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by Steven Ricci
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f you need something done in a big way, try telling Beverly Benz Treuille ’65 that she can’t do it. You’ll be amazed by the results.
One of her first attempts to do something that she didn’t realize may have been beyond her grasp came when she was an eighth-grader growing up in suburban Ridgewood, New Jersey. In a moment of inspiration right out of an Andy Hardy movie or an Our Gang short, she decided to stage a musical called “Toyland.” She organized about 25 children, employed some of their mothers to make costumes, secured use of the junior high school’s theater, obtained publicity and printing from the local newspaper, and sent her brother out on his bicycle to sell tickets.
“I had forgotten a few small details, like we didn’t have any music and we hadn’t rehearsed,” Treuille said. “But at the last minute we filled in those gaps and it worked. We raised $80, which we donated to Valley Hospital, and that was a lot of money in those days. It was a situation of not knowing that I couldn’t do it.”
Since that time, Treuille has been, among many other things, vice president of one of the world’s largest financial corporations, an entrepreneur, an author, a volunteer, and a wife and mother. But her involvement with Big Brothers Big Sisters (BBBS)—she is now chairman of the board of BBBS International—has been her most rewarding professional accomplishment. Under her leadership and direction BBBS has emerged as a global organization, improving the lives of a quater of a million American youths in all 50 states, as well as children in 18 countries around the world. Earlier this year, President George W. Bush proclaimed January as National Mentoring Month, recognizing BBBS’s vision to provide a mentor to every child who needs or wants one, a mission that has driven Beverly Benz Treuille for more than 30 years.
Treuille attended “excellent” public schools through ninth grade, when her parents decided on Emma Willard for the remainder of her secondary education because of the school’s outstanding reputation. Although she liked Emma Willard and enjoyed the boarding school experience, her grades were average, and she didn’t share similar interests with her fellow students, preferring subjects like religion, poetry, languages, and business to more traditional academics like math and science.
“I used to spend time in the Kellas reading room going through the Wall Street Journal and looking up stock prices,” she said. “I had friends, but I was also comfortable being alone. There were certain subjects that I loved, like English with Mrs. Clugston, and French. I was interested in world religions and read all the various bibles I could get my hands on. That’s what I would do on a Saturday, sit under a tree and read about Hinduism or Taoism to see if I agreed with it or if it was an interesting philosophy.”
Although she considers the education she received at Emma Willard to be superb, Treuille notes that, at the time, prevailing social and educational attitudes called for women to attend college and then obtain jobs as assistants and secretaries. But that kind of a career path was not what she wanted for herself.
“That’s another reason why I was so independent,” she said. “All of the teachers were very dedicated and quite good; they gave me a glimpse of what it means to be a truly dedicated professional; but there was not a relationship between the so-called outcomes they were telling me I could have as an adult, such as going to college and then to Katherine Gibbs to become a secretary, and what I wanted for myself. The balance was totally off.”
After Emma, she attended Wheaton College, a women’s school in Norton, Massachusetts. At Wheaton, her passion for business blossomed: she studied economics, taught statistics as a teaching assistant, and founded the Wheaton College Investment Club. With encouragement from her economics professors, she decided to apply to business schools. She applied to five schools and was accepted at all, including M.I.T. and Wharton, but opted to go to Harvard Business School after graduating from Wheaton in 1969.
“The average age of acceptance at Harvard at that time was 26 because they wanted experience,” Treuille said. “However, for most women it was virtually impossible to get experience that was relevant. While the men were in training programs at banks, the women were working as assistants.” Treuille, however, had worked on Wall Street for an investment bank during summers at Wheaton and had gained valuable experience working for the head of institutional sales on special projects and in corporate finance.
Throughout her education, Treuille had always desired to help those less fortunate. Her best friend in junior high was blind, and in eighth grade she worked at a camp for multiply disabled children. When her Harvard admissions essay asked her to describe how she envisioned her career, she said, “I wrote that I wanted to be president of the American Red Cross. All these years have gone by, and I am doing something quite similar to my original dream.”
After her 1971 Harvard graduation, she joined Citibank as a financial consultant, while also volunteering in the evening as a high school equivalency teacher for adults in Harlem. At Citibank, she quickly worked her way up the corporate ladder, becoming a vice president within a few years. In 1974, Big Brothers of New York City, Inc., asked her to join their board.
“They were looking for four things: a female, someone young, someone with finance experience, and someone with volunteer experience,” she said. “I fit the bill, and I was totally honored.”
Although she had no direct prior experience with Big Brothers, the organization’s efforts to provide mentors greatly appealed to her on a personal level.
“One thing that happens when you get involved with Big Brothers Big Sisters is that you start to think about the people who most affected your life and made a difference for you,” Treuille said. “In my case it was my grandfather, who really believed that I could do anything.”
Treuille’s grandfather founded the Sunbeam Bread Company and was an innovator in the mass production of baked goods. “He always felt that he could do anything, and he believed that I could too,” she said. “If I had to point to one person who was a mentor for me, who made me feel I could do anything, it was he. He believed in me. Mentoring happens when someone cares about you, listens to you, believes in you, and helps you realize your dreams. I would encourage everyone to think about who that person was who helped them change their lives. Almost everyone has someone.”
After serving as chairman of Big Brothers’ finance committee, she was elected president of the board in 1985. In 1987, the organization changed its name to Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York City, although it had been serving girls for some time. Among her first priorities as president was to change the organization’s leadership and set a new tone for growth.
“When I first joined the board, they had an accountant who was wearing a green eyeshade and entering numbers by hand on a spreadsheet,” she said. “These were really the olden days in a lot of ways.”
