Saturday, March 11, 2000
Plight of needy changed man who had it all
BY KRISTA RAMSEY
The Cincinnati Enquirer
Steve Elliott is one of those people whose lives are divided into halves by a single moment. From it, there is an awakening, a change in direction.
It came at an unlikely time, back in 1984 when life was treating him remarkably well. He was a winning basketball coach at Finneytown High School. A respected history teacher. Happily married, raising five children. A good guy in everyone's opinion, even his own.
Life should have been satisfied, moved on to more troublesome cases.
Instead, it plopped him at the door of the Drop-Inn Center in Over-the-Rhine, a homeless shelter. Steve was visiting as a class assignment for a course at Miami University. He boldly knocked at the door. Buddy Gray, the founder, opened it with, “What do you want?”
“I'm here to observe,” Steve told him.
“What do you think this is, the Cincinnati zoo?” Buddy barked, and shut the door.
In that moment, the door to Steve's second life opened.
"My teaching changed'
“Buddy was right,” Steve says in little more than a whisper. “He knew something about those people that I didn't. I couldn't get his question out of my mind.”
So Steve went back to knock at Buddy Gray's door again and again. He wanted to know about those other lives, so unlike his own. He started volunteering. And then he started inviting his students.
They talked about what they saw. Homelessness. Poverty. Inequity.
“My teaching changed,” he says. “I started teaching American history from a social justice angle. It made me a better teacher.”
So good, in fact, that he developed a class devoted to community service. Soon the small high school was offering five sections of it. Eventually, Steve was released from some teaching duties to coordinate the high school's service program.
Whatever reputation he had earned as a coach — the winner of five sectional tournaments and four league championships — he was about to top as a service-learning teacher.
Steve Elliott was about to become a legend.
"It's about people'
Ask around. Anyone who knows anything about school service programs knows something about Steve Elliott.
He was the creator of opportunities that took students on 11 service trips to Indian reservations in South Dakota and as many to Appalachia.
His “Urban Plunges” and “Urban Experiences” were legendary — taking carefully-brought-up suburban teen-agers to spend all day, every day, for two weeks exploring and volunteering in the real life of the inner city.
With Mr. Elliott, Finneytown students tutored children, painted houses, fed the homeless, worked elections, listened to the elderly. His golden rule: Serve, but if you have to decide whether to serve people or talk to them, then talk.
“It's about people,” he says. “The service is just the conduit to the people.”
In his first 19 years there, Steve brought Finneytown High School winning basketball teams and able history students. For his last 13, he brought the school an unparalleled reputation for compassion, understanding and service.
In 1998, he pretended to retire. Instead, he just moved his base of operations to the Mayerson Foundation, and started teaching teachers to teach students to serve.
Mr. Elliott and Mayerson are a providentially perfect match.
Next month, Steve and a group of Finneytown volunteers — many Steve's former students — will complete a three-year restoration of an Over-the-Rhine apartment. A homeless family will finally get a home.
Life was right about Coach Elliott. He was ready for a much bigger game.
Krista Ramsey's column appears on Saturdays. Write her at 312 Elm St., Cincinnati, OH 45202, or e-mail her at krista_ramsey@hotmail.com.
