Greyston Mandala in Yonkers, New York, uses Buddhist principles to redefine social service. Along with shelter, work and medical care, it offers clients a light on their life’s path.
It’s a bit disorienting driving north out of Manhattan and into Yonkers, a working class enclave in the middle of wealthy, suburban Westchester County. After crossing the narrow Harlem River on the Henry Hudson Bridge, the Saw Mill River Parkway threads north through Riverdale, then cuts into the city of Yonkers. Exit the highway, and just over the hill are pre-World War II apartment buildings, bodegas, tire repair shops, and other small neighborhood businesses. In this predominantly African-American and Hispanic neighborhood, the median annual income is $22,000.
Continue east on the city streets and soon the Hudson River appears. Apartment buildings overlook it, but they are not the luxury units one might expect with such a commanding view of the waterway. (In fact, such units are being built below, as part of an urban redevelopment project, down by the docks on the river.) Up here they’re old, weathered buildings inhabited by the working poor. Nestled by one of the buildings on Buena Vista Avenue sits a lot surrounded by a chain link fence that has been turned into a community garden. Corn, green beans, collard greens, tomatoes, peppers, cilantro and flowers grow in well-tended plots, many of them protected by espantapájaros-scarecrows made of old clothes, caps, sticks and broom handles.
The garden is one of six started by the Greyston Foundation, which provides the seed and soil but leaves the planting and harvesting to anyone who wants a plot. Retirees, school children, parents and families grow vegetables and flowers in dozens of raised beds. School classes visit the gardens for environmental education projects. Barbecues, clean-ups and celebrations are held regularly. The non-profit foundation, founded by Zen teacher Bernard Glassman in 1982, views the gardens as a means of integrating itself into the surrounding community.
“The gardens kind of ventilate Greyston,” says Charles G. Lief, the executive director of the organization for the past nine years. “Right now we largely relate to people because they’re homeless or they have AIDS or they’re unemployed. But with the gardens, we’re not dealing with people around their personal histories, we’re simply dealing with people as a broader community-building exercise.”
Community has been a central theme of Greyston since a Zen group started a for-profit bakery 19 years ago with a mission to create jobs for chronically unemployed in the inner city. Since then, the bakery has grown to employ 55 people. Greyston has also built 140 housing units for the homeless, the elderly and low-income families; opened the largest AIDS treatment program in Westchester county; offered a child-care facility for working families and families moving from welfare to work; and created non-sectarian forums for spirituality, whether it’s a council meeting for the community to share openly or pastoral counseling for people with HIV/AIDS. All told, Greyston’s budget reached $11.5 million this year, funded by product sales, service fees, donations and government grants.
Now, in perhaps its most dramatic project to date, Greyston is building a new $7 million bakery that will allow it to significantly expand its cramped 24-hour operation and hire and train even more workers. The new building was designed by architect Maya Lin, best known for the Vietnam Veterans Memorial in Washington, DC. Greyston is also renovating another 40 low-income apartments in a former slum dwelling, and has purchased the first of four lots in downtown Yonkers where it will develop properties for affordable home ownership.
Greyston views all of these activities as part of a larger mission to provide support for people along their life path. A formerly homeless mother living in Greyston housing, for example, might drop off her child at the day care so she can attend a job-training program at the bakery. As she regains stability, she might want one day to purchase a home under Greyston’s home ownership program.
“The vision for Greyston as a whole is a community, more so than being a social service agency or a combination of a social service agency and a for-profit business,” says David Rome, senior vice president of the organization. “Part of that involves seeing everything we do in a holistic way.”
This contrasts with the traditional philanthropic model, which might be content with the worthwhile aim of providing services to people in need, whether a meal, medical care or shelter for the night. Says Lief, “What we think we are moving towards more profoundly is: how, when all the parts of Greyston fit together in a coherent whole, does it illuminate a path for somebody? That’s the important work we do here-turning on the light.”
Informed by this approach, Greyston has become perhaps the foremost example of engaged Buddhism in North America. But it is also a non-denominational endeavor, open to all the spiritual traditions that one might find in a contemporary community. Many of its clients and staff are fundamentalist Christian, Baptist, Muslim, Jewish, or don’t have any religious affiliation. “We’ve developed a workplace that looks like it’s non-sectarian to people who don’t want to self-identify as Buddhists,” Lief says. “But at the same time, somebody can look at it and say these are really Buddhist-driven values here. Bridging that is an important part of the work.”
Greyston’s founder, Roshi Bernie Glassman, says in his book, Instructions to the Chef: A Zen Master’s Lessons in Living a Life that Matters, that the most potent transformations occur when you embrace things you habitually reject. That process allows you to let go of preconceptions, clearing the way for a new approach. This doesn’t mean that you forget the past; rather you let go of your attachment to it.