As she worked to expand BBBS in New York City, Treuille was also working on her personal and professional life. She met her husband, Antoine—senior managing director of an investment fund and a native of France—in 1976 while they both worked at Citibank. The couple has four children: Adrien, 26; Genevieve, 25; Phillipe, 21; and Isabelle, 14. With each pregnancy, Treuille took a year-long leave of absence from her duties at Citibank, and after she had the children, she decided to work part-time, becoming the first part-time vice president in the company’s history. In doing so, she helped establish the policies for senior officers to be able to work part-time.
“From the time I decided to get married, I made a conscious decision about giving enough time to my family,” she said. “My family has been very supportive. I’ve been lucky to have a husband who, despite his incredibly dynamic career, is there to help me make decisions, to support what I do, to be able to take over if I can’t be there.”
As people sought her advice on balancing career, family, and volunteerism, Treuille was inspired to write a book on the subject: Managing it All: Time-Saving Ideas for Career, Family, Relationships and Self (Mastermedia, 1988), co-written with Susan Schiffer Stautberg. The authors interviewed approximately 200 women who were succeeding in similar family/work arrangements. After its publication, Treuille embarked on a promotional tour, making numerous media appearances and speaking at conferences. The experience, she says, greatly helped her future efforts to expand the services of BBBS.
In 1992, she was asked to join the board of BBBS of America, a federation of over 400 independently operating BBBS agencies around the country. Again, a key priority was high-quality growth.
Since its founding in 1904, Big Brothers Big Sisters had been an effective organization, but its growth had been slow, and it needed to improve its branding and volunteer recruitment efforts. “We needed to grow,” Treuille said. “We saw that our service was having an enormous impact on children, but we were only serving 80,000 children in America. We had to do more.” The organization began a branding campaign, bolstered volunteer recruitment, and worked with the Ad Council in an effort to reach more volunteers. “Big Brothers Big Sisters is now serving over 250,000 children,” Treuille said. “It’s tripled in less than 10 years.”
As head of BBBS of America’s Program Committee, Treuille learned of numerous requests from people and groups around the world who wanted to start BBBS-type programs in their countries. Having served as head of international consulting for Citibank, she found the expansion of BBBS to an international level appealing. She chaired an ad hoc committee to decide whether to do international work within BBBS of America, or to set up a separate organization. In 1998, the committee recommended and received board approval to set up Big Brothers Big Sisters International, and Treuille was elected the first chairman. The organization’s mission is to coordinate and support the development of BBBS affiliates around the world.
“Just as Big Brothers Big Sisters of New York made an enormous leap when we brought in a new kind of leadership, Big Brothers Big Sisters of America and its many agencies have found that professional leadership is what allows us to become great, to fulfill our mission. Big Brothers Big Sisters International,” Treuille said. “has really benefited from the dramatic growth and professionalism of BBBS of America. We want to incorporate the best practices into our work with other countries so they can start at a high level, while reflecting the different cultures, values, and priorities of each country.”
Through her more than 30 years of commitment to Big Brothers Big Sisters, Treuille has maintained her intensity and passion for the program for one reason: mentoring works.
“Whether the trouble is alcohol or drugs, failure in school, or a lack of respect for oneself or others, having a mentor can be a turning point for a child in need,” she said. “And that’s true around the world. The children that we are serving are each confronted with their own problems, whether it’s poverty in Eastern Europe, extremely dangerous neighborhoods in South Africa, orphanages in Russia, or life as a Kurdish refugee in Turkey, where children of 5 or 6 years old are selling trinkets on the streets to support their families.”
Treuille says that BBBS is one of few organizations that focuses successfully on adolescents, who may need a mentor the most. “They’ve been written off by a lot of people who ought to be caring about them,” Treuille says. “Many people take the attitude that it’s too late at that age. We don’t take that attitude and that’s one of the things that distinguishes us. It’s another reason why it’s so important for this service to be made available around the world.”
With more than 18 countries now under BBBS International’s umbrella, Treuille hopes that her tenure has set the pace for the group’s continued expansion as a powerful global child service organization.
However, she also hopes to continue the many projects she has planned in her personal life. She is finishing a series of humorous children’s books about children and their beloved, elderly grandparents. She is also working on a book about parenting premature babies (her fourth child was a preemie), a cookbook for college students, and a business game for middle and upper school students. A few years ago, she started a dot.com business called Virtual Assistant, which provided remote Internet assistance to businesses and individuals, such as making travel arrangements, preparing letters, and conducting research. However, she closed the business, she said, because although there was plenty of venture capital, marketing costs were four times those in her business model.
“I’m overflowing with things I want to do,” she says, grabbing the arms of her chair and opening her eyes wide.
Her roots at Emma Willard remain a fond memory for Treuille, and she believes that her alma mater “is doing an excellent job of advising and mentoring students, celebrating their successes, and bringing each girl forward in ways that are important to her.” She advises current students to dream big and pursue their passions.
“If you wake up every day and can’t wait to do what you’re doing, that means you have a successful life and career. Don’t be too influenced or cowed by the concepts of what you ‘should’ do for a career,” she said, recalling the many milestones she has achieved simply because she hadn’t considered the possibility that she couldn’t.
And, she adds, “Finding a mentor wouldn’t hurt, either.”
Big Brothers Big Sisters is the oldest and largest youth mentoring service in the country, serving more than 250,000 children in 5,000 communities in all 50 states. It is a part of Big Brothers Big Sisters International, which oversees similar programs in more than 18 countries, including the U.S.
BBBS’s mission is to help children reach their potential through professionally supported one-to-one relationships. Independent research (Public/Private Ventures, 1995) revealed that children in the BBBS program are:
For more information about BBBS, visit www.bbbsa.org or www.bbbsi.org.
This Serving & Shaping column appeared in the winter 2006 issue of EMMA.
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