A SMALL, IMPISH smile crosses Paul Grogan’s face as he remembers being chastised by his former boss, Boston Mayor Kevin White.
The four-term mayor was a tough person to work for at times – funny, biting, and full of “defiant optimism,” says Grogan – with little patience for nonsense in his quest to transform a struggling city.
Then a 20-something speechwriter, passionate but green, Grogan offered a somewhat irrelevant remark during a high level City Hall meeting, “and the mayor regarded this as the dumbest thing he had ever heard,” Grogan said on The Codcast. “And he turned and looked at me and said, ‘Paul, we’re over here playing baseball, and you’re looking for a football helmet. Get in the game.’”
Grogan got in the game, and he stayed there for half a century – working for and advising two famed Boston mayors, championing the community development corporation (CDC) model to pair city and neighborhood activism with public and private resources, leading the New York City-based Local Initiatives Support Corporation starting in the 1980s, and heading up the Boston Foundation as president and CEO for the better part of two decades until 2021.
At 73, Grogan considers his civic legacy in a new memoir – Be Prepared to Be Lucky: Reflections on Fifty Years of Public and Community Service – co-written by former Cincinnati Foundation president Kathryn Merchant, who also joined in the Codcast conversation. Proceeds will go to the Boston Foundation’s Civic Leadership Fund.
After leaving the Boston Foundation, Grogan said, “I didn’t want a job. So I think it was really that I wanted to see if I could have just a little more influence, and play some role in keeping this movement on the kind of roll that it is now with respect to this whole civic leadership model that we’ve helped invent over the years.”
The memoir traces Grogan’s career with good humor and a frank eye trained on Greater Boston’s evolution from the structural bleakness of the 1970s to the glistening but expensive hub of local politics, innovation, science, and business that it is today. Anecdotes about some of Boston’s strongest personalities season explorations of funding battles and organizational transformation, observed and shaped by Grogan and his generation of new civic leaders.
The co-writing project came about, Merchant said, over a dinner in Bologna, Italy, in 2022. Grogan mentioned that he was thinking of writing his memoir and Merchant, who had already published three books, “practically jumped out of my chair” offering to help. The journey began a few months later, recording conversations and interviews together to frame the book.
Merchant describes Grogan as a mentor to her and the entire field of community foundations.
The memoir writing, which began around the time that Grogan was diagnosed with Parkinson’s two years ago, was initially meant to be reflections for his family that expanded out into a broader look at the role of civic leadership in government, private, and non-profit spaces.
When Grogan took over at the Boston Foundation, leading and expanding the century-old organization for almost two decades from 2001 to 2021, Merchant said, “we all lined up like lemmings to say, ‘How is he getting this done?’ He is transforming a traditional community foundation, which frankly most of us were running, and we wanted to have a piece of that knowledge. And Paul gave that willingly to the point that today, some 90 percent of all community foundations follow a degree of a civic leadership model. That’s because of Paul.”
Prepared to Be Lucky comes from the 1949 E.B. White book Here is New York, in which the author counsels, “No one should come to New York to live unless he is willing to be lucky.”
In Grogan’s telling, readying for luck involves “a watchfulness about the environment around you and what you’re doing.” It means having “an ability to respond to opportunity that presents itself, that might not if you didn’t have that sensibility or that state of mind of recognizing that’s how the world works, and I’m going to turn that to my advantage as much as I can.”
In looking back, Grogan also looks for a way to inspire a new generation of ambitious, dedicated young people who may want to enter civic leadership. The person in the right place at the right time doesn’t necessarily mean being a 24-year-old in a flagging 1970s Boston.
“I think it’s important that people recognize that the kind of reform energy or processes we’ve been talking to can come from anywhere,” Grogan said. “It’s not necessarily the public sector.” Neighborhood-based organizations, larger nonprofits, foundations with an appetite to coordinate public-private partnerships – all could be launch points for new leaders. “It’s kind of confusing, because there isn’t an exact science, but the good news is there’s space in these organizations for something to happen.”