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ITT EXECUTIVE HELPS INNER-CITY KIDS DEVELOP TALENTS FOR A BRIGHTER FUTURE

Dr. Harold Davis is more than a big brother to hundreds of New York's inner-city youngsters. He's an example.

"These kids need more than a college education to have a decent shot at a slice of the economic pie," he says. "They need to have their energies directed, indexed, toward the future. They need to be nurtured, to be shown models of success. And that's what we try to do."

During the day, David managed the medical clinic in the headquarter of International Telephone and Telegraph Corporation, which encourages its executives to "get involved".

And he is heavily involved, nearly every night and most weekends, as secretary of Sponsor for Educational Opportunity (SEO), a volunteer organization that has helped more than 1,500 inner-city youths in Manhattan get a crack at a college education.

Davis, 36, first became involved in the organization while he was a student att Bronx Community College in 1965. The principal ingredient in SEO's approach is to provide each selected student with a sponsor, an "interested other".

"This sponsor works with the student, meets with his family, gets to know his neighborhood and his problems," Davis said. "The sponsor's main job, though, is to teach them how to become successful."

Though Davis stresses that participation as an SEO sponsor entails no financial obligation, it does entail assuming a long-term relationship, one that may last eight years or more.

In the early years of the program, the target was under-achievers in the inner-city, high school students with intelligence but lacking the motivation to develop higher expectations.

"They have lots of drive, but no direction," Davis said. "So our main emphasis was on giving them insights into how the system works and teaching them to inject themselves into their lives, to be 'proactive rather than reactive'."

Since its inception, the organization has been purely voluntary and will not accept federal funds. All contributions to date have come from private organizations.

"We are not primarily a funding organization," Davis explained. "While SEO does provide academic assistance, scholarship assistance and grants on a needs basis, we have much more to give as advisors."

Until 1980, SEO had maintained what Davis terms a "laissez-faire" attitude toward overtly directing the subjects studies by its students.

"We let the become what they would," he said. "But then we re-examined our goals, and the SEO board decided it was imperative to direct the students toward opportunities of the future - business and science, high technology.

"We wanted to expose them to these new options. We decided we had to tell them what's coming, because we know what's coming."

With that decision came te birth of a subsidiary SEO program, a more pragmatically directed arm called Sponsors for Engineering and Science.

This program was targeted at ninth grade students at vocational schools in the inner-city.

"These are kids who would have indexed to become journeymen workers - functional but not powerful," Davis said.

As the target audience decreased in age, from youngsters in high school to those just entering the secondary system, the sponsorship structure became more complex. What SEO calls the "chaining reaction" was established.

Chaining is a process by which the youngest students are linked to students in the last years of high school, to freshmen and sophomores in college, to graduate students, and to professionals working in the fields of science and engineering.

The result is an elaborate set of teaching and nurturing relationships, with each succeeding echelon providing both knowledge ad clues about what the next stage will bring. So far some 30 students have embarked on the science and engineering tract through this outgrowth.

A second SEO offshoot came into being in 1980, a program called "Summer on the Street" that places exceptional minority college students in summer jobs on Wall Street. This program, Davis explained, was aimed at tapping high achievers at schools such as Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford and NYU and giving them an opportunity to "index" a career in the financial world into their ultimate career choices.

The program was designed as a one-shot program, an employment commitment for one summer only.

"The students were told that if they wanted to return, they had to do it on their own," Davis said. "And the results speak for themselves. Of the 1980 students, 80 percent were able to get themselves placed as investment analysts after graduation."

Students in this program have increased each year, and Davis said that Wall Street ha reacted most favorably to the project. A recent SEO proposal to make th program operational throughout the year has been accepted by participating Wall Street firms and it is now underway. Wall Street firms involved in the program include First Boston Corporation, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers Kuhn Loeb, Morgan Stanley, Paine Webber ad Salomon Brothers.

"We're taking the best kids in the country," Davis said. "We don't ask for any special considerations. We tell our students that this is no handout. We have to pay our dues. And those dues are substance, stature and worth."

SEO and its ancillary programs currently involve approximately 100 students and 100 advisors. It's a program, Davis said, that is fueled by the "overflow of energy from very busy people."

Davis is one of them.

He is familiar with the educational needs and imperatives of the inner-city; he grew up in Spanish Harlem in Manhattan. His academic potential was recognized when he was a student at George Westinghouse Vocational and Technical High School and it headed him on an academic path that included Bronx Community College Wesleyan University and Yale Medical School.

"Medicine plays an important role in my participation with SEO," he said. "In SEO we try to decrease the stress level of our students by increasing their capability level. 

"We don't believe in a 'sink or swim' approach. We learned that didn't work in the '60s and '70s.. Just because you give people opportunities doesn't mean that they will know how to take advantage of them." 

Speaking of his own years in the inner-city, Davis said "My mother and father were always proactive. My dad worked hard. He was naturally iconoclastic, but he never taught us to cop-out. He learned fro a man who couldn't articulate at my level, but who communicated by example. And that's one of the things we try to do as sponsors." 

Davis concedes that SEO consumes the greater portion of his free time. 

But he still finds time to participate in yet another organization, as a member of the board of directors of the Association for the Integration of Management, a group dedicated to bettering the situation of minority men and women in corporate America. 

Jim Nixon, an ITT Vice President and director of equal employment opportunity for the corporation, and Bob Waite, vice president and director business development-natural resources at ITT, are coworkers who participate in AIM with Davis. 

"I'm active in AIM because it dovetails with the other programs that I'm involved with; they cross pollinate, It's a refresher course for the messages of SEO. Continue presenting the best of yourself- continue being concerned about being indexed for the future." 

To some, it seems that SEO has been keeping its light hidden under a bushel basket.

"That's because we're a very quiet organization," Davis said. "We're not into nation building. We've stopped trying to save the world because we learned a long time ago that our ankles go underneath the water."