“Find a Place to Stand”

At last week’s annual Germination Project gala, the city was introduced to 20 high school juniors with a lot riding on their shoulders.

The group of young people from throughout the region are, as lawyer/philanthropist Ajay Raju—founder of both Germination and The Citizen—has said, some of the brightest of the brightest. They are already successes in and out of the classroom, deeply ambitious and civic-minded.

They will need all of this if they are to meet the high-minded ambitions of the Germination Project: To shape young men and women, already destined for professional greatness, to be the civic leaders Philadelphia needs to become a world class city for all.

It’s a long-term bet that began four years ago, with the first crop of Germination fellows—now college juniors—who committed not only to two years of Germination programming while in high school, but to returning home after college to continue their work in Philadelphia.

Like the other classes, the 2019 Fellows spent part of their summer learning about innovation at Penn Medicine, and will spend the year seeped in different aspects of how the world we live in works—from the New York Stock Exchange to the Philadelphia Museum of Art to the American Heart Association.

In the short-term, we have Hazim Hardeman, Temple University’s first Rhodes Scholar, who—though not a Germination fellow—proved at the gala that he is a young man this city needs, and is privileged to count as one of our own.

Hardeman, about whom much has been written, spoke of his mentors and inspirations: his mother, who lied about their address to send him to a better public school, the late Nobel Prize author Toni Morrison, a former Temple professor and the young people he left behind in his neighborhood—or who didn’t make it out.

“We all suffer if a kid from North Philly has a better chance of meeting their end at Temple University Hospital, rather than their beginning in a Temple University classroom,” Hardeman said, near the end of his speech in the Union League ballroom.

But it was something Hardeman said early on, inspired by a conversation he had with Raju leading up to the event, that most resonated for our times—words that the well-heeled crowd of Philadelphians found themselves repeating at the end of the night.

Raju “told me about one of the best commencement speeches he had ever heard, in which a Jesuit priest rose before a graduating class and said these eight words: ‘Find a place to stand, and stand there,’” Hardeman said. “If there is a theme I want to share with you today, that is it: Finding a place to stand.”

Watch Hardeman’s speech here.

This year’s gala—hosted by one Citizen board member, Diana Lind, executive director of the Chamber’s Arts + Business Council, and chaired by another, Bob Keith, co-founder/CEO of Nouveau Capital—honored longtime Philadelphia businessman/philanthropist Walt D’Alessio and Dr. Jack Ende of Penn Medicine.