The Cathedral Within: Transforming Your Life by Giving Something Back [Paperback]

Bill Shore (Author)

Book Description

Publication Date: November 13, 2001

In this wise and inspiring book, social entrepreneur Bill Shore shows us how to make the most of life and do something that counts. Like the cathedral builders of an earlier time, the visionaries described in this memoir share a single desire: to create something that endures. The extraordinary people Shore has met on his travels represent a new movement of citizens who are tapping into the vast resources of the private sector to improve public life. Among them are:

-- Gary Mulhair, who has created unprecedented jobs and wealth at the largest self-supporting human-service organization of its kind, Pioneer Human Services of Seattle.

-- Nancy Carstedt of the Chicago Childrenís Choir, which provides thousands of children their first introduction to music.

-- Geoffrey Canada, who has made a safe haven for more than four thousand inner-city children in New York City, from Hell's Kitchen to Harlem.

These leaders, and many others described in these pages, have built important new cathedrals within their communities, and by doing so they have transformed lives, including their own.

Editorial Reviews

Amazon.com Review

The Cathedral Within uses the metaphor of architecture to look at the way individuals allocate their resources to improve public life. Just as the enduring magnificence of a cathedral is not erected overnight, so, too, the transformation of a society takes many, many years to complete. And just as the construction of a cathedral is less a reflection of its builders' interest in masonry than a testament to the soaring reach of the human spirit, philanthropy is not so much a response to need as to a basic human requirement to give something meaningful back to society.

Bill Shore is the founder of Share Our Strength, a national nonprofit devoted to raising funds for antihunger and antipoverty organizations worldwide, and his book showcases the stories of some of the social entrepreneurs he has come across in the course of his work. Among his chosen visionaries are Alan Khazei, the cofounder of City Year, the community-service program upon which Bill Clinton drew for his own model of a national service, and Geoffrey Canada, the president and CEO of the Rheedlen Centers, designed to provide a safe haven for inner-city children. These leaders and many others, Shore argues, represent a kind of symbiosis between the need to improve oneself personally and the drive to transform the community. The Cathedral Within also contains an excellent resource directory of community organizations where readers can begin their own process of giving back. --Patrizia DiLucchio --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Booklist

This book is not about religious consolation or giving. It is about helping, and finding that more rewarding than business or politics. But that still makes it sound too much like a self-help tome. It is an explanation of why helping is important and how sound helping organizations are succeeding these days, when government helping programs are scaling back and dying out. Shore directs Share Our Strength, an organization that helps organizations concerned with alleviating hunger and poverty, especially for children. Indeed, trotting out some fine illustrative stories about what children need from his own fatherly experience, Shore posits children's health and welfare as the quintessential reasons for helping work. As for the success stories in helping work today, Shore profiles seven. The most striking commonality among them is entrepreneurial spirit: if these nonprofit agencies don't already have for-profit subsidiaries, they are seriously considering them. For they see, as Shore emphasizes, that charity and redistribution of wealth (taxes for government programs) must be supplemented by "creating new wealth" through producing and selling goods and services. So young or dissatisfied businesspersons looking for meaningful work should consider helping work, Shore suggests, engaging in it as if it were the work of building a cathedral--seemingly endless but endlessly rewarding: think of it as a cathedral within. Ray Olson --This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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Product Details

• Paperback: 320 pages
• Publisher: Random House Trade Paperbacks (November 13, 2001)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 0375758291
• ISBN-13: 978-0375758294
• Product Dimensions: 5.2 x 0.7 x 8 inches
• Shipping Weight: 9.1 ounces (View shipping rates and policies)
• Average Customer Review: 4.5 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (13 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #159,806 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)
  • #32 in Books > Business & Investing > Job Hunting & Careers > Volunteer Work

More About the Author

Bill Shore is the founder and executive director of Share Our Strength®, a national nonprofit that is ending childhood hunger in America. Shore is also the chairman of Community Wealth Ventures®, Inc., a for-profit subsidiary of Share Our Strength that offers strategy and implementation services to foundations and nonprofit organizations, partnering with them to design and implement innovative approaches to growth and sustainability to promote social change.

