Inspirer Banks on Inner City

Inside his offices on the 30th floor of the downtown Wells Fargo building, John Bryant is surrounded by symbols of his success.

Dozens of framed magazine articles, letters of gratitude and photos give testimony to the achievements of Bryant’s Operation Hope Inc., a nonprofit investment banking campaign focused solely on the inner city.

“Not bad,” he likes to say, “for a little black boy from Compton.”

In the aftermath of the 1992 riots, Bryant, then a 26-year-old community college dropout-turned-entrepreneur, had the audacity to invite a group of investment bankers on a bus tour through some of the most devastated neighborhoods. He was determined to call their attention to one of the deepest grievances of post-riot L.A.: the historic inability of minority communities to attract business loans and, in turn, jobs.

His bus tour became a mushrooming annual event. This year, it drew 300 bankers and government officials, including the chairman of the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp., which requires banks to make minimum levels of loans to poor communities.

Bryant has mushroomed, too. As Operation Hope has steered hundreds of inner-city borrowers to financial institutions, he has become one of the most celebrated figures to emerge from the riots--a charismatic, up-from-the-’hood pied piper attacking economic inequity not with anti-capitalist rhetoric but a positive program. At 32, he is one of the most recognized voices in America on inner-city investment.

But an examination of Bryant’s rise also shows that becoming a voice is a far cry from becoming a significant contributor to inner-city revitalization.

While the original purpose of Operation Hope was to generate business loans, an extremely small percentage of the loans Operation Hope brokers have been for business purposes. The overwhelming majority have been for home mortgages, and there have been relatively few of those--little more than one a week during the past three years.

Bryant’s most impressive credentials--his charm, workaholic commitment and inspirational powers--are personal, not financial. His critics note that the bankers who ride Bryant’s bus each year rarely make specific loan commitments. Rather, they pledge to Bryant that they will make loans to any qualified candidate he sends them.

Some advocates for the minority community cut community-investment deals with sympathetic companies and then ride herd on them publicly, demanding accountability. Not Bryant.

“He is a cheap date for banks,” said a longtime community development advocate, who like most critics of Bryant--fearful of alienating the financial institutions that are allied with Operation Hope--spoke on the condition of anonymity. “They ride an annual bus tour and never make any serious financial commitments to our community.”

Bryant is not alone in finding the business of lending in the inner city to be anemic. Just two weeks ago, the Los Angeles Community Development Bank--created to make loans to urban entrepreneurs shunned by conventional lenders--revealed that it has reached less than 40% of its lending goals, despite a large pool of capital.

But much of Bryant’s notoriety has come from promising a private sector solution to a problem that has eluded government intervention. In recent years, reporters have flocked to Bryant for perspective on curbing urban poverty. Time magazine named him “One of America’s 50 Most Promising Leaders of the Future.” Oprah invited him on her TV show. President Clinton’s 50th birthday celebration committee offered him membership. The Gap’s national khakis campaign enlisted him. Last month he jetted to Lyon, France, as a United Nations “goodwill ambassador” for the U.N.’s Conference on Trade and Development.

“I recognize that this country only really respects and pays attention to some form of authority and power,” Bryant said. “I was not given it, wasn’t born with it, so I decided to create my own.”

Productivity Questioned

Bryant’s first bus tour through L.A. netted him only $61,000, mostly in government grants, just enough to begin Operation Hope on a shoestring. Since then, acting as a middleman, he has arranged for $28 million worth of loans from 45 partner financial institutions to inner-city borrowers.

He now employs a staff of 25, financed by the partner banks, which pay $3,000 to $35,000 a year to join Operation Hope. He routinely outworks his staff, often selling his organization until 2 in the morning.

The partners finance Operation Hope’s annual $1-million operating budget, including Bryant’s $85,000 salary as well as two community banking centers in Southwest Los Angeles and the city of Maywood. The centers offer home mortgages, small-business loans and credit counseling for those who might otherwise be turned down.

Operation Hope cranks out frequent news releases promoting both Bryant and new deals between the organization and banks, omitting a variety of disappointments:

* Of the $28 million in loans brokered by Operation Hope during its life, only $3 million worth--29 loans in all--has gone to businesses, according to records compiled by Bryant and his partner banks through August. The rest of the loans--about 150--have been residential mortgages, made over the past three years. Operation Hope has funded fewer than a third of the 500 mortgage loan applications it has received.

