The FBI named Bob Pawloski a 2018 honoree of the Director’s Community Leadership Award
Every morning for the past 21 years, Bob Pawloski’s feet hit the floor at 5:00 AM.
He slips into a pair of Nikes, plods across the hardwood, and makes his way to the gym. The routine is the same: a workout, followed by a run outside, weather permitting.
His usual route takes him through the streets of East Hartford, over Founder’s Bridge into Hartford. As dawn breaks, he’s logged ten miles through the neighborhoods that have shaped his career. If these streets could talk, the stories they would tell – none more improbable or impactful than that of the runner chasing the miles of pavement. They would speak to a person who found a greater purpose, an unsung hero that has at times literally saved lives, and at the very least, shaped the trajectory of thousands.
In a seminal speech, The Drum Major Instinct, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. extolled the virtue of those who serve with little thought to the acclaim it might bring. These servant leaders are the best leaders, because when the accolades come, as it did for Bob one Wednesday in March, they are all the more meaningful.
On March 14th, 2018, COMPASS Youth Collaborative’s CEO Robert Pawloski received the FBI Director’s Community Leadership Award.
Every year, the FBI Director recognizes leaders from across the country who make extraordinary contributions to the community. The honorees are formally recognized at FBI headquarters in Washington, D.C., but prior to the official ceremony, the nominating field office presents a certificate locally.
Those who know Bob know that his style is atypical for the corner office. He is more comfortable in a tracksuit (emblazoned with Oakland Raiders regalia, of course) than a business suit. After 21 years, he still tries to fix the copier and makes the daily office trash runs. In that vein, the local presentation was to be an understated affair. Bob wanted the COMPASS staff and his family there, because as he insisted, this award was really about them, not him.
Three speakers were invited, each reflective of certain facets of Bob’s career, to join the FBI’s emissary, Senior Supervisory Intelligence Analyst Dennis Hatton.
Kim Oliver represented the City of Hartford, in her capacity as the Director of Youth, Families, Children and Recreation. Melissa Yennie St. Juste spoke as a founding COMPASS member, and Sgt. Steven Austin of the Hartford Police Department shared his rational for nominating Bob.
Each made remarks that far surpassed a testimony of a singular award. They spoke of an extraordinary person who built a community of caring in a remarkable organization.
As an anthropologist, Joseph Campbell spent much of his career contemplating and writing about heroes, mostly on account of their cultural ubiquity.
Bob Pawloski with the invited speakers
The hero’s journey speaks to the very essence of what makes us human, and to Campbell’s mind it followed a specific arch: the hero responds to a call of the universe, one that presents a myriad of obstacles, and labors until achieving his noble endeavor.
You might say that Bob got the call to service in 1996, riding shotgun in a police van. Mark Rubera, a Lieutenant for the Hartford Police Department (HPD), was at the helm, fiddling with the radio, and Wilbur Harrison’s voice warbled over an oldies station.
Bob thought Harrison’s song – Kansas City – was prescient: he and Mark had just loaded up the van with eight teenagers and a weekend’s worth of provisions. After months of training, Mark registered the kids for a golden gloves boxing tournament in Missouri. He convinced his friend Bob to help chaperone.
They split the driving, coached their prize fighters through to the finals, and came back the next day. For the kids, many of whom had never left the state, visiting the Paris of the Plains felt like the opportunity of a lifetime. For Bob, the 48-hour road trip felt like an answer to his personal soul-searching.
Back then, the Police Athletic League (PAL) was one of the few outlets for kids in Hartford. It was a desperately needed respite to the gang violence plaguing the neighborhood, and Bob began volunteering as a fitness instructor at the PAL gym on Broad Street.
“If the gym closed late, Mark and I would walk the kids home,” Bob remembers. “I’ll never forget those walks. It wasn’t unusual to see ten or fifteen gang members watching, and when you got to the kid’s house, it was obvious just how difficult some of their circumstances were.”
Bob saw the need to bring consistency to youth who had tremendous promise, but little stability. He found his calling, and flipping through the want ads of the Sunday paper, also found his mission.
Hartford Areas Rally Together (HART), a local organizing group, sought a Director for their newly formed South End Knight Riders Youth Center. Bob sent off a resume and a glowing recommendation from HPD.
He got turned down, at first.
“I couldn’t move to Harford, because of my family, and during the initial interview they indicated it was a deal breaker,” Bob recalls.
Nevertheless, he received a call back for a second interview. The panelists asked about his previous experience and areas of expertise. Bob fielded the questions until a voice piped up among the young people present. Craig Yennie, a middle school student at MD Fox School, asked the question on everyone’s mind.
