Inez Killingsworth
A trolley full of Cleveland activists and a pair of executives from Countrywide Financial Corp. comes to a halt in front of a haggard home. The siding is sagging. The windows boarded. The gutters long gone, pillaged by vandals looking to make a few bucks on scrap....
Shana Swiss
In the late 1980s at a Boston hospital, physician Shana Swiss treated a refugee woman with 19 stab wounds. The brutality made Swiss realize she wanted to do more for this patient than sew up her horrific wounds. “I had to do something to stop violence against women,”...
Jan Lepore-Jentleson
One afternoon in 1997, Jan Lepore-Jentleson, then the building inspection superintendent for Dayton, Ohio, found herself utterly discouraged. “I remember deciding that I was fed up wasting my time being a bureaucrat, pushing paper and accomplishing little of value for...
Nancy Sanford Hughes
Nancy Sanford Hughes was at a loss after her husband’s death from cancer in 2001. During their 30-year marriage, she’d been mostly a stay-at-home mom, but one with a yen for travel and adventure. When well-meaning friends suggested she sell her rambling home in...