Commencement

Commencement Keynote Speaker: Reuven Carlyle

3 things to know about Reuven Carlyle: Business development. Public policy. Gelato.

Reuven Carlyle, the keynote speaker for this years' commencement ceremony June 18, will advocate for graduates to undertake community and national service. Reuven is the co-founder of City Year, an AmeriCorps program for 17-24 year olds performing a year of community and national service, a successful business developer and co-owner of Dolce Vita, LLC, a gelato company. He has received recognition for civic engagement from the Thomas C. Wales Foundation (Wales was the college's commencement speaker in 2001).

Carlyle is a passionate, enthusiastic, dedicated, philosophical, creative and committed serial entrepreneur with a deeply-held belief that grand ideas, which at first appear to be ridiculous and impossible, are usually the ones most worth pursuing.

Carlyle has a successful track record in the wireless and software industries including business development, sales, marketing and government relation positions with McCaw Cellular Communications/AT&T Wireless, Xypoint, UIEvolution and other area companies. As vice president of external affairs, Carlyle helped build Xypoint from a small startup to the largest provider of emergency wireless E9-1-1 services in the nation serving Verizon, Cingular, U.S. Cellular and other major wireless carriers. The company raised $42 million in venture money and was sold to TCS, Inc. (Nasdaq: TSYS) in 2001. He also has provided business development services to a number of Israeli-based technology companies entering the U.S. market.

Carlyle also is co-owner of Dolce Vita, LLC, a gelato company providing authentic, hand made, Italian gelato and sorbetto desserts. The company has one retail outlet on Seattle’s Queen Anne Hill and a thriving wholesale operation serving premium resteraunts and food services throughout the region.

Previously, Carlyle was a press secretary for a governor, speechwriter and public policy specialist. Carlyle has a M.P.A. from the John F. Kennedy School of Government at Harvard University and a B.A. in communications from the University of Massachusetts. As a teenager Carlyle served in Washington, D.C. as a U.S. Congressional Page for Senators Warren G. Magnuson and Henry M. Jackson and as a personal page to Speaker Thomas P. O’Neill, Jr.

Carlyle is citizen co-founder and current board co-chair of City Year, an AmeriCorps program for 17-24 year olds performing a year of community and national service. He also serves on the board of the University of Washington Chapter of Hillel, an umbrella Jewish community organization. He lives in Seattle with his wife Wendy Carlyle, a physician, and their three children.

Commencement Address
June 18, 2004

President Oharah, trustees, faculty, parents, friends, and graduates of the Class of 2004:

I'm deeply honored to be with you today. Thank you for this wonderful opportunity.

There are unwritten rules of commencement speeches - be quick, pithy, funny, and don't preach about your obligation as new college graduates to change the world.

But with some 3,600 colleges and universities in our country, I figure there's only 5 memorable speeches anyway, so the chances of mine being one of them seem ridiculously low.

The great news for me is that this takes the pressure off and I can just share what's in my heart.

I have been so profoundly impressed by the students and faculty I've met at Edmonds that I can't help myself but to break one of those rules and talk about idealism and, yes, your obligation to change the world.

One of the most inspired commencement speeches in recent memory was not at Harvard or the University of Washington but here-at this very podium-by Tom Wales. Tom was Edmonds' 2001 speaker, the federal prosecutor and handgun-control advocate who was tragically shot down in his Seattle home just four months later.

Tom challenged your peers to step up and embrace life with courage and intensity:

He said,

"Be engaged. Be involved in what goes on around you. Be present in your own life. Find something you believe in passionately and get into it. Get outraged. Take a stand."

I have no words or insight more beautiful than that.

My hope today is to honor your celebration by doing what Tom did: Be real-and talk about genuine issues and some new ideas.

Everyone has a story, a part of their history and soul and DNA that reflects who they really are.

For the first 5 years of my life, I was bounced between foster homes as my mother-a certified hippie with flowers in her hair-struggled to overcome mental illness. Which she did.

At 5, newly re-united with my mother, we moved to Bellingham where she worked as the only woman welder in a shipyard of 100 men making fishing boats bound for Alaska.

My mother and I struggled for years on public assistance to make it. I learned in the gut that the greatest harm that poverty inflicts on kids is that it tries to drag them down into the muck of low self esteem.

I can still feel the humiliation from 6th grade when our teacher required the kids on welfare to walk to the front of the room to receive our free lunch tickets.

My life-changing break came at 15 when I finagled an invite to a local political event for our state's powerful United States Senator, Warren Magnuson, who was at that time 3rd in line for the presidency.

Looking out of place at the fancy event, I paced in the back of the room for 2 hours as people came and went.

Finally, with palms dripping in sweat, I sat down on the Senator's foot stool, looked him in the eye, and asked, with the passion that only a naïve teenager can pull off, for a job as his congressional page in Washington, D.C.

