How One Man's Tragedy Fueled a Movement

The following is an exclusive excerpt from my upcoming book PURPOSEFUL: Are You a Manager or a Movement Starter? available on 5/22/18 from Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Random House.

The first step to any successful movement is to create a clear and compelling vision of what that movement intends to achieve. One of the most effective ways to communicate a vision is with visceral stories to help people deeply understand what it is and why it matters.

A profound example of powering vision with a meaningful story comes from Hank Hunt who took an unthinkable tragedy to fuel his movement for Kari's Law. Read more about Hank and how he used storytelling to bring his vision to reform 911 to life and attract hundreds of thousands of supporters along the way in the following excerpt:

HANK HUNT HAD a picture-perfect life. He grew up in Little Rock, Arkansas; he was a “typical southern boy who got dirty and popped wheelies on bicycles and pulled girls’ ponytails.” He moved to Texas in 1972 and married his high school sweetheart, and they had two little girls. Hank joined the armed forces as a military police officer and says he believes he did a lot of good in that job. He didn’t intend to start a movement or change the world in a big way, but he says he’s “always been the kind of person that if I see somebody that needs some help, I do what I can to help them.”

And then on December 1, 2013, tragedy struck. Hank’s wife was in Fort Worth at a Christmas bazaar, and he was home when she called around lunchtime. She told Hank that she couldn’t reach their daughter, Kari, which didn’t seem that out of the ordinary. But a few minutes later when he tried several times and got no answer, he felt the first twinge of concern, since his daughter almost always answered his calls. Then his wife told him that Kari’s husband had just posted, “Oh my God, I snapped,” on social media. Now Hank was really worried. He called the police department and the hospital to see if Kari had been admitted or whether they had been called to a domestic disturbance. He knew something was wrong when the person at the police department said, “Can I have a detective call you back?”

And something was very wrong. As Hank would soon find out, his daughter, Kari, was stabbed by her estranged husband in a hotel bathroom while her three children, ages two, four, and nine, were in the bedroom on the other side of the thin wall. Amid their mother’s screams, Hank’s oldest grandchild had tried to dial 911 to get help for her mother, but she couldn’t get the call to go through. Like most children and adults, she had no idea that in a hotel she would need to dial 9 first to get an outside line. After not being able to reach 911, she tried asking hotel employees for help and eventually reached a guest across the hall who first tried to assist, and then successfully called 911. Emergency services arrived eleven minutes after the call finally went through.

Unfortunately, it was too late. Kari died that day.

Despite his unthinkable loss, Hank has since dedicated himself tirelessly to campaigning for his vision: “Kari’s Law” would require hotels and other businesses to do away with phone systems that require dialing any additional number before calling 911. Hank envisions a world where 911 would work the same way on every phone so that no other person has to face the unspeakable agony that his granddaughter did that day. As Hank described to me: “While the law may have Kari’s name on it, it was my granddaughter who was the inspiration for it. When I had her in my lap at the police station after it happened, I can’t even begin to describe the look on her face. It was like she was searching for something because she kept looking from eye to eye, back and forth. She said, ‘Papa, I tried four times and the telephone didn’t work.’ And then it dawned on me: she was at a hotel, and hotel telephone systems required you to dial an extra number to get an outside line. But she didn’t know that. When I saw my granddaughter’s face and heard her tell me what happened, I knew it was my fault. It was everyone’s fault. Every adult is to blame because we teach our children to call 911. We advertise it. It’s on fire trucks, police cars, everywhere. But what’s not there is: ‘Call 911 unless you’re in a hotel or office building or anywhere else where you have to dial an extra number to get an outside line first.’ Kids would have to constantly relearn how to call 911 unless we get it changed.”

When you hear Hank’s story, Kari’s story, and Kari’s daughter’s story, it’s nearly impossible not to want to fix this as desperately as Hank does. Hank’s story gives power to his vision to reform 911, and that vision has become a movement. More than 600,000 people signed Hank’s Change.org petition, igniting a massive campaign.

Hank’s story gives power to his vision to reform 911, and that vision has become a movement.

First, some large hotel companies, like the Marriott International Corporation, mandated that all hotels franchised under the Marriott brand update their phone system to be direct-dial 911. Then Hank was able to get Kari’s Law passed in several states, including Texas, New York, Illinois, Maryland, and Tennessee. And finally the bill passed unanimously in the House of Representatives in January 2017 and in the Senate in August 2017, and President Trump signed it into law in February of 2018—an enormous victory.

Hank Hunt will say he still has a ways to go in order to achieve his vision of ensuring this never happens to another child, but he’s quite close now and making one hell of a difference along the way. His tragedy fuels him as well as all the other people who joined the movement for Kari’s Law.**

Excerpted from Purposeful: Are You a Manager or a Movement Starter? by Jennifer Dulski, in agreement with Portfolio, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC. Copyright ? Jennifer Dulski, 2018.