Living in Tolerance: A Conversation with Bret Hrbek on Promoting Respect and Dignity

Bret Hrbek, Delta Xi (Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University) 1996, is a Certified Financial Planner® and Chartered Advisor in Philanthropy® with Edward Jones in Front Royal, Virginia. He joined the firm in 2000 after several years in conservative politics and a year as the Director of Chapter Development for Zeta Beta Tau Fraternity.

Bret is a charter member and past President of the Delta Xi Chapter. Continuing his dedication to the Fraternity, he sat on the Supreme Council for 16 years, chairing the Expansion, Brotherhood, Heritage, and Special Awards committees, and participating as faculty at various conventions, conclaves, and leadership schools.

Currently, Bret is the District Governor for Rotary District 7570, encompassing western Virginia and northeastern Tennessee, and is a member of the Warren Memorial Hospital Foundation Board of Directors. He is a past President of the Rotary Club of Front Royal (2019-2020) and the Front Royal-Warren County United Way. Previously, he held positions on the Council of Finance & Administration for the Virginia Conference of the United Methodist Church, and on the boards of the Northern Shenandoah Valley Community Foundation and the Shenandoah Area Council of the Boy Scouts of America.

Bret has been recognized for his devotion to community, family, faith, and fraternity with the Front Royal-Warren County Chamber of Commerce Citizen of the Year Award, the Front Royal United Methodist Church Service Candle, and two Ted Jones Spirit of Caring Awards, and by Rotary District 7570 and Zeta Beta Tau Fraternity.

He lives in Front Royal, Virginia with his wife Jessica and their four children: Noah W. Hrbek, Delta Xi (Virginia Polytechnic Institute & State University) 2026, Annie, Hunter, and Luke. In his spare time, Bret enjoys attending his children’s athletic events and performances, traveling, listening to podcasts, reading, and, of course, rooting for the Hokies.​

More information at – https://www.zbtfoundation.org

 

The Interview Transcript

Hugh Ballou:
Welcome to the non-profit exchange. This is Hugh Ballou, Founder and President of SynerVision Leadership Foundation. The Nonprofit Exchange is a weekly Episode driven. It’s a start as a podcast, but now it’s a video show and we have had um 425 leaders Share about their work and today is a very special episode a new friend Bret Hrbek who’s in Virginia but he’s doing some work with uh, the I got to look at my notes here to see to be able to say what this is. It’s the Zeta Beta Tau Foundation. So Bret, welcome to the non-profit exchange. But before we talk about the organization, tell people about yourself and why you work with this organization, please. Sure.

Bret Hrbek:
Thanks, Hugh. So I’ve been involved with the Zeta Beta Tau fraternity and foundation since I was an undergraduate at Virginia Tech. So in 1993, I joined At college, I joined the Zeta Beta 12 fraternity, the Delta Psi chapter. And from then, I never looked back. I was president of my chapter as an undergraduate at Virginia Tech. Then I went and served on our board of directors as an undergraduate as well, the fraternity, national fraternity. And then I worked for the fraternity, actually, and I then served on our Supreme Council or the board of directors for about 15, 16 years, and then switched over to our foundation and have served and now I’m the president, I’m going into my third year as president of the Zeta Beta Tau Foundation, which is the 501c3 organization that supports the fraternity’s work when it comes to leadership training, education, providing scholarships to our undergraduate members and brothers. I personally believe that fraternity is one of the best ways to mold a young bratty teenage 18 year old freshman into a productive member of society and a contributing member of society when they work through their college years and move on. And then the fraternity, that like brotherhood of a lifetime, that membership that you can continue throughout your lifetime, the connections that you make and the values you make. It was one of the first oaths I ever took besides being a Boy Scout. And when I joined the Methodist Church as a 13 year old, One of the first oaths I ever took was to live by this credo and the standards that the fraternity set, and it’s something that I’ve applied to my daily life, my personal life, as well as my rotary life, as we have talked about in the past. And my son is actually, my oldest son is now a member of ZBT, so not only did I call him son, I get to call him brother from my own chapter, and it’s a really special thing. So I stay involved because, again, I think it’s in the one of the best ways to be able to shape and mold young men to become productive members of contributing members of society.

