Interview with Mark Levine

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Mark Levine received an Echoing Green Fellowship in 1995 and used it to launch a community credit union in a low-income neighborhood where his high school students lived.  

The Fellowship allowed him to attract other grants and successfully grow the institution, which is still going strong 12 years later. He currently runs the Center for After School Excellence, which supports after school programs in New York City and is now expanding nationwide. The programs are vital because the after school period from 3p.m. to 6 p.m. is a time where kids can grow in many ways, academically, artistically and socially. The Center helps high school students get college degrees by tutoring them in math and other important subjects and introducing them to college-level course.

Mark loves startups, especially the thrill of creation and building an organization. And he loves big ideas – what social entrepreneurs call the "Big Hairy Aggressive Goal, or BHAG, because nothing motivates stakeholders like a big idea.” 

His major failure, or actually a stumble, happened when Mark expanded the community credit union just a few months before the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center. Many of the credit union borrowers, mostly blue-color workers, lost their jobs and stopped paying their loans – a big financial hit. Mark had been overly optimistic and learned that even in period of great growth, one shouldn’t assume that it will continue. “Build a reserve. Extrapolating today's success into tomorrow's success is very dangerous. Don’t be tempted to be too aggressive; use some of your success to squirrel away a reserve in case you hit an economic slowdown in a later year.”

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