How did a man who once “lost” a European diplomat at the Mall of America during a tour of the U.S. end up becoming a professor of International Affairs at NYU?
Brad Heckman is the founder and former CEO of the New York Peace Institute, one of the country’s largest dispute resolution centers. Today he is a Professor at NYU’s Center for Global Affairs.
Hal: First question Brad, tell us about where you were raised and what your life was like back in the day.
Brad Heckman: Oh my goodness. I was raised in a small blue collar steel town in Pennsylvania called North Catasauqua, a suburb of Allentown.
Where I grew up you were either from a steel working family or a Pennsylvania Dutch farming family. I happened to be a hybrid of both. One grandfather was a steelworker and the other was a Pennsylvania Dutch farmer. So I’m a true Catasauqua boy.
BRICK 1: FINDING YOURSELF
Hal: You talk about being kind of a scrawny, shy child growing up in a steel town. What was that like?
Brad Heckman: It had its rough moments. I wasn’t into sports. It was a big sports town. I was scrawny, in some ways, I didn’t fit in. I was an only child on top of that, meaning I didn’t necessarily relate to people that well. I was poorly socialized. On the other hand it allowed me to be a big fish in a small pond. So I was doing music and art and theater stuff and it allowed me to do things not necessarily well, but participate in creative things that I really enjoyed.
As an only child, second generation or third generation, some of my grandparents were immigrants. There was a lot of pressure on me to succeed and do well in very narrow parameters. This was tough because I just wanted to play music and do art whereas my parents had these great ambitions for me to be financially successful and have a great title and all of that, which I don’t blame them for, that was the American dream.
Hal: The way you described it, you said your parents wanted you to have a career with a name. Can you talk about that?
Brad Heckman: In the world I came from we weren’t aware of that many career options and my parents wanted me to do well and that translated into a career path that they knew of from media, TV and so on, so that meant doctor or lawyer, and that was kind of the social contract between me and my parents growing up, that I would be a lawyer. I had no idea what that really meant, I didn’t know what lawyers did. I did have, at a young age, an interest in social justice or at least what I understood to be social justice.
Hal: What gave you a sense of social justice?
Brad Heckman: Probably my parents because as much as I’m saying about their ambitions for me, they were both in helping professions. My mom was a nurse and my dad was an elementary school teacher for most of his career.
Hal: You described yourself as shy. What did you do to fit in?
Brad Heckman: Yeah, absent being good at sports, I had to do something. I loved playing music. I learned to play the trumpet.
For me, music was kind of a social activity in that I played in my high school marching band so I went to every single football game and still have no idea whatsoever how football is played.
BRICK 2: A NOTE OF COMPASSION
Hal: Your trumpet playing skills let to a very odd, part-time job. Talk about that and the effect it had on you.
Brad Heckman: In high school the local funeral home was looking for a kid to play Taps on the trumpet at military funerals and I played the trumpet, so they picked me. That was one of my first jobs and it was lucrative. I think I got $50 to play 30 seconds worth of music and be driven in a hearse, and I did bend towards the morose and melancholy, so it checked out with that. My parents… liked the idea that I was making some money, so they would always write an excuse for me to miss class to go to funerals, which I think engendered lots of sympathy from my teachers who thought my family were just dropping like flies with all the funerals that I was going to.
On a deeper level it was really interesting hanging out with the funeral home folks who were shepherding people in a lot of pain through a difficult transition. So just bearing witness to so many funerals as a bystander just allowed me to get a glimpse of part of the human condition and grappling with change and transition and seeing people at their best and their worst.
Hal: You mentioned it aroused a compassion in you.
Brad Heckman: It did and the funeral guys helped spark this. They weren’t the TV stereotype of morose funeral directors. They were funny and witty, they joked around, but never at the expense of the deceased. So seeing this combination of having compassion and empathy but not taking yourself so seriously was something that really imprinted itself on me. Looking back it really, I think, had a big influence on how I strive to be.
Hal: How do you strive to be?
Brad Heckman: As a professional, as a person, I chose a line of work that helps people in their pain, but I don’t take myself terribly seriously.
Hal: Another part-time job you had was working at the corner store and that ended up having some interesting echoes in your life.
