Article courtesy of the St.Louis Post Dispatch...

Busy Man Smells the Flowers at Full Speed
By Art Charity Of The Post-Dispatch

This story was published in South Post on Monday, November 5, 2001.

Derek Rapp cut his work to 60 percent of full time and founded St. Louis Cares to help volunteers connect with work they could do.

It's not always easy to photograph a busy man. On the day the Post-Dispatch was planning to take these pictures of Derek Rapp, he was heading first to Love Park in Manchester to lead volunteers in hacking down honeysuckle vines, then to another park to coach his 7-year-old's soccer team and then to running a board meeting of Divergence, the Creve Coeur biotech company he heads.

It was a Saturday, but for the past couple of years you may have found him similarly disposed on any day of the week.

Rapp smiled his guileless smile. "I guess this is a microcosm of your whole article," he said.

And he was right. Sometimes the roles we play in life seem very rigid: businessman, teacher, journalist, homemaker. If they squeeze us a bit too tightly, we can't do much about it; they weren't tailored to fit us but made for the market.

But every now and then a chance may come our way to change all that. A little more than two years ago Derek Rapp, the hard-working, stress-bearing mergers and acquisitions director for Monsanto, stumbled across his chance and took it. He found a way to split his life equally among business, volunteer service and family without doing any of them by halves.

And along the way he founded an organization, St. Louis Cares, that helps other busy men and women at least dip their feet into the waters of working for their communities, if not to follow him in taking the plunge.

Here's how it happened. In the mid-1990s, when he was still in his early 30s, Rapp was living the conventional life of a corporate golden boy: well-paid, exciting and prestigious work on the yin side; pressure, overtime and absence from his family on the yang.

But the pace was beginning to get to him.

"Physically, I felt like I was a mess all the time," he said. He popped a lot of Tylenol. "I wasn't living a life that was consistent with what I had envisioned for myself."

For one thing, he always had thought volunteer service would be part of his life; now it had dropped off the radar. An older colleague at Monsanto who had just had a heart attack took Rapp aside and told him, "You be careful. You're on that path, too."

He never had consciously aimed to become a merger expert; his first job out of college just happened to be in that area, and as first steps often acquire their own momentum, from then on "people would plug me into M&A roles."

Now, in his confusion, his lack of a grand plan proved to be a weird sort of advantage. "I'm one who believes that you work to make the most of opportunities you're presented with," he says. "If you do things well and honestly, if you treat people in a fair and decent way, opportunities will come."

But it requires a certain openness of mind to see the opportunities for what they are.

For example, during that winter and spring of 1997, his wife, Emily, was pregnant with their third child. Two women Derek Rapp knew at Monsanto had just come back from family leave. "It hit me that that could be just what I needed in order to refuel and also to figure out how to put myself on a more sustainable track."

So he asked his boss for 12 weeks' leave and, to his mild surprise, the boss agreed. He spent the time helping to care for the baby, playing with his older children, groping for what he ought to be doing for the long haul.

Though the sabbatical was refreshing, the answer eluded him.

Two days after he returned to work, the coin finally dropped. He was talking to a former classmate who told him about another classmate who had founded Greater DC Cares, an organization that matched busy people who could volunteer in Washington for a couple of hours a day, perhaps a weekend, with projects that could put that limited time to good use.

Derek Rapp reacted just as you might expect a too-busy man would: "The moment I heard about that concept, it resonated with me so strongly as something St. Louis has got to have."

He approached the United Way of Greater St. Louis, just to pass along the idea and offer some modest help. The woman with whom he spoke wasn't going to let him off quite so easy.

She said she was familiar with the "city cares" concept and starting a St. Louis version was already on her wish list, but so were a lot of other things. Was Rapp ready to create St. Louis Cares himself?

Gulp. Now there was an unexpected twist and at just the wrong moment, as Monsanto was gearing up to negotiate a huge acquisition, the $2.5 billion purchase of DeKalb Genetics. With time, though, the idea began to seem less strange.

On a family vacation to Florida in March 1998, Emily popped the obvious question: Could the mergers and acquisitions director of Monsanto work part time? They both saw the change as a way to put balance in their lives. So Derek Rapp went back to his boss, and once again to his mild surprise they worked out an arrangement: He could work for Monsanto three days out of five, for three-fifths of his old salary. The rest of his time belonged to the nonprofit sector.

Soon Rick Skinner of the United Way's Volunteer Center began to see what a corporate dealmaker could do in the volunteer world.

"I can't say enough about Derek's commitment," Skinner said. "He went to Memphis, he went to Washington D.C. to research their programs and brought the best practices to St. Louis."

On Aug. 20, 1999, St. Louis Cares had its first project at the South Side Day Nursery. Now it's busily preparing to go back there on Nov. 15 for its 500th project.

Skinner rattles off the statistics: More than 2,300 St. Louisans have added their names to the volunteer roster in these two years. They've given just short of 20,000 hours of their time.

More than 170 cultural, neighborhood, social-service and recreational groups have been helped. If you follow one formula for putting a value on volunteer service, that's more than $300,000 worth of donated work. For Rapp, meanwhile, once the horse left the barn, life has gone on reshaping itself. In February, after Pharmacia bought Monsanto and his job threatened to move east, the native of west St. Louis County broke away to become the chairman of Divergence, whose offices are in a bucolic business incubator on Monsanto's Creve Coeur campus.

He's as ingratiatingly enthusiastic about the potential for protecting the food supply from pests in the for-profit sector as about helping St. Louisans help one another for free.

He's reduced himself to being an ordinary St. Louis Cares volunteer for the time being - part of the "natural ebbing and flowing" that comes with a new job - but his bright, relaxed office tells the story of his priorities. On one wall are framed clippings about the DeKalb Genetics sale; on another are neat rows of crayoned messages from his children; on the next is "Make a Difference," a Mary Engelbreit print his daughter gave him to celebrate his work with St. Louis Cares.

"It's hard for me even to be articulate on the subject," he said. "I feel so much better about where things are now."

He didn't reinvent himself in a vacuum, of course; it takes a village to raise a new man. "With a different boss and in a different culture - because Monsanto was a supportive place in a lot of ways," he muses out loud, "who knows? It's hard to know how things would have turned out. Because, of course, the company didn't have to say yes."

Derek Rapp is a very lucky man, but who should blame him for that? He saw his luck coming and didn't keep it to himself.

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