conference theme, grew up in a poverty-stricken neighborhood of Baltimore, Maryland, in a street culture where schooling seemed irrelevant compared to the street-wise path to manhood, through drugs, guns and criminal activity. After Moore’s father died, his mother sent Wes and his siblings to private school in hopes of re-routing his gang-influenced goals. But it wasn’t until he was sent to military school that Moore began to make the kind of positive choices that would take him on to Johns Hopkins University, Oxford, and a successful career in international relations.

Those choices hit home the day the Baltimore Sun ran the announcement that he had won a prestigious Rhodes Scholarship. On another page, the paper covered the story of a very different Wes Moore, a man Moore’s age, with the same name, who grew up in the same part of Baltimore, and who had just killed a police officer in a botched armed robbery.

That startling coincidence prompted Moore to begin correspondence with his imprisoned mirror image. In his book The Other Wes Moore, published last year, Moore uses their diverging stories to ponder the stunning differences choice, education, mentoring and public service can make in the lives of young people. O Magazine praises, “The Other Wes Moore highlights the transformative influence of caring adults.” Kirkus Reviews calls the book “An absorbing narrative that makes clear the critical roles that choices, family support and luck play in young people’s lives.”

Moore’s experience moved him to found STAND!, a program that works with Baltimore kids involved in the criminal justice system. He is passionate about the important positive impact not only education and meaningful public service, but wise mentoring can have for young people.

While one’s personal crossroads may not always lead in such diametrically opposite ways as Wes’s, choice is a constant. These same lessons translate in infinite, if less dramatic, ways. Regardless of our leadership responsibilities, each of us makes such choices every day. They may affect us in our individual lives, or they may involve a choice to affect the lives of others: to fill our obligation as the mentor, the teacher, the boss or parent who helps someone else standing at their own crossroads to turn down the better path. That’s a powerful choice.

Wes Moore will be the morning keynote speaker at the 16th Annual Bay Path College Women’s Leadership conference on April 29th.