BRICK 3: FOLLOWING A CREATIVE IMPULSE
Brad Heckman: Yeah, there was a local convenience store which sold penny candy. My parents had bought me for Christmas some paint brushes that you can use specifically for sign making and lettering. I have no idea why they got them. So I learned how to do lettering. I can’t imagine that I had the guts or the chutzpah to do this, but I went to the candy story and said, “Hey, do you need someone to make signs for you for your sales and your products?” and they said, “Well, show us a sample.” So I came back the next day with a sign advertising, I think ,their hotdogs and I think I used one my first bad puns, like, “Our hotdogs are on a roll,” or something horrible like that. They liked the sign, so they paid me $1 a sign for their store. They would tell me what they wanted and I would do fancy lettering. So that was actually my first paid job and creative endeavor.
Kathleen: You talked about being surprised that you had the chutzpah to do that; yet creating opportunity seems to be a very strong theme throughout your career.
Brad Heckman: In some ways it doesn’t add up because I really see myself as fundamentally introverted and socially awkward, so it kind of astounds me that I walked in there and initiated that conversation, although when I look back, it is similar to other opportunities I tried to create. I suppose, like many people, I have different facets of who I am, and part of it is I think I do have an entrepreneurial hustler kind of a streak in me and yet I fundamentally see myself still as the awkward Pennsylvania kid.
So I think it’s just an example of how we all have multitudes within us.
Hal: And yet the illustration skill you developed would end up playing a major part in your teaching.
Brad Heckman: Yes. There are so many different ways of acquiring knowledge, and I’m personally a visual thinker. I always tried to shoehorn creative stuff into my career endeavors like using visuals, using storytelling, using language, using theater techniques as ways for people to learn outside of a PowerPoint and lecture. The art that I create, in my opinion, wouldn’t stand on its own as art with a capital A, but used as a teaching medium works really well.
Hal: Looking back can you see any bricks starting to form for you at this point in your life?
Brad Heckman: Yeah. I think the bricks that were there were, one, something to do with empathy, compassion, social justice, however nebulous that may have been in my brain; two, needing to satisfy my creative impulses somehow, and three, an iota of entrepreneurship in spite of my social awkwardness.
Hal: You went to Dickinson College, you majored in political science. Why political science?
Brad Heckman: I have no idea. I think because political science was considered to be the standard pre law kind of course track.
Hal: At this point, you said that you thought you were going to go to law school, or at least your parents thought so, but upon graduation you decided not to. What happened?
BRICK 4: FOLLOWING YOUR INSTINCTS: A ROAD NOT TAKEN
Brad Heckman: I had to take the LSATS, which are the admission test for going to law school and, as I remember it, the morning of the actual exam I woke up and I said, “I don’t really want to do this,” so I just blew off the LSATS. I didn’t go and I burned that bridge. I felt both dread and relief; relief that I could just go back to bed and not take a standardized test and dread that I had closed the door to that and would have to tell my parents.
Simultaneous to that, around that time, I had a classmate who was from Poland, which was still under Soviet rule, and she considered herself something of an asylum seeker or a refugee and had suggested that I go to Poland and teach English. But before any of that materialized I had to call my family and let them know that I was shattering their hopes and dreams for my future.
Hal: That’s heavy stuff. So, “Hi Mom and Dad, I’m not going to go to law school but I am going to go to Poland,” and their reaction was what?
Brad Heckman: They were so pissed. Oh my goodness, they were like, “We worked so hard to send you to college to a private school.” I was too dumb and naïve and selfish to really appreciate all they had done to send me to school. I’m like, “Hey man, I didn’t ask to be born.” So I think we were all pretty defensive in that conversation.
They were really, really disappointed and then when the other shoe dropped and I said, “Yeah, I’m going to go to Poland,” they just thought I was nuts. My grandmother had immigrated from Slovakia, they’re like, “You know our family worked so hard to get the hell out of that part of the world and you’re going back? What the hell are you thinking?”
Hal: So you withstood their disappointment, which must have been hard, but oddly enough, even though you didn’t know it at the time, this was actually a major turning point in your life, wasn’t it?
BRICK 5: SOCIAL JUSTICE AND THE POWER OF DIALOGUE
Brad Heckman: It was, by sheer luck. I arrived in Poland, it was still very much a Soviet communist police state. I had the impetuousness of youth in that I really didn’t think ahead of some of the consequences of going there. I was under surveillance, waited in bread lines and experienced some of the stuff that you see in Cold War movies about that part of the world.
