“You gotta be willing to starve for a while—but the starving’s over now.”

NIU alumnus Howard Hill is a certified public accountant with a south Chicago firm headed by Darius C. Bolling, also an NIU alum. Hill, a 1980 graduate, was Black Student Union president, Homecoming king and a student/faculty liaison who helped “trouble-shoot problems related to getting into classes and dorms.”

Together, he and Bolling are finding ways to let students know starving can be followed by prospering, as their lives indicate.

There’s a growing concern for education, Hill believes. Maybe it’s because of the dilapidated conditions of Chicago elementary and high schools revealed lately in the press or the cries of higher education for more funding.

“But I like to think it (the growing concern) is a natural concern for education itself—people trying to give something back to the community they took so much from.

“Our basic concern is the students,” he said.

Hill and Bolling organized a group which to date has put $3,000—in the form of six $500 scholarships—back into NIU. The group is called the Black Alumni Council, the first constituent group of NIU’s Alumni Association.

Hill, BAC president, said to form the council he and Bolling rounded up a group of friends whom they thought would be interested in working with alumni. Through parties sponsored by the council, the scholarship money was raised. “We (he and Bolling) want to get folks stimulated and interested in terms of education.”

Fourteen members make up the formal BAC board, but Hill said all black alumni actually are members, as they are of the Alumni Association. As many as 500 alumni have attended BAC functions.

“Our main purpose of the BAC is the recruitment and retention of minorities,” which in effect is culturally enriching to the university, Hill said. A fringe benefit of the council is that it allows those alumni involved “networking” opportunities.

But not all of their contributions come in the form of money. Last year, the accounting firm partners made about six trips to NIU to deliver their “Where Are They Now?” seminars, giving students an idea of what life after college can be like.

“It’s a role-modeling type of thing,” Hill said.

Hill said he, Bolling and other members of the BAC will continue their close association with NIU. “We’ll be on campus at lease once a month for some function or another,” Hill said. There will be more “Where Are They Now?” seminars and involvement with Unity In Diversity Week, student leader seminars/meetings, greek functions and Homecoming in their lives.

But, Hill stresses, “We’re not educators—we’re accountants.” After graduating from NIU, he and Bolling went to work in the corporate world of accounting before Bolling formed the four-person accounting firm in 1985.

“We were probably some of the youngest guys on the block,” Hill said about creating a firm so soon after graduation. “We’re basically workaholics—we’ve made mistakes, learned things. Things have grown since we started.”

The community-based firm deals wth the “basic elements” of accounting—income tax preparation, auditing, personal finance planning and insurance.

“Most people don’t think about (establishing their own firm) until they’re 35 to 40 years old when they think they can’t make it in the corporate world. That wasn’t necessarily the case with us.

“It wasn’t that we weren’t well-received in the corporate world—we made a conscious choice to start our own practice.”