Milton Magazine, Spring 2007

Milton Magazine

Spring 2007

Public Problem Solving Many Milton alumni have crafted careers of activism, within the non-proďŹ t sector, in public service, and through political action. With a steady focus on long-term change, they have taken responsibility for improving our lives and those of our neighbors, nearby and around the world.

Contents

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Features: Public Problem Solving Front Cover: Changing Perspectives Oil bar, 42" x 52"

by Samantha Lee ’07 Back Cover: February Morning

by Greg White

3 Bringing Management Expertise to Philanthropy Identifying effective, long-term ways to solve complex problems Cathleen Everett

6 Collaboration Aims at Corporate Social Responsibility Working with corporations interested in addressing the well-being of communities Cathleen Everett

8 Marketing to Underserved Audiences Susan Clark’s communications and social change organization, Common Knowledge, has an unusual track record and unique niche.

Cathleen Everett

10 Making Good Ideas Useful Sally Bowles has lived her remarkable professional life at the intersection of big, bold ideas that would affect millions of people, and the challenge of implementation.

Cathleen Everett

12 “Get Engaged” Three Milton graduates of the ’90s were staffers in Deval Patrick’s campaign for governor who put their life plans on hold and took up crucial roles at the core of the campaign.

Cathleen Everett

16 Our Clients Are Among the Hardest to Serve From policy and program development to implementation of new strategies and initiatives, Randy Quezada “connects the dots” for New York’s homeless.

Cathleen Everett

18 From Distressed Neighborhoods, Building Healthy Communities LISC brings a holistic view to community development, helping transform distressed neighborhoods into healthy communities where people have access to affordable homes, jobs, reliable places to shop, and highquality schools.

Cathleen Everett Erin Hoodlet

22 Stewardship of the Earth: A Matter of Fairness and Responibility Seeking to establish sustainability and good stewardship of the earth as central ethical imperatives of human society Erin Hoodlet

25 William C. Janeway Earns the 2006 Advocate Award from Environmental Advocates of New York 26 Citizen Schools Improving student achievement by blending real-world learning projects and rigorous academics after school Erin Hoodlet

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Departments 28 “Lights-On” in Denver After School OpenWorld Learning (OWL) is an after-school program for children in grades 3 through 5 that combines learning about computer programming with peer teaching.

Erin Hoodlet

30 Faculty Advisors Shepherd Young Strategists At Milton, commitments outside of class help define the individual.

Cathleen Everett

35 “That energy clearly paid off.”

The countless hours Milton students devoted to all aspects of campaigning proved to be a crucial force for Governor Patrick.

Kenzie Bok ’07 Tara Venkatraman ’07

37 What Is Amnesty International?

This year’s heads, who adopted Human Rights and Poverty as their campaign, strategized to find a more powerful way for students to connect with human rights problems.

Cathleen Everett

38 Faculty Perspective Self Education Suzanne Y. DeBuhr

40 Post Script Social Venture Partners: New philanthropy that includes thinking about, acting on and investing in social change Jenna Bertocchi Stapleton ’92

42 Post Script Milton at the Midpoint of the Last Century: One Collection of Memories Oakes Ames Plimpton ’50

44 Post Script A Milton Reconnect: A family history, intertwined with Milton over decades, leads to a 21st century commitment Andy Ward ’51

45 The Head of School Learning How to Disagree Robin Robertson

46 In•Sight 48 On Centre News and notes from the campus and beyond

55 Sports Frank Millet is the inspiration for a national squash tournament

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Editor Cathleen Everett Associate Editor Erin Hoodlet Photography Ralph Alswang, Wiqan Ang, Bryan Cheney, Dennis Curran, Michael Dwyer, Roberto Fabro, John Horner, Nicki Pardo, JD Sloan, Martha Stewart, Greg White Design Moore & Associates Milton Magazine is published twice a year

by Milton Academy. Editorial and business offices are located at Milton Academy where change-of-address notifications should be sent.

As an institution committed to diversity, Milton Academy welcomes the opportunity to admit academically qualified students of any gender, race, color, handicapped status, sexual orientation, religion, national or ethnic origin to all the rights, privileges, programs and activities generally available to its students. It does not discriminate on the basis of gender, race, color, handicapped status, sexual orientation, religion, national or ethnic origin in the administration of its educational policies, admission policies, scholarship programs, and athletic or other school-administered activities.

