Douglas McGray

A Uniquely American DREAM

Articles — Wed, 19 Sep 2007 12:48:00 -0400

Thoughtful people will disagree about immigration policy -- how many foreigners to let in, for what purpose, and what to do about the 12 million illegal immigrants already in this country. That’s why sweeping immigration reform has failed again and again. This fall, Congress should think smaller, and figure out what it can agree on, before another year passes with no progress. It might start by considering young people like Lucia.

When Lucia’s parents dropped her off at a new elementary school in Los Angeles more than 15 years ago, she didn’t speak a word of English. And she didn’t really… more

Mr. Successful

adminn — Sat, 11 Aug 2007 01:52:00 -0400

Anyone who's ever been to a wedding knows not everybody can stand up in front of a roomful of people and just talk. Anthony Pico discovered by accident, at 15, that he has a gift for doing that. He's 18 now, and he's become so well known as a public speaker on the subject of foster care, which he knows well, he was appointed to a blue… more

Pop-Up Cities

Articles — Tue, 01 May 2007 10:14:00 -0400

Three years ago, Alejandro Gutierrez got a strange and tantalizing message from Hong Kong. Some McKinsey consultants were putting together a business plan for a big client that wanted to build a small city on the outskirts of Shanghai. But the land, at the marshy eastern tip of a massive, mostly undeveloped island at the mouth of the Yangtze River, was a migratory stop for one of the rarest birds in the world -- the black-faced spoonbill, a gangly white creature with a long, flat beak.

McKinsey wanted to know if the developer, the Shanghai Industrial Investment Corporation,… more

Just One Thing Missing

Articles — Sun, 08 Apr 2007 03:48:00 -0400

Martha doesn't like to talk about her future anymore. She'd wanted to go to med school, become an OB-gyn. And she's exactly the kind of kid everyone roots for. She grew up in a poor, mostly immigrant neighborhood in East Los Angeles, where most people didn't graduate from high school, and nobody talked about college. But Martha got into UCLA. She couldn't believe it: UCLA.

She… more

The Downhill Battle: Global Warming and the Traveler’s World

Articles — Thu, 01 Mar 2007 23:38:00 -0500

When the aspen Ski Company launched its environment division -- a kind of green management team, think tank, and consultancy -- it was the first of its kind in the ski industry: an in-house watchdog to prevent the resort from gorging on energy and trampling its fragile ecosystem. Ten years later, the division’s director, Auden Schendler, spends at least as much time thinking about saving Aspen as he does about saving its environment. Both, it turns out, are highly vulnerable to climate change.

"I’m not concerned about all the snow going away in the year 2100," says Schendler’s longtime boss,… more

Network Philanthropy

Articles — Sun, 21 Jan 2007 22:43:00 -0500

They seemed so young. That’s what Peter Hero remembers most about the day, nine years ago, when Pierre Omidyar and Jeff Skoll walked into his office at Community Foundation Silicon Valley with an odd idea to give away a fortune. Omidyar wore jeans and a T-shirt; his thick black hair was tied back in a ponytail. Skoll had on what looked to Hero like a varsity jacket. He couldn’t still be in high school, could he? Hero thought they were smart kids, nice kids too, but he’d never heard of their company and he was unsure about its prospects. "I… more

Humanitarian of the Year: Christina Galitsky, 33

Articles — Wed, 13 Sep 2006 01:01:00 -0400

Back in graduate school, Christina Galitsky could boil her life’s work down into something like the title of a journal article: "The reversibility of proteins absorbing onto a surface," she says. But since she dropped off the Ph.D. track and, later, took a job up the hill at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, the question "What do you do?" has turned into a stumper. "I guess now I say, I try and work on ... sort of innovative solutions to ... wait, what do I say?" she says with a laugh.

Officially, Galitsky spends about two-thirds of her time developing tools to… more

Counseling Kids to Graduation and Beyond

Articles — Thu, 07 Sep 2006 00:23:00 -0400

In all the talk about education reform, school counselors seldom come up. Maybe that’s because adults tend to do the talking.

A privately funded after-school program in Oakland called Kids First has spent the last couple of years coordinating youth-led research projects to figure out why kids in their city believe that dropout rates are so high and college admissions so rare. To the surprise of the group’s adult organizers, the No. 1 issue that kids identified was bad or nonexistent counseling.

The Kids First students said they had trouble making sense of graduation requirements -- especially the transfer students, who can… more

Volunteer on the Road

Articles — Mon, 04 Sep 2006 23:19:00 -0400

Generally speaking, you don’t want a crowbar or a wheelbarrow to feature prominently in your vacation photos. Or rubble. Or poverty (unless, perhaps, it is the exotic kind -- a shoeless boy with oil-black hair; a woman carrying vegetables to the market). But that is just the kind of experience Daniel Johnson sought out earlier this year when he organized a trip to coastal Mississippi with a few dozen officemates from Credit Suisse New York. "All along Route 10, from New Orleans, you could see the devastation," the 45-year-old managing director recalls. And then there was Biloxi: "It was run… more

The Laptop Crusade

Articles — Fri, 28 Jul 2006 14:19:27 -0400

Yves Béhar sits at a wide worktable on the lofted second floor of fuseproject, his San Francisco design studio, surrounded by windows and whiteboards and nearly a dozen foam laptops. He is tall and tan, with a surfer’s mess of curls and the quiet, easy manner of someone who just woke up from a nap. “There are two types of projects,” he says. “There are the stylist projects -- the ones you sign with your signature. Then there are the ones that are going to be difficult.” He looks at his pile of discarded ideas, none of them much alike,… more