Patricia B. Wolff

Patricia B. Wolff

St. Louis–area pediatrician Patricia Wolff first began volunteering on medical missions to poverty-stricken Haiti in 1988 with her two young children in tow. For 15 years she worked to alleviate sickness and hunger, which is especially brutal on Haiti’s children. “I...
Joan Wylie

Joan Wylie

From her first day as a student teacher and through 30 years in education, Joan Wylie wanted to help disadvantaged students overcome the sense of failure they had from not having learned to read. In 1998, when she was 52, she led a collaborative of teachers focused on...
Ray Umashankar

Ray Umashankar

Ray Umashankar’s life changed when his 23-year-old daughter returned from India and announced her intention to help children of sex workers and victims of trafficking in their native country. Inspired by her vision, he and his wife looked into the situation and...
Gail Johnson Vaughan

Gail Johnson Vaughan

During the 20 years she ran an adoption agency in California, which has the highest number of foster children in the nation, Gail Johnson Vaughan was routinely dismayed by the assumption – common among professionals in the foster care system – that finding permanent...
Ted Wohlfarth

Ted Wohlfarth

Ted Wohlfarth spent the first half of his life teaching economics, studying commercial real estate markets, and coaching his children’s baseball, basketball, and soccer teams. Those experiences taught Wohlfarth there is a problem with the games that adults give...