Hugh Ballou:
Why you? Why did you step up to lead this?

Bret Hrbek:
I because of what it did for me, it really what it did, and I have said this multiple times and people that know me better might get a chuckle out of it. But I say, you know, if you think I’m a dork now, you should have seen before CBT. So in high school, I was I was a I knew people. I played some sports, but I wasn’t overly athletic. I wasn’t Mr. Mr. Popularity. I was a leader in my high school. But when I got to college, I was able to grow as a person, become a much more social person, which more extroverted because of fraternity. And I saw what it did for me in terms of my personal growth as an individual. And I wanted to make sure that this organization was going to be around for generations to come. It’s under attack, the fraternity system, because of stupid mistakes. They’re 18 and 19 year old boys and girls. They make stupid, stupid mistakes. We give them a lot of responsibility. And if the fraternity and sororities do what they do best, they’re molding them and putting those guardrails up. So I wanted to make sure that those guardrails continued to be established in our college campuses for the behavior and the growth of our of our college students. So that’s why I’m staying. And again, I just rose because I’m around, I work, I believe, and I’ve been put into, I’m privileged to be put into positions of leadership by my colleagues.

Hugh Ballou:
And rightfully so um, you’ve demonstrated large here Um, also the district governor of rotary and that’s a pretty big job and a pretty big leadership hat So you’re you’re doing multiple things in your financial planner in front royal virginia, um helping a lot of people So you’re you’re live a life of service. So thank you for that um, so let’s dig in a little deeper on the the Depth and breadth of the problem that you’re addressing. So can you give us a little more enlightenment on that?

Bret Hrbek:
Sure. So I really appreciate the opportunity to talk about this, because people, I’ll tell you, our new executive director for the project that I’m talking about, Intolerance, he used to be with Harvard when Alina Kagan was the dean there at the law school. And when Akiva went to Justice Kagan and was telling her about this program, because he’s still friends with her, and she said, a fraternity is doing this? And that’s kind of been the reaction. So that’s why I want to really want to get out there and talk about why we’re doing this. ZBT is a historically Jewish fraternity. We were founded in 1898 by Jewish men, actually as a Zionist organization. And then by 1903, that wasn’t necessary anymore. There’s plenty of other Zionist organizations. So they realized that Jewish men were excluded from the other social fraternities in the country. So they designed and developed their own of Jewish college fraternity, Zeta Beta Tau, Zayin Lit Mishlech Tepate. And they created this Jewish organization. By 1954, we went non-sectarian, but we are still heavily Jewish. But as we brought more non-Jews into the fraternity, which I am one of those, and so I’m grateful for that, we still want to make sure that we honor our heritage because I never forgot why we were founded. We were founded because fraternities and other institutions had closed the doors to Jews and the blacks to others that were not in the mainstream and the majority. So part of that is we want to make sure that we’re fighting against antisemitism. We partnered with the ADL for an antisemitism program or the fight antisemitism program on college campuses. And what we found is that our non-Jewish members really couldn’t grasp what that meant. It wasn’t something that they ever lived with, and they just didn’t get enthusiastic about it. So it was not a success. So we stepped back and we said, well, what can we do in order to address hate and intolerance on college campuses, address antisemitism without actually focusing on that and alienating people that don’t understand what that is like? And we said, okay, let’s talk about intolerance generally. And that means antisemitism, but it also means racial intolerance, sexuality intolerance, religious intolerance, any kind of intolerance there is. And how do we treat individuals as God-given blessed souls that deserve dignity and respect? And that’s where we came up with this intolerance. So we went to different organizations. We went to the Smithsonian, the Civil Rights Museum in Atlanta. We went to different organizations to pick their brains and find out exactly what, where we can come in and help fill that gap. And what we realized and what we were told is that nobody was doing this on college campuses. So we say, and we are the perfect person or organization to do something on college campuses because we have 80 chapters across college campuses across the country that have been well-established chapters on well-established universities with problems like this that we’re trying to address. So we wanted to develop something that was interactive, that would go in and start getting people to think about what it’s like to be discriminated against. We’re not necessarily there to force people to change their minds, but we want to plant seeds in people’s hearts that then they start to recognize what antisemitism is, what bigotry is, and when they might be experiencing it, or when they might even be condoning it by not condemning it. So we wanted to create something that people could go through, experience something to that effect, and then they could walk away with it and just plant that seed in their mind to start maybe being a little bit more tolerant to somebody that was different than them. So think about if you’ve ever been to the Civil Rights Museum in Atlanta, there’s the lunch counter. And in that lunch counter, you put your hands down on the counter, you’re sitting down on a replica counter from the 1950s, or just a diner, but this is in the 50s, you put your headphones on, And you are now imagining yourself as a black man or woman at that lunch counter. And there are racists coming in behind you. The counter starts to shake. They’re yelling in your ears. You’re trying to concentrate. And just, you get a glimpse, just a tiny glimpse, because I don’t want to equate it, you get a glimpse of what it would have been like under a Joan Crow in the South in the 50s. That’s what we were trying to do. That’s what we want to do on college campuses. We want to have people experience a little bit of what it’s like to be on the other side. And whether that’s because you are a conservative Christian, or because you’re an agnostic Jew, or because you’re a devout Muslim, or because you are homosexual, or because you’re black or a woman, it doesn’t matter. All of us have felt some kind of discrimination and intolerance, and we want to break that down so we see each other as people. Our goal is not to make you love each other. It is not to even make you like each other. It is to make you, encourage you, not make you, but encourage you to tolerate it and share the same space because we do need to share the same space on earth. And we’ve seen what’s happened on college campuses when it comes to antisemitism, especially since October 7th, 2023, and that explosion. So we know the need is there. And we believe that we are well equipped because of the infrastructure that the fraternity system had on the college campus and our history connected to intolerance, that we can make a real difference.

