OUR WHY · 595 KIPLING
The classroom and the stands.
Every organization has a founding story. This one is about two rooms, and the difference between how a boy was treated in each of them.
The Full Story
In third grade there was a boy in my class named JJ. I was not a good student that year. I spent most lunch periods inside, catching up on work I had not turned in, which is how I happened to be in the room on an ordinary afternoon when JJ was looking for something he had lost.
The teacher lost her patience with him. She told him to start at one corner and walk the entire perimeter of the classroom, clockwise, until he found it. She said it loudly. The thing he was looking for was a few steps behind where she told him to start.
I did not say anything. I was eight, and I have thought about it for a long time since.
The only other place I ever saw JJ was the high school stadium at 595 Kipling. My older brother played football, and JJ and his dad were at every game. Not occasionally. Every game. He was not a visitor in those stands. He knew where they sat. He knew what happened next. He was completely at home.
Same kid. Same week, sometimes. One room where he was a problem to be managed, and one where he was just another person who had come to watch the game.
Nobody designed that stadium to be kind to him. That is the part that stayed with me. It was kind by accident, because a crowd is a place where nobody has to explain why they belong. The classroom had to be taught. The stands already knew.
JJ's Friends exists to buy families a few hours in the second kind of room.
"The stands did not accommodate him. They just had room."
Accommodation is something granted to a person who is understood as an exception. Room is what a place has when it was never keeping track in the first place.
That is the front row feeling.
Not the best seat in the building. The feeling of walking in already expected. It is the one phrase we never reword, because it is the only thing we are actually selling.