Convention Chairman
George D. Behrakis

Mr. Behrakis is the former chairman of Leadership 100 and chairman of this year’s convention

How is the 25th Anniversary Fund drive going?

We’re doing extremely well. We brought in 64 new members this year. We have over 300 right now, 331 in fact, and we might get as many as 340 or 350.

And you have another five years to reach your goal?

I think we’re going to reach our goal in about two or two and a half years. I think if we accelerate the pace we can bring in the desired members.

How do you bring in these members, what is the pitch?

I think the pitch is very simple: the goal of this organization is to promote Hellenism and Orthodoxy. We support the work of the Church but would also like to do a lot of work in promoting Hellenism. Surprisingly the 64 new members are between the ages of 40 and 55. These are the ones we want. We want to capture the young people who are willing to extend themselves whether they’re professionals, workers, executives, we don’t care what they are as long as they want to promote the Hellenism and Orthodoxy in America before we lose it.

How do you appeal to people with busy careers?

The way we do it is we structure the scale so that someone who is 25-30 can come in with dues of $2,500-$3,000 a year. Once they hit 30 to 35 it’s $3,500. Once they reach 35-40 it’s $4,000. And it comes up to the age of 55 when it’s $10,000 a year. So by the time they’ve reached 50 they’ve already paid their dues. So we restructured it to bring in the youth. What we’ve done in the cities like Boston is we had a reception and brought in 40 people who are not members and 10 of them became members. We can do that in Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, Philadelphia, New Jersey, Long Island, New York and I think we can sign up another 70-80 people.

How do you find potential members?

A lot of it is word of mouth. A lot of it is knowing one person who says I know three other Greeks, and we say, give us their address, give us their telephone number so we can talk to them. A person in Boston might say, well, I have a friend in New York, I have a friend in Cleveland, I have a friend in Kansas City. We usually go there and have a reception or party and sit there and discuss the membership and bring in the chairman and bring in Paulette and the chairman of development for that area and explain that over 25 years we’ve given out over $25 to $30 million to various programs and we’d like to continue this and if we can get to a high of 1,000 members we can start giving out $5 million. And we want to create other programs beyond what we’re doing, to promote elementary and secondary education, for example. We have so many schools in the country, day schools and afternoon schools. We want to be able to get grants out to them.

Do you do that now?

Yes. We don’t want to lose the language or the culture. Because what’s happening today is that 80 percent of new marriages among Greeks are mixed marriages. If we want people to adopt Greek Orthodoxy we need to educate them. We want to do that job. We have a day school here in Lowell, it’s the oldest in the country, and I can tell you of the 150 students, possibly three quarters come from mixed marriages and the other 15 to 20 percent are non-Greek. The non-Greeks like the way the schools is run and surprisingly you might have the Polish kids speaking Greek. You may have a Cambodian kid speaking Greek and singing the Greek songs and dancing. It’s just incredible what can happen when they’re young.

How do you fight what seems to be a prevalent social trend?

I think society is steering in that direction because we’re not a country like Greece, which is all Greek, or 90 percent, anyway. In this country we’re multicultural and multiethnic and when the kids go to school the classroom might have only one Greek. When I went to school we had twenty Greeks in the classroom, but we grew up in a Greek area. Today we’re living in the suburbs and the kids are going to suburban schools and you may have thirty Greek kids, but they’re all spread out. In the old days if you lived in a Greek area you might have had a conglomeration of 20-25 percent Greeks in the school system. We don’t have it today. So I think we need to spend the money in the right place rather than send it out and hope it’s going to happen. We’re going to lose our language if we don’t do that.

You think language is key and has to be preserved?

I think communication is key. The grammar and the spelling are difficult, but if kids can communicate and learn something about the Greek language, that’s good. I don’t think they can become as fluent as we were, because for example I had my mother, my grandmother, who came from Greece and spoke Greek to us. If the parents are not speaking Greek in the home and the kids are not going to Greek school the language is lost.

The traditional view is visiting Greece will motivate kids to learn the language and culture. Is the Leadership involved in some way to provide these junkets for the kids?

Not yet. But we’re thinking about it. I think that’s important, but a lot of kids don’t have that opportunity. I went to Greece as a student at the end of the ‘50s, early ‘60s, and I went to Greece and met my relatives and I sent my kids and they went to the Ionian Village. That’s important. And for the priests: we need to send the priests to Greece to learn about the culture and the language. This way they’ll know the language and the culture more directly. But as for the kids, they have to go over there to see the museums, the archeological sites, and see where their parents and grandparents came from.

How do you motivate younger people to be a part of the Church?

I think the most important thing is that you need to have an outreach program. You have to go get them; they’re not going to come to you. Nobody’s going to come to you to buy your product, you have to go out and sell your product. We need to do a better job of cultivating the youth. We know that 30-50 percent are not going to come to church. But we want at least 20 percent of them to want to come by finding out word of mouth about the Church and its activities and saying, We should do that. We had some Leadership programs that had 300 youth attending and I went and spoke and they came from all over the country and they wanted to be involved. But you need to have follow-up and you need to let them get involved more in the community. Leadership 100 is not the answer fully, I think the Church has to work harder to bring the youth in. Priests have to make the phone calls and meet these people and the various organizations need to do more.

How does someone like you find the time to get involved with Leadership and its activities?

I worked with Johnson & Johnson when I started out and we learned a lot about time management. If you can put the time and effort into it you can do it. I try to prioritize. When I travel across the country, I try to call people, whether it’s in Oklahoma City or Kansas City, and I go out to dinner with them to promote the organization.

Why do you think being involved is important?

First of all, I have four children and nine grandchildren. They’re all Greek, they all go to the Greek church, and basically I try to teach them the values, my wife will teach them the values of the Greek church, but you also have to teach them the history of the Greek church and not only that, but about our history and the beginnings of Western civilization, which started with the Greeks. And once you give them a complete history of Greece, from the philosophers to Alexander the Great and on, you will make them proud of where they came from. Some people would kill to have what we have, to be Greek. I think we have a birthright that we sometimes forget about: it’s the best-kept secret in town. We have to show these kids where we came from.

You’re a successful person; does that give you a special influence with young career people?

I spoke to my high school graduation and I said, Listen, fellas, I grew up six, seven blocks from here. My parents came from Greece, couldn’t speak English, but they forced their children to learn English, knowing this was the language of this land of opportunity. And you have an opportunity here to be responsible if you want to be. I came from immigrant parents and we worked hard, if you don’t want to work hard, good luck to you. As Greeks, we’re very proud people and we should be even more proud and spread the word.

©2009 NEOCORP MEDIA

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