Jerry Lee (image courtesy MulvannyG2)
BY BRIAN LIBBY
One day he's a Portland kid delivering newspapers and the next, a few decades later, he's being recognized by President Obama as a leading example of serving his community. The recipe for his success? "If you’re benevolent and kind, it pays back," Jerry Lee said in a recent phone interview.
MulvannyG2 Architecture’s Seattle-based Chairman of the Board, Lee received a 2011 Gold Level Presidential Volunteer Service Award presented by the President's Council on Service and Civic Participation. “Your volunteer service demonstrates the kind of commitment to your community that moves America a step closer to its great promise,” Obama stated in his congratulatory letter to Lee.
Lee, who originally hails from Portland and studied at the University of Oregon, has logged more than 500 hours of community service in the last 12 months alone. He is a member of Seattle Children’s Hospital Foundation’s “Circle of Care” and as a board member of the College Success Foundation. He is a board member for Susan G. Komen for the Cure, The Martinez Foundation, and the Bellevue Arts Museum. Lee also actively supports the Seattle Art Museum and Communities in Schools/Seattle, as well as Kin On Community Health Care and Nikkei Concerns, both elderly care facilities serving the Pacific Northwest.
Lee says his father first taught him the value of generosity. "We lived at Second and Yamhill and my dad had a grocery store there for 35 years," he recalls. "It was basically full of pensioners. I remember my mother getting upset at my father at all the IOUs in the register. Dad pretty much fronted the bill until their Social Security checks came. When hungry people came in, dad gave them food to eat. Sometimes at our dinner table there were transients. In the 35 years they had their business, they never were robbed once. There was no graffiti. I’ve always felt that dad’s goodwill was a kind of halo that was protected around the store. I think that kind of philosophy was what I took in the business world."
Rendering of Gashora Girls Academy site plan
Mulvanny G2, for which Lee has worked for more than 35 years, has designed numerous pro-bono projects over the years. The latest example is the Gashora Girls Academy in Rwanda, which opened in February. An upper-secondary boarding school for 270 girls, In addition to offering high quality college-prep academics, the Gashora Girls Academy is focused on eliminating the impediments that exist to girls receiving an education. They are provided nutritious meals, mental and emotional support, access to healthcare, and a supportive learning environment with optimal conditions for assuring their future success. The 30-acre campus overlooks Lake Milayi and includes student dormitories, a dining hall with attached kitchen, science and technology labs, an art/mixed media center, and sports fields.
So what made Lee want to become an architect? Why was design the route to carrying on the benevolence he saw in his father?
"When I was a kid down at Shattuck school, I had a friend, an immigrant from Hong Kong. We hung out a lot together, but he never invited me to his home," Lee remembers. "In the seventh grade I finally went over there, to a place at Second and Alder. On the second floor there was this big floor space, and all these immigrants had plywood sheets that they lived on temporarily maybe 10 by 12 feet. My friend and his sister and mother and father lived there. I was just appalled. I came back and told my mom, 'I want to become an architect and design homes for immigrant housing when I grow up.' That’s what started my path."
When Lee first started at Mulvanny as a draftsman in the 1980s, "I ran the blueprint machine and swept the floors, at the bottom of the totem pole," he recalls. Today, as a head of the firm, he is far from a top-down leader. He says his Asian heritage, viewed through his parents' example, was about hard work as well as family. "We’ve always blended our culture with our business practice," he explains. "Finance and profits are all good, but I think we take a different philosophy: that if you do the job right, profits are a byproduct."
That starts with a happily company family. "We have breakfast every Friday morning together. I think it’s important we break bread together with our co-workers. You’re never going to sit with the same guy every Friday. We try to make them like ‘Family Feud’ or ‘Hollywood Squares’ or ‘Survivor’. We’ve even taught the Macarena and had lessens in setting places at the table. We try to get together for bowling, or a ball game. It’s important to involve the family, including spouses. I think because of it we have a tendency to work together. The Chinese philosophy says if you put a bundle of sticks together you can’t break it like you could just one stick. Together we can make mountains move."
Redmond City Hall (image courtesy Public Art 4 Culture)
Still, Jerry Lee seems to be an extra big stick. Or, to mix metaphors with help from Reggie Jackson, Lee may be the straw that stirs the drink. Certainly there are projects for which he holds pride as an architect. In our conversation, Lee cited projects like Redmond City Hall, and talked about how the firm has expanded continually over the years, including an office in his hometown that has designed a number of award-winning projects.
Yet it always comes back to his giving spirit - not just a convenient giving, but one with true force and meaning. Consider a final story from Lee:
“I had an Ichiro signed baseball bat I got in 2001, which I loved. But my dad says if you give something to charity, it should be something you treasure, not just something you’re looking to get rid of. So I donated it to Komen Foundation for an auction fundraiser. It raised $1,000. Not long after that, a friend of mine gave me a birthday present. It was a signed jersey from Wayne Gretzky, the world’s greatest hockey player. He wanted to give something back that was as good as the Ichiro bat. But the year after I donated that jersey to Komen and it raised $10,000. USA Today was part of the sponsorship campaign that year, and they printed a picture of the jersey. Six months later I got this big box in the mail, and it was a signed jersey and a letter from Wayne Gretzky saying, you can’t give this one away.’”
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