Editor's note: Select board chairwoman Shana Teas presented this short speech Sunday at a farewell party for Betty Slade and David Cole, who leave soon for Texas:

When I was working with David several years ago, I was copied on a correspondence he sent reaching out to the outer edges of his network to a Harvard professor. The letter included bunch of credentials, projects he’d worked on, people they may know in common, establishing his bona fides. And I looked at that letter and thought, “Who is that guy?  The David I know was a humble, soft-spoken intellectual elderly gentlemen.  Thinking about that brought me to an analogy I want to use today to talk about what I’ve learned from David and Betty.

I think they are secretly spy masters. Leaders of an elite intelligence organization. This is a fictional analogy but I do want to point out that they have been involved in all kinds of international travel and diplomacy, so maybe they just can’t talk about it?

What I know about intelligence agencies mostly comes from Tom Clancy, but I think there are three components.

The first is intelligence gathering. When you’re spying you don’t necessarily know what you’re looking for, so you have to have a very broad reach, get your information from a variety of sources. David and Betty can do detailed research, but they also remember to come up and look wide. That’s how you get cemeteries, Paul Cuffee, birds and residential tax rates, you don’t stay in your echo chamber. They are amazing at this.

The next thing you need is a network. You have to put assets in place, your sleeper cells. And again, you may not know what you need or who you’re looking for, you have to extend your network. I imagine in their secret lair they have a dossier on every one of us. Not just our name and contact information, but our skills, expertise, talent, resources. Who we know, what we’re good at, probably what we’re bad at too. 

But the reason you create an elite organization like this is to actually do something with it. In the movies its either amassing wealth and power or its averting a major international crisis. We could use your help guys on the crisis front. 

I don’t think either of those things motivate David and Betty. My observation is that they actually believe the world can be a better place. And they believe THEY can MAKE the world a better place. They don’t worry about credit or recognition, they care about the results.

Once they get an idea, they start putting the ideas and the people together and Betty gets to work. Above all else, Betty is a RECRUITER. Who here has been recruited by Betty to do something? I’m going to switch analogies here, but she doesn’t just recruit. She has a way of knowing when to be a cheerleader, or a coach, or a strategist, or a procurement officer. They are both good at noticing if you need an idea, a nudge, an introduction, or to be nagged. I’m sure that as long as David has access to email I’ll be hearing about the Residential Tax Exemption. They may think their book writing days are over, but networking and recruiting is the book I think they need to create.

So now we’re here to say goodbye to them, to honor them. I don’t want us all to just remember them or miss them. We honor them by continuing the work they started, the projects, the ideas they’ve planted, let’s grow what they started. And we’ve got a hole now in the fabric of our network, we honor them by patching it up, stitching it together, strengthening it, not letting it fray. And we honor them by using what we’ve learned from them. I challenge you, the next time you find yourself saying “someone should” I want you remember that you’ve been an asset in this elite agency. You’ve seen it work firsthand, you’ve seen what two people can do when they don’t worry about credit or reward, so channel them and go do it.

Thank you for allowing me to be an asset in your organization.