Shana Swiss

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

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...
Kathleen Taylor

Kathleen Taylor

Kathleen Taylor, a doctor of obstetrics and gynecology who practiced in California, was motivated to join her first medical mission to a developing country in 2003 after two medical scares: her own emergency cardiac surgery at age 56 and just two years later the near...
Michael L. Smolens

Michael L. Smolens

Early in his career in the garment industry, the St. Louis-raised Michael Smolens took his first trip abroad to the southern Philippines. The trip influenced his life’s direction, and he spent the next 30 years doing business with emerging economies. After 9/11, he...