Hugh Ballou:
I grew up in Atlanta and lived there in the fifties and sixties. So I experienced what you’re just talked about and it was real. Um, and we’ve come a long way, but we still have ways to go. And what I, what I’m hearing is that it’s a forum for people to have meaningful discussions. and people who like humankind, and there’s a lot of things we have in common. Going back to the synergy with Rotary, there’s a similarity in the welcoming of all of God’s people into conversation. I think we’ve lost the art of conversation in our society with all of our devices, and people in tech companies text somebody in the next cubicle. So I think what I know what you’re doing is so critical today’s world and and what I see is especially the non-profit community Is forging ahead with how society could be and will be because we don’t have a political agenda We have a human It’s actually um philanthropy, which means love of humankind. It’s philanthropy, which is not about money only, you know That’s part of it. But really it’s the love of humankind. It’s what we’re doing together for the benefit of each other So, um, I I really appreciate that talk about the um intended outcomes the impact of your work and Maybe there’s some impact that you can share with us in how we’ve how this organization has impacted people’s lives That’s a thank you for the question because we are still in the process.

Bret Hrbek:
So we’re launching or we’re trying to quickly fail, if you will. We’re exercising a lot of the corporate lingo, lean startup. So what we’re doing right now, we’re piloting on about 10 college campuses. We have a program to get people hands-on, interactive on the college campus, and then encourage them to come later in the evening to have that exact discussion, to have a sit down where we have people from different sides of not necessarily the political aisle, but the different sides of, and not even necessarily the value system, but your faith, different faiths or different backgrounds, and have that open, frank conversation where you’re exactly right, where we’re being respectful of each other’s opinions and thoughts, and acknowledging that we are coming from a place of truth and honesty, as we see it in our experience, having that conversation, and then going another step further and then actually having accreditation. What we found is this generation on college campus really want that accreditation that they can throw up on LinkedIn and show that they’ve done something accomplished, that they can use to further it, and that’s okay. We’re all, we can also provide some kind of credential to allow you to move forward in life and be more successful. That’s even better. So there will be some kind of credentialing where actually it shouldn’t back up, not credentialing, but recognition, because we’re not going to get into credentialing business, but a recognition where you get a badge of some sort that you now become an ambassador of intolerance, or I should say of tolerance, or the ambassador of living in tolerance. And that’s where the intolerance comes from. We want to live in tolerance with each other. So there is an opportunity for them then the next year, if this is successful, to come back and help facilitate those ongoing conversations. And there has been discussion, frankly, because of my connection with Rotary, about how do we work with our local Rotary clubs, maybe to help them facilitate that conversation with those undergraduates. Because we know that every four years that population turns over, those Rotary clubs are hanging around there, hopefully. And maybe that those leaders and those individuals in those clubs can help facilitate and make sure that that conversation continues on. So that’s a nice partnership That’s a budding partnership that perhaps could happen between the two organizations that I feel most passionate about. So I don’t really have any concrete evidence this is going to work. We’re not sure yet. We think it will. We want to prove our thesis. We’re in the stages that we’ve hired the designer. We’ve got that design. We’ve got the prototype