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Paul Polak

Paul Polak

By Gary Hume | Apr 26, 2023

As a psychiatrist, Paul Polak fought the causes of mental illness, gradually deciding ending poverty was the best way to promote world health. In 1989, at age 56, he founded International Development Enterprises (IDE) to design products that would help the 90 percent...
Paulette Fair

Paulette Fair

By Gary Hume | Apr 26, 2023

In the summer of 2003, Fair and a colleague at the nonprofit where she worked began tutoring her grandson, her colleague’s son and a couple of their friends in reading, algebra and public speaking. While there, the young men also helped around the nonprofit, called...
Richard Fahey

Richard Fahey

By Gary Hume | Apr 26, 2023

When environmental lawyer Richard Fahey returned to Liberia in 2009 with his wife, Suzanne, 30 years after serving as a Peace Corps volunteer there, he found a much different place. The country, one of the world’s poorest, was devastated after 14 years of civil war....
John Corcoran

John Corcoran

By Gary Hume | Apr 26, 2023

In the early 1990s, John Corcoran’s 4-year-old granddaughter began asking him to read books with her. But he couldn’t read. He was one of the 93 million Americans whose reading skills are below the basic level. In his 17 years teaching high school, he had fooled...
Ruth Shuman

Ruth Shuman

By Gary Hume | Apr 26, 2023

In early 1994, Shuman visited an arts-in-education program in several public schools in Harlem, a predominantly low-income neighborhood in New York City. “I was appalled at how these schools appeared,” she recalls. “They were colorless, lifeless, and...