* The daily services of Operation Hope’s two community banking centers often go unused. Although Bryant’s seminars on investing draw crowds, few people take advantage of the centers’ donated computers and Internet connections, their check-cashing services or their automated teller machines. A campaign to offer Operation Hope credit cards has resulted in less than 100 takers in two years.

* The productivity of the banking centers is questionable. For example, in three years, banking partners at Operation Hope’s La Brea Avenue center in Southwest Los Angeles made few loans because they relied on Operation Hope lending officers. By contrast, the one institution that chose to assign its own loan representative to the center--First Federal Bank of California--made as many loans as the seven other partners combined--102. Bryant admits that Operation Hope has had difficulty employing lending officers and plans to hire more next year.

* Of 1,451 people enrolled in Operation Hope’s credit counseling, which helps people clean up their credit rating so they can qualify for loans, fewer than 10% have graduated.

* The largest commitment to Bryant’s organization was made last year by Chase Manhattan Mortgage Corp., which pledged to loan from $50 million to $100 million for home mortgages through a program jointly run by Operation Hope and the Los Angeles Urban League. To date, less than $2 million in loans has been funded by Chase, which paid $60,000 to the two groups to hold seminars to promote the loans.

Gary Bonner, Chase’s vice president and senior community development officer, said the bank was “clearly” disappointed that the groups brought the bank so few potential customers.

Bryant makes no apologies. Operation Hope’s mission should be viewed not as revitalization, he says now, but education--spreading the word to needy borrowers.

“We are a conduit, an educator and an inspirator,” he said. “A large part of Operation Hope’s success has been tied to breaking stereotypes held by mainstream financial leaders, public policymakers and the media.”

In explaining his frequent national travels--the nonprofit spent $60,000 on travel and entertainment last year--Bryant often says Operation Hope is on “a mission from God.”

“People come here saying, ‘I’m embarrassed, my credit is shot, I’m buying things in cash,’ ” he said. “They learn that they don’t have to be ashamed. Why do they know that? Because John Bryant stands and says, ‘I failed too, several times.’ They have no reason to be ashamed.”

Sometimes Broke, but Never Poor

Bryant grew up in working-class homes in Compton and South-Central Los Angeles. His parents divorced early. His mother had an aerospace job. His father was a sidewalk cement contractor.

His mother sent him to school wearing homemade crushed-velvet suits with bow ties. “She sent me to school in Compton dressed like that,” he said. “I used to have my rear end kicked every day. I was the outcast, like the overweight kid or the kid with the thick glasses.”

It taught him a lesson: “Groups don’t succeed, individuals do. . . . It was always the kid who stood out in class, who didn’t run with the crowd, who succeeded in life.” At 10, he sold candy at school to make extra money. At 12, he decided to drop his given surname, Smith, and use his middle name as his last.

At 13, he moved in with his father and convinced him to enroll him in the Hollywood Professional School, a private school whose students included several famous teenage stars. Through fellow students Bryant got bit parts in various television series including “The Twilight Zone” and “Diff’rent Strokes.”

Bryant admits he lacked talent to play a variety of roles. “There was too much hype, and I always found myself playing one role: myself.”

While he struggled to find himself in the late 1980s, transferring to several high schools and eventually earning a G.E.D., his mother offered to help him get a job with her at McDonnell Douglas. Instead, Bryant walked into Geoffrey’s, a glitzy Malibu restaurant, observed there were no minority employees and demanded a job.

“I might have even said [jokingly], ‘I might get the NAACP to come here and picket you guys,’ ” Bryant recalled. “I like using racial humor sometimes. It breaks the ice. Most people are decent.”

He got hired as a busboy and soon endeared himself to the restaurant’s owner, who moved him into administration. The more people he met, the more confident he became that he could succeed on his own. He became a concert promoter, a self-employed clothing salesman--and ended up broke, living in his Jeep for six months by the airport, refusing to move home as a failure.

When Bryant describes this chapter in his life, he emphasizes that he was broke, but not poor. “Being broke is an economic condition. Being poor is a disabling frame of mind, a depressed condition of the spirit.”

Finally, using his Malibu connections, he found work again at a Westside investment company as a salesman. Soon he was working in its new Hollywood division, which concentrated on brokering loans for people who had good assets but no steady income--the kinds of people Bryant knew well from his acting days.

Then, in the spring of 1992, a largely white Ventura County jury acquitted white police officers of most of the charges stemming from the beating of Rodney G. King. Like many, Bryant was shocked and angered.

“I felt like a fraud, because I had believed in the American dream and that all you needed to do was work hard to succeed. Then I realized that sometimes there is no justice, but just us.”