in place. And we’re working with some college campuses right now to get permission to come onto campus and work with universities in order to to be successful in that we’re working with or reaching out to organizations outside of the fraternity world. Certainly, again, going back to what Justice Kagan said, fraternities doing this. So we’re looking at other fraternities and sororities, but we’re also looking at the rotaries. We’re looking at the organization and LGBTQ community. We’re looking at an Hispanic community and the African-American community. So we want to make sure that this is a diverse set of ideas that are coming together. And it’s not all these White Jewish guys are coming in and tell us how not to be anti-Semitic. We want to make sure that this is a holistic approach to being tolerant of one another. And if it fails, we will figure it out and then we’ll learn from those mistakes or we’ll learn from what we just didn’t work and we’ll apply it again. Because this is something that we’re not going to stop doing until we’re successful. How do you define success? I’m not sure we are working on that as well. We are trying to put in metrics in place of how we can measure whether or not we move the needle at all. Because if we haven’t done anything, there’s no use of spending the millions of dollars that we’re trying to raise in order to put this program in place across the country. We don’t believe that’s the case. I personally believe that a conversation that you and I have in a civil way is going to leave both of us a little different as we leave and how that is applied in our daily life. I’m not sure, but I know that that will change.

Hugh Ballou:
Wow. That’s, that’s high impact. And you know, the, the only failure is fail is quitting. And I’m an expert in the narrow area that I work in, in leadership, and nonprofit, and strategy, because I’ve failed at everything. We call those learning opportunities. So Bret, I want to share your website. And it’s, pull this bar out of the way, it’s ZBT, you gotta get my letters right, ZBT, like Zeta Beta Tau, but the little three letters, ZBTfoundation.org. So when people go there, there’s some people listening, so let’s describe it to them there on a podcast, but when people go there, what will they find?

Bret Hrbek:
Well, the first page until December 31st probably is make your year-end gift, because we are in our campaign mode here at the end of the year for last-minute gifts, because it is a 501c3 nonprofit. But if you go under why it matters, you’ll go under what we do on that screen. You can drop down the second one, you can see all the different things that we’re doing, but then intolerance campaign is what we’re talking about in the project. And on that one, that’s an opportunity for you if you want to help with your financial resources, please make a donation to that. We are, like I said, raising, our goal is several million dollars in order to make sure that we have some place. We do have a staff member that’s in place. And then this also talks about our steering committee. We have an academic advisory committee that’s represented a very diverse group of folks there. Talks a little bit about our project. Or you can email, through the link there, or you can email me at president at zbtfoundation.org. And Matt, if you want more information, I’m happy to connect you with Akiva Kovic, who is our executive director, or our CEO, John Steeman. or anybody else in it. So if you have a part, if you’re representing an organization that might be interested in engaging in this fight for tolerance or to bring people together in tolerance on college campuses, please reach out to one of us through the website there. And we’ll be happy to talk to you and see how we can partner together. Partnerships are one of the number one things that we are working on right now besides fundraising, because we can’t do this alone. We need to have, the more partners we have to come together, It will be more likely this is going to be a success because the more likely we’re going to be taken even more seriously than we already are.