Greyston, which Glassman started as an outgrowth of the Zen Community of New York, decided to work with those people who were habitually rejected by society. “Our culture doesn’t just throw out things,” he wrote, “we throw out people as well. But just because someone is homeless, or because someone has AIDS, or is mentally handicapped or gay or black or white or old or whatever, doesn’t mean the person is garbage. We all have something to offer.” He brought up the Buddhist metaphor of a lotus nourished in mud: “We can’t just work with what we like about ourselves. We have to work with our muddy water.”
Glassman’s book, written with the late Rick Fields, tells the story of Greyston’s founding. An aerospace engineer turned monk, Glassman arrived in New York in 1979 to start a Zen community affiliated with Zenshu-ji temple in Los Angeles, led by Glassman’s teacher, the late Taizan Maezumi Roshi. It supported itself by donations and fees from seminars and retreats held at a building it had purchased in Riverdale called the Greyston mansion.
Seeking a broader impact from its work, the group looked into starting a business that might constitute right livelihood. The criteria for the business were: it should do no harm, become a vehicle for training and personal growth, support a growing community, be accessible to those without a background in the field, create jobs for many people, and become a venture in which they could excel. It should combine engagement, a commitment to social action, and sustainability.
They settled on a bakery. Borrowing $300,000 from a donor, they opened up the facility in 1982. Soon, along with meditation sessions, they were churning out muffins, scones and cakes. By 1985, they were selling goods to restaurants and stores, and providing residents in the surrounding inner city with jobs. They eventually sold the mansion in Riverdale-while retaining its name-to move closer to their new community in Yonkers. Greyston is now located on the grounds of a former Catholic convent across from the Yonkers General Hospital.
Glassman got support from other entrepreneurs with a social conscience, such as Ben & Jerry’s Homemade Inc., the premium ice cream maker in South Burlington, Vermont. The company contracted Greyston to produce brownies for its Fudge Brownie ice cream flavor-a contract now worth $4 million a year, or 70% of the bakery’s business. Greyston also expanded into providing housing for the homeless, with the first Greyston Family Inn building opening in 1991. A year later it formed Greyston Health Services for people with HIV/AIDS. In 1993, the Greyston Foundation was incorporated as the umbrella organization for these activities.
Years before welfare-to-work programs, Greyston, like other community organizations, created a way for its members to try to achieve self-sufficiency. It didn’t aim to “help” people. Rather, by providing training and entry-level jobs at the bakery, and a housing program in which the tenants governed the buildings, it sought to break the cycle of poverty and dependency.
That’s why Lief is sensitive about holding up its workers as poster children desperately in need of support. It’s patronizing, he says, to use its workforce as a marketing vehicle to sell its baked goods. Instead, Lief says, what Greyston seeks to offer is “a high quality, competitively priced” product that happens also to further a “social mission.” The difference is measured in dignity.
Charles Lief was attracted to Greyston by Glassman’s goal of creating a Buddhist spiritual community that worked within the world-similar, say, to the work of United Jewish Communities or Catholic Charities. He came from the Shambhala community in Nova Scotia in 1992 to set up the AIDS treatment facility. David Rome came shortly after. Both had backgrounds in business (Lief was a lawyer, Rome a publisher), and had studied under the late Chögyam Trungpa Rinpoche, the founder of the Shambhala community.
“We have a strong body of teaching that says work in the world is an essential part of being a complete practitioner,” Lief says, “and somehow institutionally we haven’t figured out how to do that.” Greyston thus became a “missing piece” for Lief: “It was an important next step to feel that I was testing my value as a Buddhist practitioner.”
“Bernie had been very attracted early on to the mandala principle, a prominent feature in Tibetan Buddhism,” Rome says. “And rightly or wrongly he thought we were mandala experts, having trained under Trungpa Rinpoche, and that we could come and give form to his vision.”
Greyston’s strategic plan is based on the mandala principle, as applied to the organization overall and to the details of specific initiatives-even the financial projections one finds in a conventional business plan. Far from an abstraction, the mandala model is a guide to unify Greyston and point the way ahead.
Glassman described the “Greyston Mandala” as a circle of life. It has four outer components-body, heart, mind and spirit-whose activities (or energies) are unified in a fifth component, the self.
At the most basic level, a person needs food, clothing and shelter. In the mandala, this is the realm of the body and the activity of enrichment. Emotions, relations and love form the second sphere, heart, whose activity is healing. Knowledge and intellect are the elements of the third sphere, mind, whose activity is clarifying. The fourth element, spirit, is defined as transpersonal and universal experience, and empowering is its activity. The self integrates all the spheres and thus has a unifying energy.
But the model doesn’t just apply to the individual; it also applies to the organization. Thus, for example, the realm of the body becomes the realm of wealth in the Greyston Mandala, since this sphere provides shelter and jobs for the community through the Greyston Family Inn and Greyston Bakery. Health care, day care, the gardens-each has its place in the mandala and correspond with specific energies. At the center is the administration, coordinating the parts and planning for the future.