Shore founded Share Our Strength in 1984 in response to the Ethiopian famine and subsequently renewed concern about hunger in the United States. From 1978 through 1987, Shore served on the senatorial and presidential campaign staffs of former U.S. Senator Gary Hart (D-Colorado). From 1988 to 1991, Shore served as chief of staff for former U.S. Senator Robert Kerrey (D-Nebraska). His transition from politics to innovative community service and his prescription for community change are documented in his first book, Revolution of the Heart (Riverhead Press, 1995). Shore's second book, The Cathedral Within (Random House, 1999), profiles a new breed of community leaders who are tapping every sector of society to improve community life. Shore's most recent book is The Imaginations of Unreasonable Men, published in November, 2010 by PublicAffairs.

A native of Pittsburgh, Pa., Shore earned his B.A. at the University of Pennsylvania and his law degree from George Washington University in Washington, D.C. He currently serves on the board of directors of The Timberland Company and Venture Philanthropy Partners and was named one of America's Best Leaders (October 2005) by "US News & World Report."

Shore has been an adjunct professor at New York University's Stern School of Business and is currently an advisor for the Reynolds Foundation Fellowship program at the John F. Kennedy School of Government.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

10 of 11 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Perfect Father's Day Gift - But Buy One for Yourself Too., June 4, 1999

By A Customer

This review is from: The Cathedral Within (Hardcover)

Billy Shore doesn't just have a message; he is a great storyteller with a message. The result is a book that you won't want to stop reading until you get to the very last page. Then you will want to go out and do something to make yourself and the world a little bit better place. It has been a long time since I read a book that made me think so much, or reflect so deeply on the world in which we live; or the one that we will leave to the next generations. Shore guides us to the realization that there is much that we can be doing to leave our children the basic freedoms of safety, education and the ability to earn a decent livelihood; things that many of us took for granted. This book has genuine heros and heroines, great parenting stories, humour, lots of examples of what's working, and some very pointed examples of why the clock is ticking for the children of our country. And as the title promises, just reading the book makes you begin to feel empowered to start giving more to get more out of life. A great dose of inspiration and direction for individuals and organizations.

12 of 14 people found the following review helpful:

4.0 out of 5 stars Building A Soul For Business, May 17, 2000

By 

Melissa E. Penn "Contributor to human(e) evol... (Cardiff-by-the-Sea, CA) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: The Cathedral Within (Hardcover)

Perhaps the most important points that this book makes are 1) If you can't build the structure, add a few bricks! and 2) Community Wealth and Social Capital are re-inventing business from the soul out!

In this well-written book, Shore (Founder of Share Our Strength) uses the model of a cathedral to demonstrate that large dreams are community efforts that reach beyond personal lifetimes to accomplish, and that appear impossible until the collective brainpower of the community engages to find a solution. This metaphor addresses the "perfectionism" that sometimes stops people from making efforts towards social change. In the inspirational stories of ordinary people doing extraordinary things, readers feel the passion that rebounds of the pages. Echoing the human voice for meaning in an increasingly digital and isolated world, this book suggests practical ways for American wealth to be redefined, redistributed, and built upon foundations that include social interests. It is a blueprint for building ethics into today's business values and ventures that will create a social structure of community wealth.

I read it in one sitting, underlined heavily, and have placed 39 page markers within its covers. The inspiration found between its pages has helped me redesign my own business plan towards the greater good. In short, read it.

6 of 7 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Right on the mark, May 6, 2002

By 

Steven S Cichosz (Monument, Colorado United States) - See all my reviews

This review is from: The Cathedral Within: Transforming Your Life by Giving Something Back (Paperback)

This is a book that touches the heart of both important social issues and the reader. Written in a wonderfully open style the author writes from a perspective of sharing rather than preaching. Bill Shore's approach of tying his view of how the issues of today's society can be most effectively addressed to his personal experiences, rather than theory and conjecture, brings substantial credibility to his writings.
The issues addressed are those of scaling the resources of non-profit, public service, organizations to meet the growing needs of our society in the face of shrinking government resources. The notion of making non-profit organizations self-sufficient is well outlined and easily understood. "The Cathedral Within" is a book that left me feeling encouraged to know that there is not only room for improvemnt in our social structure but that it is being aggressively and effectively pursued.