“How long will you stay?”
Bob answered in the best way he knew how – from the heart.
“I’ll give you my word,” he said, “and my word is my commitment. I strongly believe that I can make a dedicated commitment to the development of the youth center.”
A Hartford Courant article from 1997 captures the youth center’s early beginnings
The youth center took shape in the basement office of Saint Augustine’s School in Hartford’s South End. It was a spartan operation, with an old metal desk wedged between a wall and a bookshelf, and a phone that didn’t reach the desk. Bob set out the shingle from Tuesday through Sunday afternoons, offering basketball clinics, a dance program, tutoring, and a two machine computer lab.
In 1997, the center posted an operating budget of $185,000. Keeping the center open was no small feat: with city funding in flux from year-to-year, and a mandate to reach 600 youth, Bob became a jack of all trades. “For those few years – I did whatever it took,” he recalls.
He spent mornings on fundraising, finances, and human resources. In the afternoons, Bob oversaw programming for the 150 youth in attendance. He had a part-time staff of six high school students (including Elizabeth Giannetta-Ramos, COMPASS’ current Director of Partnerships) a small group of volunteers and the backing of the local faithful. On days when he doubted his own sanity, Saint Augustine’s resident priest, Father Jacobs, and resident nun, Sister Maris, buoyed his spirits.
The youth center grew rapidly. By 2003, Bob built enough stability to spin away from the HART umbrella. “The leaders at HART were instrumental in getting us off the ground,” he notes, “but it was time. HART really saw itself as a community incubator, and it was time to stand on our own two feet.”
He filed for a nonprofit status, and the youth center eventually settled on a name – COMPASS Youth Collaborative – an acronym for Community, Parents, and Students Succeeding. He had also hired his first full-time employee, Jacquelyn Santiago, to oversee programs.
The center needed more space, so Bob canvassed the neighborhood for a bigger gym. “I was biking through the neighborhood one day, and I came across this beautiful school, South Middle School,” he says. “I called the principal and told him about our vision.”
The principal, Jim Fagan, would prove pivotal in the youth center’s future expansion. For an hour after school, the students of South Middle received academic tutoring, and the building remained open to the community for night gym. What impressed Principal Fagan most was the relationships forged between the COMPASS staff and neighborhood kids; so much so that it inspired the novel idea behind COMPASS Peacebuilders.
Long before second-chance was a lauded practice, Bob hired community members who had once lost their way but had made amends. He recognized within them an untapped talent reserve, one that could change the odds for youth facing similar circumstances. The COMPASS Peacebuilders program provides long-term mentorship for at-risk youth, crisis mitigation to prevent youth violence, and various programs to divert young people from high-risk activities.
Since its formal inception in 2006, the COMPASS Peacebuilders have mentored hundreds of in-risk youth. The staff responded to innumerable crises across the City of Hartford. There’s no exact way to measure the problems that we prevent, but surely, the Peacebuilders stopped scores of situations from becoming statistics.
The development of this model is a credit to many, including former program director Iran Nazario, but it took Bob’s foresight to see the inherent value, and his fortitude to see it through. It is for this leap of faith that the New Haven field office selected Bob as their honoree.
As Special Agent Dennis Hatton would explain during the certificate ceremony, Bob’s vision exemplifies what the FBI must strive for. “Too often in life, individuals find themselves left behind, or facing obstacles they cannot overcome,” noted Mr. Hatton. “One of the keys to breaking the cycle of violence is treating the root causes, and that is exactly what COMPASS does so well and why we’re honoring Bob today.”
The COMPASS Peacebuilders
For those of us that have had the opportunity to be in Bob’s professional orbit, it’s hard to believe our luck. This is not meant as a hyperbolic comparison, but consider this vignette of LA Dodgers pitcher Sandy Koufax.
It’s a cool evening in Minneapolis, Minnesota in October of 1965. Sandy Koufax is on the baseball mound at Metropolitan Stadium. It’s game two of the World Series. Koufax declined to pitch game one, in observance of Yom Kippur. The audience is in awe.
Here is this pitcher, who returns to the game after maintaining his personal values, and clinches the Series by subsequently pitching two shutouts in games five and seven. His performance garnered him the title of Series MVP, and fans would remember it as one of the most thrilling runs in baseball history.
When he announced his retirement shortly thereafter at the age of 30, it left many to wonder if what they had witnessed was even real. The comet had streaked from view, and one could either feel sorrow at its passing or revel in its memory.