As I was there the revolution broke out, people took to the streets, which historically when that kind of thing happened the tanks came in and martial law was declared and people were thrown into prison and of course I was worried about my own fate since I was regarded by some as being there as a spy. Amazingly martial law wasn’t declared and it resulted in a round table dialogue that included all sectors of society that resulted in a peaceful transition of power. It was really remarkable.
At that time, I was really interested in social justice, civil disobedience and nonviolence, really inspired by Martin Luther King and Gandhi and certainly Nelson Mandela. So to see that play out, to see a revolution by conversation was just extraordinary. I don’t know if this is a brick or not, but it helped me answer a really profound question which was at that point being involved in civil disobedience and protests it helped me answer the question of, ‘if you bang your fists on the doors of power and if they answer the door and say, “Okay, come in, let’s talk,”’ what’s going to happen and I was able to see that play out in an amazing, amazing way.
I figured somehow my career has to touch upon this, and then to see the domino effect as country after country engaged in these velvet revolutions encouraged me to stay in Poland for a second year as this played out.
Hal: So you stumble into one of the greatest turning points in modern history, it’s extraordinary.
Brad Heckman: Yeah, stumble is absolutely the right word for that. Fast forwarding to later in my career, I found myself working in immediate post war zones. I was similarly naïve around my own safety and actually found myself in some kind of harrowing situations that looking back I probably should have been on higher alert to safety, but at the time, I really didn’t.
Hal: Then, after two years in Poland you returned to the U.S. You decided to go to graduate school at Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies. Why there?
Brad Heckman: I had no idea what I was going to do with my life or with the experiences that I had accumulated in Poland. So grad school was a good dodge when you don’t know what to do and I thought I would need the credentials behind it.
BRICK 6: WORKING WITH THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY
About a year after that, I got a job for a big NGO that had State Department funding to bring the first generation of Democratically elected Romanian mayors to the U.S. for a State sponsored study tour. So my job was to schlep them around the country to meet their counterparts and other folks that would help them “build democracy” back home.
Hal: So they could see democracy in action, as it were.
Brad Heckman: Yes. The mayors were extraordinary. One of them ran an illegal underground rock-and-roll radio station in Romania. Another was a holistic healer, Shaman type, which was also I imagine frowned upon by the State. They were just really cool folks who were non-politicians coming from small impoverished communities and then taking a study tour where they’re seeing a very carefully curated version of America.
One of my jobs was to take them to the Mall of America in the Twin Cities (Minneapolis-St.Paul), so they would see an example of a private / public partnership. I can’t think of a less transferable model of that than the Mall of America, and on top of that I lost one of them. Keeping track of a dozen Romanian mayors in the Mall of America for folks who have never experienced Western style retail before, yeah, not the best idea, nor I was particularly good at being their handler.
Hal: So you lost a mayor. That’s very careless.
Brad Heckman: It was terrifying. Actually, he wasn’t a mayor. He was a senator, so he was the one high-level government official there. He later became Minister of the Interior, and the mayors really didn’t like him. They thought he was connected to the old regime, to the Ceaușescu regime, they thought he was there to spy on them. So they were delighted that I lost him and reluctant to give me any clues on when they last saw him, like it couldn’t have happened to a better person. I’m like, “Dudes, you got to help me find this guy. This could be an international incident.” We eventually did find him sitting on the sidewalk smoking and he was most displeased with me.
Hal: What did you take away from that experience?
Brad Heckman: I think what I learned among other things is that if you want to bring about social change you can’t push ideas on people. You can help pull ideas from people and I really learned that if people want to build their own future they have to tap into what’s important and relevant to them, their own self-determination to use a mediation word.
Hal: Another really formative time in your life was when you met Raymond Shonholtz. Tell us who he was.
BRICK 7: INTRO TO MEDIATION
Brad Heckman: Ray Shonholtz was the founder of the first community mediation center in the U.S. He was an attorney, had done a lot of work around civil rights, he was a freedom rider in the South during the Civil Rights Movement…He was also a pioneer of mediation, the idea of a neutral third party helping people work out disputes on their own without something being imposed on them…
So he set up a nonprofit organization in San Francisco where he lived called Partners for Democratic Change (now known as Partners Global) that was really the prototype for New York Peace Institute and almost every community mediation center in the country. He did that for a number of years and then around the time that I was living in Poland and the revolutions were breaking out, he had this idea of introducing mediation to countries whose judicial systems were either in transition or corrupt or not working.