Printed on Recycled Paper

Public Problem Solving Taking on our most complex problems Katherine Fulton, president of the Monitor Institute, used the term “public problem solving” to describe today’s environment of philanthropy—“new players, new tools and new pressures that add up to a new time”—she asserted. These philanthropists have publicly named and embraced problems that affect our lives every day, problems that seem intractable.

In addition to philanthropists, many others, including consultants, visionary founders, and professionals who work in the public interest, are engaged in public problem solving. While many think of this moment in our history as a dark time, we do see around us creativity, energy, optimism, cooperation, and far sighted commitment to social and environmental benefit.

Many Milton alumni have crafted careers of activism, within the nonprofit sector, in public service, and through political action. With a steady focus on long-term change, they have taken responsibility for trying to improve our lives and those of our neighbors, nearby and around the world.

Through leadership in companies, organizations, and governmental agencies, they strive to meet subsistence needs, stem disease, empower citizens, educate children and care for the planet. Read about them, and about how Milton prepares students to follow their lead.

Cathleen Everett

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Bringing Management Expertise to Philanthropy: New approaches to long-standing problems

Owen Stearns ’89 “Lots of movement is happening quickly all over the world. Our job [at Monitor] is to facilitate good thinking and growth in a healthy, connected, cohesive way, and we’ve got signals that other organizations implementing change want that, too.”

The scale of philanthropy today is unprecedented and growing. According to Monitor Group data, total giving in 2006 reached $260 billion; the number of billionaires in the world exceeded 400 this year, compared to roughly 170 in 1997; in the United States, from 2001 to 2004, the number of households with a net worth of $100 million or more increased from 7,000 to 10,000. Sophisticated donors want to find effective, long-term ways to solve complex problems, and their outlook is not only local, but global.

AP Photo/Pervez Anjum

Fast Company (the magazine and Web site) and Monitor Group named “Forty-three entrepreneurs who are changing the world” in their 2006 joint ranking. These entrepreneurs have “found a better way to do good: They’re using the disciplines of the corporate world to tackle daunting social problems.” If you, the individual donor, want to maximize the impact of your philanthropic dollar, give to one of these organizations, the article urges.

Pakistani villagers are in search of water after a severe heat wave which dried up their wells in Badin, 250 kilometers southeast of Karachi, Pakistan, June 2005. The temperature in some regions crossed 118˚F.

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The most powerful philanthropists are affecting the social and political order, worldwide: Bono and Bill Clinton use personal influence to galvanize world action to treat and contain the HIV/AIDS virus.

George Soros has linked some of his funding projects directly to demonstrations of open, transparent governments. The Rockefeller Foundation is partnering with the Gates Foundation to move lessons learned about improving agricultural productivity from South America to Africa.

Leveraging Donors’ Dollars The opportunity to be an influential activist is not limited to Warren Buffett, Larry Page and Sergey Brin of Google, or Pierre Omidyar of eBay, however. The growth of aggregated funds (nonprofits structured like mutual funds except that their purpose is to invest in problemsolving ideas) allows donors at all levels to leverage their dollars. Individuals can give to one of the many aggregated funds where full-time staffers with M.B.A.s and Ph.D.s help identify, evaluate and support enterprises meant to accomplish systemic change.

A consultant with the Monitor Institute, Owen figures in this new environment of philanthropy—bringing management expertise to foundations, nonprofit organizations or philanthropic venture-capital funds, ensuring that they have solid business plans with rigorous and relevant performance metrics that make them accountable for results.

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Owen’s firm, which operates within the umbrella of the international management consulting company, Monitor Group, wants to be a leader in anticipating changes and applying new approaches to addressing complex social challenges.

The Acumen Fund was Owen’s latest major project. Acumen Fund is a nonprofit investment fund that operates somewhat like a venture-capital firm. They look for market-based approaches that provide basic services to populations making under $4 a day. Jennifer Lee wrote in the New York Times recently that Acumen Fund’s vision responds to “a desire to reinvent philanthropy and push the boundaries of how people who had done well could also do good.” One of Acumen Fund’s tenets is that markets work for the poor, not just the rich. Philanthropy has always addressed immediate needs; the new philanthropic models try to couple meeting needs with creating sustainable projects that contribute to broad, economic and social progress.