Hugh Ballou:
I love it. And that’s, this is not a local front Royal organization. This is in Indiana, isn’t it?

Bret Hrbek:
Our headquarters are Indianapolis. We have, uh, we have 80, uh, about 80 chapters across the country. Um, we are piloting this at, uh, uh, seven schools, rural schools, Washington schools, big schools, small schools, schools, and big college football schools with no academic or no athletics, no athletics. So we’re trying to find out, make sure that this is a program that is universal. It’s evergreen. It’s going to work pretty much everywhere. Now, we aren’t going on Harvard. We’re not taking on Yale or Penn. We’re taking some of those hotbed areas that have had some, been in the news over the past year because of the October 7th protests. We’re going to let them cool down a little bit. So we are going to work on some other areas that might be a little lower hanging fruit, if you will. but our intention would be to have this going across the country. We just need the resources for it. We gotta make sure that the project works and what works at all or most campuses.

Hugh Ballou:
Giving us a lot to think about and hearing somebody that’s in the trenches working Paving the way you don’t have the answers, but you’re out there and you’re going to fail fast. I love that. So, you know, let’s get it done and then Do something and then improve on it next time because you’re going to do some good and I want the people listening intolerance is Within it’s not the word intolerance. So I just want to clarify that for people that are just listening

Bret Hrbek:
It’s either in parentheses or capitalized. We’re still playing around with exactly what that’s going to look like. But it’s a play on words of living in tolerance, not being intolerant.

Hugh Ballou:
People listening to this you’ll be able to at the nonprofit exchange org you’ll find this episode and there’ll be a full transcript So some of those things that went by pretty fast as those sound bites We covered a lot of territory like we’re working in collaboration with others. That’s an underutilized Strategy, you know, we can do more together, you know in the South we say we’re none of us as smart as all of us but none of us has the energy as all of us and you know, we have our own grammar in the South, but we, uh, we do things together and that’s an inspiration. So this has been great. So what do you want to leave people with today, Bret?

Bret Hrbek:
I want to leave people knowing that, um, one I’m a fraternity man, so that we fraternities do good work. And that is if you’re, if you’re a parent and you’re concerned about your young man or a daughter, young son or daughter, do you go into college and joining a Greek letter organization? Always be concerned, but I wouldn’t be too worried about it. check in the organization, find out what they’re doing, find out what their mission is, talk to their parents. I think you’re going to turn out and find out that it’s going to be one of the best decisions that your child could make. But two, we have the ability to fight this intolerance on college campuses. Anti-Semitism has been around with us for 6,000 years or since Jews existed. We can end it. It can be something that we can do. We can treat each other as human beings. It takes civil society. We don’t want to go back. We do not want to go back. to a day when might makes right, and whoever the strongest was wins, and whoever the dominant skin color of the day won. We want to go back where we treat each other with a dignity and respect, or go to the day, I should say, we’ve never been there, but to the day where we treat each other with dignity and respect. And if we can start just tolerating everybody who are different than us, I think getting to the next level of acceptance and love It’s going to be a whole lot easier to do. So let us get to that point of where we’re tolerating and living in tolerance with each other. And we can do that. We’re trying to lead that way. And if we fail, we’re going to figure out a different way to do it. But if you want to come and join us and support us on that, we’d love to help. We’d love to take your, your monetary contributions, and we’d love to take your partnership with collaboration ideas. Just reach out to us through zbtfoundation.org and we will partner with you if we can to make this world a better place for tolerance.

Hugh Ballou:
You’ve been a great inspiration, Bret Hrbek. Thank you for being my guest today on the nonprofit exchange.

Bret Hrbek:
Thank you.