Partners for Change was kind of a small startup then, now it’s a global organization and they were looking for someone who had experience in that part of the world and who was cheap and I fit the bill. So this is where a lot of things came together.
They hired me. I very quickly learned mediation skills, apprenticed under Ray Shonholtz and this was epic for me because it really brought so many things together. It gave me a mechanism and a structure through which you can bring together social justice, consensus building, respect for people’s self-determination and background and culture and reduce conflict and violence and allowed me to work in that part of the world that I had come of age in.
BRICK 8: STARTING MEDIATION CENTERS IN HIGH INTENSITY COMMUNITIES
I worked with Ray for about nine years and eventually became his right hand and was their director of international programs and my job was essentially to help set up community mediation centers throughout Eastern and Central Europe, the Balkans, the South Caucasus, and a little in Latin America.
One of my takeaways was if you give people the opportunity to spend some time together, to get to know each other on their own terms, provide a framework for that so that it’s safe, people are capable of incredible and almost miraculous acts of healing and forgiveness and understanding. To see that play out in communities that were experiencing violence was just extraordinary.
Hal: Eventually you left that organization and then you ended up working at Safe Horizon in New York City.
Brad Heckman: Right. I moved back to the States with no job, no prospects. As luck would have it, the director of Safe Horizon was stepping down and the job became available.
Hal: So what kind of skills did you learn while you were at Safe Horizon?
BRICK 9: MANAGING A LARGE ORGANIZATION
Brad Heckman: I learned the pros of cons of being part of a much larger organization than I was used to. It had more than 800 employees. It ran the largest network of domestic violence shelters in New York City, had something like a $50 million budget.
The mediation program was a tiny, tiny part of a much larger organization that addressed domestic violence, human trafficking, stalking and other things that I really learned so much about that later informed much of what we do at New York Peace Institute.
Hal: Why did you decide to leave Safe Horizon and start the New York Peace Institute?
Brad Heckman: In some ways the decision was thrust upon me. By that point I’d become a Vice President of Safe Horizon. I was overseeing a portfolio of programs, including a men’s batterers program, a domestic violence legal service an anti-stalking program and an anti-trafficking program. Then a new CEO came on board with the idea of really taking a hard look at Safe Horizon and figuring out what programs were a mission fit. The main focus of the organization was domestic violence, child abuse and human trafficking and sexual abuse.
Brad Heckman: We went through this strategic planning process, and it became apparent that we were really looking at mediation as not being a great fit to the organization, that it just wasn’t on brand… The last thing I’d want to do is see it shut down and see 10,000 New Yorkers not have the option to a free and peaceful way of resolving a dispute.
BRICK 10: THE RESPONSIBILITIES OF A CEO
Brad Heckman: So I orchestrated a spinoff of Safe Horizon and started the New York Peace Institute as an independent free-standing organization. In a very short period of time, about six months, I had to really bring together every bit of information that I had learned about organization building to build New York Peace Institute’s identity, brand, board of directors, staffing patterns.
Hal: You did that for 9 years, then in 2017 you took a leave of absence to take care of your mom who was very ill, and during that time you told me that you had decided to move on. What brought you to that decision and then what happened next?
Brad Heckman: Yeah, well, my mom was diagnosed with cancer. It was surreal because at this time I was also starting to do more and more art work…and it was just an opportunity to reflect on what was really important to me.
BRICK 11: BACK TO THE FUTURE
In building New York Peace Institute, I had been happily working really insane hours, but at the expense of a lot of things: at the expense of relationships and family and pursuing my own real joy, which is creative stuff and teaching. So during that time I thought, “You know what? What I really want to do is teach and draw pictures,” and I had been an adjunct professor at NYU for about eight years at that point.
As just another example of the universe conspiring to make things work, as this was happening NYU offered to have me come on board as a full-time professor.
Hal: Okay, all right so my next to last question is fill in the blanks. I started as a blank and I ended up as a blank.”
Brad Heckman: I started as an awkward, working class part neanderthal kid from Pennsylvania and ended up as an amateur artist and professor… still neanderthal.
You can keep up with Brad on Instagram and Twitter.
“10 Bricks” is a series of interviews with people who have had interesting careers and lives, bucking the conventional wisdom of following a single, linear career path.
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Design and illustration by Martine Lindstrøm.