The mandala isn’t a static model; it can be used to examine the purpose of activities and understand where they are leading. A homeless man entering Greyston with a substance abuse problem, for example, would first focus on the body and heart to begin turning his life around. In practical terms, he would secure safe housing and then work on physical and emotional health. When those aspects became stabilized, the other realms of the mandala (mind and spirit) might become a larger focus in his life.
This evolutionary process plays into a second Buddhist concept applied at Greyston: path. “It’s really a question of just how tired you become of who you are in a neurotic sense,” says Lief. “If you get tired enough of who you are, you figure out creative ways to break out. And breaking through that wall of resistance is really the beginning of a definition of path.” Essentially, it’s a recognition that each individual is on their own path, in relationship with the larger community.
Greyston even hired a vice president for pathmaker services last year, who has started working with formerly homeless families and entry level workers on these issues. “It is clearly intended for everyone in the organization, starting with board members and volunteers,” Rome says. “I have this vision in which everyone who becomes part of Greyston could articulate what it is they are working on in their life through their involvement with Greyston.”
How does the Buddhist approach actually inform the day-to-day work at Greyston? It appears in the silence observed before a meeting is held, allowing the participants to slow down, get in touch with their inner state, gather their thoughts and focus on the issues at hand. It manifests itself in “listening practice,” a mindfulness approach Greyston has adopted that recognizes the importance of being present and of listening to others. “For me, that is the realization of Buddhism, more so than something explicit like we practice mediation together,” Rome says.
Judith Lief, who works as a Buddhist pastoral counselor at the Maitri Day Center, says she comes across Buddhist concepts all the time in her work with AIDS patients, but she doesn’t bring them up. They arise in the work itself. She feels her challenge is to make patients aware of Buddhist practices or ways of thinking about problems that might help them. So, for example, she teaches mindfulness meditation to provide a way for people to deal with physical ailments through relaxation and insight. She also holds sessions that deal with death and dying-among people who are literally fading away.
“I wanted to try and expand my language to see how Buddhist practice translates to people coming from a working class background, or from less educated backgrounds or from the streets,” she says. But more often than not, it’s the patients who address issues in a way that resonates with her own understanding.
“There’s an issue that comes up over and over, which is forgiveness,” she says. “Many of the people I’ve met contracted AIDS from partners who did not disclose they were HIV positive. So finding that out-usually under strange circumstances-leads to tremendous anger.” At the same time, through telling their stories, many realize that “the anger they are feeling is damaging themselves more than anyone else. Questions come up: ‘How do you let go of that? How do you forgive?’ Now I don’t bring that up at all; these are things I’ve learned from them.”
She goes on to say that the openness to address these issues stems from the fact that these people rarely “experience genuine respect. So even the slightest bit of respect and the slightest bit of being willing to listen reveals these treasure troves of issues and insights and confusion.”
The work at the Maitri center can be overwhelming at times, she admits. And this presents something of a challenge to a Buddhist practitioner, since “you’re supposed to be expanding your capacity to relate to the actual suffering all around in the world. Over time how do you do that? After spending four or five hours at Maitri center, you come back home and feel like you’ve been at work for about 12 years.”
This has given her a deeper respect for the people who do this work every day, and it has also enriched her practice. “It’s inspiring to me how much spirit and soul people have in the midst of this tremendously difficult life,” she says. “That people still have a sense of humor, that they are still very humble, that they are very insightful and don’t totally give up. It’s very humbling that way.”
In a wood-paneled conference room, a dozen or so chairs are set up in a circle. On one sits a picture of Sandra Jishu Holmes, Roshi Glassman’s late wife, who began a practice called “council.” Each month, anyone in the Greyston community can come to the meeting and bring up whatever is on their mind. It is open to clients, staff, administrators and the occasional visitor. The only requirement is that people talk from the heart and listen from the heart. They also agree not to talk about what transpires within the circle.
The session borrows on the Native American practice of the talking stick. Each person who holds the carved and painted stick can speak. When they are finished talking, they pass the stick to the next person. And so on-the conversation deepening as the stick gets passed again and again, even though the circular nature of the process does not encompass the traditional Western notion of dialogue. At the end of the session, which lasts for perhaps two hours, the room feels much closer. Some people who have never met each other hug in recognition of the stories told.
What’s most surprising is that this session has taken place in the confines of a social service organization. Yet there is nothing “institutional” about what transpires. It’s a sharing of personal stories by people who live and work in a community, with an honesty that’s palpable.
Perhaps this is the real prize of this Buddhist-inspired approach. It’s a way of listening, a way of relating, a way of gardening-nothing more. If Greyston can maintain its explicit Buddhist identity in the future, Rome says, “I would be very happy. But it’s more important that it continues doing genuine work.”