Filling a Political Void

In the hours after the riots, Bryant found himself at First African Methodist Episcopal Church, where the Rev. Cecil Murray encouraged him to use his banking skills to promote change. Within days, Bryant organized the bus tour--accompanied by a police escort.

Without knowing it, Bryant was filling a political void. Los Angeles suffered from a lack of leadership as it struggled to rebuild after the riots. Mayor Tom Bradley’s administration preferred to turn the reins over to private developers, who were to be mobilized by an umbrella organization known as Rebuild L.A. Results were less dramatic than expected. Rebuild L.A. would--as promised at its creation--close up shop after five years.

As the country searched to find reasons for the riots, Bryant seemed to have the answer for corporate America. Six years later, his access to power is impressive. One recent day’s calendar included a meeting with former LAPD Chief Willie L. Williams, lunch with a local congresswoman and another meeting with the local head of the Small Business Administration before a gathering with banking executives.

Bryant’s friends call him the Energizer Bunny, so constantly on the go that he returns phone calls from his seat in a crowded movie theater and has to take protein supplements to maintain 155 pounds on his 5-foot-11 frame.

He also runs a sideline business importing African art and has founded The New Leaders, a group of young black professionals whose corporate backgrounds stand apart from Los Angeles’ traditional civil-rights-oriented black leadership.

A moment on this year’s bankers bus tour illustrated the contradictions in Bryant’s peripatetic, go-for-the-photo-op style.

One of the stops the tour made, in an effort to highlight Operation Hope’s successes, was the newly opened community banking center in Maywood, where Bryant has struggled to penetrate a largely Latino city. Here, a nervous but happy Grace Villanueva told her story.

Villanueva, a 30-year-old mother of four who works at a trucking company with her husband, last year received a loan through Operation Hope for $143,000 to purchase a two-story house. She told the bankers she was unable to get a loan until she and her husband visited Operation Hope.

As she finished her tearful testimonial, she was handed an envelope. She said one of the bankers told her there was a check inside--a claim Bryant denies.

“I was really happy, I couldn’t believe it,” she said, thinking she might be getting some money to buy furniture.

As the tears streamed down her face, the camera clicked and she embraced her lenders and left.

When she got home and opened the envelope, she was shocked to find it was empty.

The reason his staffers handed Villanueva an empty envelope, Bryant said, was to symbolize the issuance of her loan--even though she had been making payments on it for six months.

“We didn’t have an oversized check,” he said, “so we handed her an [empty] envelope for the cameras.”

Critics, citing moments like this, dismiss Bryant as charmingly manipulative. But most observers acknowledge a disarming warmth.

“He has a way of establishing a personal relationship with people long before a business relationship develops,” said Stephen Shugerman, president of Southern Pacific Bank and a founding director of Operation Hope. “He has the ability to relate to people. He can relate to a white middle-aged banker type, and he can relate to a teenager in South-Central. He can make that transition very easily.”

Bankers like Shugerman needed someone like Bryant as much as he needed them. Operation Hope’s 45 banking partners contribute to the nonprofit as part of their obligation under the Community Reinvestment Act, a federal law enacted in 1977 that requires banks to demonstrate involvement in disadvantaged communities or face penalties.

“Banks always love to have one example, do one thing and then say they are done,” said Alan Fisher, executive director of the California Reinvestment Committee, which is working with financial institutions including BankAmerica to increase lending in economically depressed and minority communities. “No one organization can satisfy the needs of an entire community.”

Bryant says it is unfair to judge Operation Hope solely on the numbers of loans made. That ignores the courage required to open bank branches at a time when so many banks are closing branches to save money, he says. He boasts that nearly 20,000 people have participated in Operation Hope’s educational components, including counseling, programs in the schools, technical assistance and economic education. “Customers being counseled take anywhere from months to years to restore their credit,” he said.

Operation Hope, he acknowledges, involves selling a product: himself.

“You need to put a face to the movement. You need to make it personal, make it relatable. There are two John Bryants. There is John Bryant the individual, and there is John Bryant the product. . . . We leverage that product to create opportunities for Operation Hope and for the inner cities.

“You may ask, ‘Haven’t you benefited?’ Hell yes, I have, but not in any proportion to how I could have benefited. Operation Hope will continue to use me as a public face until it has grown up as a child grows up, leaves home and stands on its own two feet.”

Bryant’s minister, Murray, affectionately compares him to a meteor that may be burning too quickly.

“The great challenge of John Bryant is to stabilize before moving to the next stage, to do things in stages,” Murray said.