Years later, a sports announcer would ask Koufax about his take on pitching. In a moment brilliantly re-captured by The Atlantic magazine, Koufax responded simply: “pitching,” he said, “is about precision.”
The same can be said of running a nonprofit successfully, year after year, for 21 years. It’s a form of control that in no way feels controlling; it does not detract from the development of others, but actively contributes to their wellbeing. When a long-time staff member was diagnosed with cancer, it is Bob’s words that she remembers most: We love you. You can do this. Even if we can’t be there in the doctor’s office, we’re behind you. And don’t worry about the money. The checks will keep coming.
That Bob has mastered this art of nurturing precision stems from his personal routine, one that remains constant no matter the weather. Regardless of the players at the table or the money in the game, Bob’s ethos in running COMPASS never strays from a keen eye on finances, people, and programs. “We are what we repeatedly do,” mused Aristole. “Excellence then, is not an act, but a habit.”
As a result, COMPASS has grown to one of the leading youth development organizations in Hartford. Having left the tiny basement office years ago, the organization now employs over 60 staff members across five sites on a $2.7 million annual budget. The robust school-based programs and the 24/7, on-call presence of the COMPASS Peacebuilders support hundreds of youth and families annually. Through the course of 21 years, thousands of youth have successfully matriculated to adulthood, thanks in no small part to COMPASS.
Truly, youth development is a noble endeavor because growth happens over the course of a lifetime. There are brief glimpses of the summit when you encounter a kid that you cared for, now making a way in the world as a happy, fulfilled adult.
These moments are often unexpected, at times bittersweet, and always deeply moving.
Dr. Craig Yennie passed away two years ago.
At 33 years of age, it was far too soon for a life so well lived. The kid who helped bring about COMPASS blazed an incredible trail throughout his life. When he graduated from Hartford Public Schools, he matriculated at Trinity College, received his PhD in Organic Chemistry from Brown University, and became a much-beloved teacher and researcher. His memorial service was packed, the attendance a testament to the esteem held for the Yennie family.
During the service, his sister, Melissa Yennie, read a letter she found while cleaning out Craig’s apartment in Providence. Craig could hardly be considered a pack rat; he kept few sentimental items, except for family photos and Hartford Whalers hockey memorabilia. The fact that this note survived at all was highly unusual. It was written over ten years ago, and it was about the youth center. Craig described how it had changed his life, and how its Director, Bob Pawloski, was intrinsic to his success.
Dr. Craig Yennie during his youth center days
“I was floored,” Bob says. “There are literally hundreds of people at this memorial service, and the woman in the pew behind me pokes me in the back and asks if I’m Bob.”
Likewise, when principal Jim Fagan passed away in 2017, his death came with a heartfelt expression of gratitude.
Two weeks prior to his passing, Jim called out of the blue to say thank you. Bob had no idea he was ill, nor could he have expected that it would be their last conversation.
“I know you don’t always hear this,” Jim began, “but I wanted to personally thank you for all that you’ve done for our kids.”
Those who achieve even a modicum of this personal and professional success would likely credit their most immediate circle.
If COMPASS speaks to Bob’s soul, it is his wife, Barbara Pawloski, who speaks to his heart. Barbara didn’t balk when, in the early days of their marriage, Bob began talking about a career change. It meant less money and worse hours, but Barb believed in the vision for COMPASS every bit as Bob did. They met at a Thanksgiving road race and have run through life together ever since, raising four children and ten grandchildren between them. Should his children read this, they ought to know of the love and pride with which he speaks of you.
For anyone else who might wonder about the secret sauce, I’ll tell you what he tells us: find your soulmate and take her to dinner often.
On the day this award was to be finalized, I told my mom I was nervous. Bob may be the best person we know, but this is a national award. Like any good Irish Catholic mother, she told me not to worry. There’s a saint for every situation who is the perfect intercessor.
Most of the time it makes me smile, but this time it gave me pause.
The saint that day was Gerolamo Emiliani. In the small town of Lecco, Italy, there is a stunning shrine perched above the shores of Lake Como in his honor. Tourists flock to the Lake’s more well-known towns, but the local faithful climb the wide stone steps (incredibly, often on their knees) to the white-washed walls of this monastery.
There is great affection for Gerolamo because he is utterly relatable. The tale goes that he lived a life of the world until he had a change of heart. A plague swept through Europe, leaving thousands dead; Gerolamo found his calling building homes for newly orphaned children. He would later be canonized a saint, the patron of orphaned children and at-risk youth.
It is a fitting happenstance, then, that the award confirmation came on this day, for in his own right, Bob Pawloski might well be considered a patron saint for Hartford’s youth.