Two weeks later, because of the Senator's willingness to help mentor a lost kid, and Mrs. Magnuson's insistence that he do it-for which I'll always be grateful-I was in the United States Senate with a crisp page uniform sitting next to the sons and daughters of CEOs and cabinet members.

With the guidance of mentors who helped lift me up, I went on to college, graduate school and a series of high tech jobs in the cellular phone industry-and to marry the love and joy of my life, my wife Wendy.

I have learned that there is a powerful wave of positive emotional and spiritual energy that radiates from our mentors and lifts us up when we are down. It nourishes our soul. It helps us find meaning and purpose. It helps lift us from foster care to Harvard.

Go back to the very day you decided to attend Edmonds, to lift yourself up, get new skills and get serious about your advanced education. You made a profound choice that day and you have done it.

Think of your own family and mentors, for no one comes here alone. Let's recognize their sacrifice in helping you reach this moment.

Unleash the entrepreneurial spirit within yourself.

I believe that everyone is an entrepreneur at heart, not just front-page big names like Bill Gates, Paul Allen and Howard Schultz. An entrepreneur is not just a business person who builds companies and chases money, it is a spiritual frame of mind-it is having the gift of new eyes to see fresh opportunities for yourself and to take advantage of them.

The energy that many of you cinched to work part-time, arrange housing, or find child care, to come back and get your GED or professional retraining, to transfer to Central Washington University or other institutions, all required creativity, perseverance, spirit and energy to make happen.

The truth is you are a successful entrepreneur. And the company you are building is yourself.

With gas prices and the war in Iraq and a stressful job environment, it's easy at times let cynicism rule. But nothing should distract you from finding your passion and being good at what inspires you. Be proud of your own voice, especially when you sing out of tune with traditional expectations.

If you do, your choice of a career-and your single most important choice of all during your time on this planet- your choice of a spouse or life partner - will never be at odds with the values of your conscience.

In the spirit of dialogue and diversity that Edmonds nourishes, let me tell you about a public policy issue that is my personal passion.

Open you heart to this idea:

Imagine a social movement where every young person is encouraged-- and paid -- to serve our country for a year of full-time national and community service in the Peace Corps, the military, AmeriCorps, or other instruments of civic engagement?

At City Year, the AmeriCorps program I helped bring to King County, we imagine a time when the most commonly asked question of every high school student will be, "where are you going to spend your year of service?"

Imagine if every young person in our state --black and white, Asian and Latino, rich and poor, kids from Lynwood and Ellensburg and immigrants from Ukraine, the daughters of CEOs and kids from foster care--all serving together with the money, support and infrastructure to make it effective.

Last year throughout our country 64,000 AmeriCorps members served in over 5,000 non profits, schools and community groups, including here at Edmonds, under the inspired leadership of Instructor Tom Murphy.

Your peers Joey Ketah, President of the American Indian Student Association, and Michael Aspen, a culinary arts student, served as AmeriCorps members, and helped organize this year's acclaimed POWWOW that drew participants from all our surrounding states, British Columbia and even Peru.

Beverly Yuodelis worked hard as an AmeriCorps member to help communities of color, religious groups and first responders increase our community's public safety skills.

Alyca Avent organized lectures and arts and culture events on campus that were incredibly successful.

And your tireless student commencement speaker, Yolanda Eskridge, will serve as a math teacher next year under the AmeriCorps banner.

All of you help create an ethic of civic engagement here on this special campus. Thank you, and everyone who made time in your life this year to volunteer.

In exchange for your service, we should help with your education - I mean real help - I mean serious help. No excuses about a cap on transfer admissions at Western Washington University, Central and the other 4-year colleges. We should provide better first time home buying help, free advanced job training and even free admission to our state park system.

Next year, a group of citizen activists will introduce legislation in the state legislature to begin to make this happen.

Robert Kennedy, the great civic leader of the 1960s, said to a different generation of young people facing moral challenges of their day:

"Each time a man stands up for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends forth a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance."

I have learned from my journey from foster care to Harvard to business to parenthood that every good deed you perform, publicly, or privately when only the light of your conscience is looking, is a ripple of hope.

As you think about your journey, be a ripple of hope and help a kid looking for a mentor.

Be a ripple of hope and treat your spouse or partner with respect.

Be a ripple of hope for your generation and vote.

Be a ripple of hope, get passionate about issues that move you and reject cynicism.

As Tom Wales said on this very podium, "there is work to be done."

Class of 2004, this is your day and this is your hour of triumph. We are all incredibly proud of you. We are proud of the difficult choices and extraordinary effort you've made to reach this very moment.

Open your heart and you will continue to lift up toward a joyous, righteous, happy, loving, spiritually alive and meaningful life.

I wish you G-d speed on your journey. Congratulations and thank you.