“Small amounts of philanthropic capital, combined with large doses of business acumen, can build thriving enterprises that serve vast numbers of the poor,” the Acumen Fund Web site claims. “Our investments focus on delivering affordable, critical goods and services—like health, water and housing—through innovative, market-oriented approaches.”

A representative project, for instance, combats malaria, which kills at least one million people each year. Acumen Fund created a public-private partnership with WHO, UNICEF, Sumitomo, ExxonMobil and an African bed-net maker to manufacture an anti-malarial bed net. Typical bed nets must be treated every six months and are prone to tearing. The new bed net produced by A–Z Textiles Mills—although more expensive than the old bed nets— kills mosquitoes on contact for five years and is non-tearable. The nets are selling, and making them has created more than 100 jobs. Instead of the traditional approach of buying several thousand bed nets and distributing them to the poor, Acumen Fund’s investment and management assistance allowed A–Z to expand its operations dramatically—their bed nets now protect over 6 million Tanzanians from malaria.

Acumen Fund has also invested in a new drip irrigation system engineered by International Development Enterprises in India. Subsistence farmers can buy the system for $30, far less than the price of typical irrigation systems. With increased land productivity, the system pays for itself quickly. Incomes increase and farmers buy a second and third system, ultimately beginning to accumulate wealth.

Other investments help urban squatters in Pakistan build cinderblock homes and achieve tenure security and legal title to them; or provide small capital loans to

Owen Stearns ’89

women entrepreneurs; or work with a local Indian company to produce, market and distribute Mytry De-flouridation Filters, which give families access to clean, safe drinking water.

Some ventures are disappointing, as with those in any investment fund, and Acumen Fund is learning important lessons and adding expertise as they go.

Acumen Fund has 27 full-time staff, many with M.B.A.s and other specialized degrees who do the evaluation, decision-making, and bring hands-on operations expertise to the projects Acumen backs.

Uncovering sustainable solutions Over the past six months, Owen and his team from Monitor worked with Acumen Fund to develop a strategy for the next five years—one that will expand Acumen Fund’s current investments from $20 million to over $150 million. “Acumen Fund is really at the cutting edge of a few different trends in the social sector, all of which could really change the way we think about creating change in the world in the coming years,” Owen says. “If this really works, they will have uncovered a much more sustainable way to address issues of global poverty. And so, being centrally involved in helping them figure out how to actually make this work feels great.”

Prior to the Acumen Fund project, much of Owen’s work for Monitor Institute involved education enterprises. He has

worked with an inner-city boarding school in Washington, D.C., that wanted to replicate its model in other cities. For the Gates Foundation, he developed a business plan on behalf of a network of charter and choice schools in Milwaukee, Wisconsin, to help the foundation evaluate and strategize possible support. Owen’s current project is back in the international development space—helping a publicly funded organization based in Latin America design a transition plan, as its funding will be eliminated and it will need to find a new business model with different sources of revenue.

The recent evolutions within philanthropy—and approaches to social change more broadly—have created jobs and even careers that did not exist even a decade ago. When Owen graduated from Amherst College in 1994, he had been heavily involved in community service activities, including doing a City Year and supporting the creation of AmeriCorps. He then spent several years with the Monitor Group, a global strategy consulting firm, before leaving to co-direct The City School, a nonprofit leadership development program for high school students in Boston founded by Milton Academy former faculty Todd Fry. Owen was a charter board member for the City School and as co-director led the fundraising strategy, and then the search for the next director, as well as the transition to new leadership.

With these two early experiences at leading for-profit and nonprofit organizations, he found himself searching for something that was a hybrid of the two. The most interesting learning and activity in the world was actually in the space between the two sectors, where social change was being pursued without regard to the IRS designation. He was fortunate to find the Foundation Strategy Group, a newly formed firm that provides strategic advice to private, corporate, and community foundations. After four years there, he returned to Monitor to help launch the Monitor Institute, its social change practice, which works with many of the leading actors continuing to create new approaches to longstanding problems.

Improving education for urban students is one of Owen’s core commitments: he is founding board chair of Excel Academy, an East Boston charter school serving middle school students. As with Owen’s other projects, results matter: Students in Excel’s first eighth-grade graduating class outperformed students from nearly every district in the state, scoring in the top 9 percent statewide on the 2006 English MCAS exam and in the top 6 percent statewide on the 2006 math MCAS exam.

Cathleen Everett

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Yeng Felipe Butler ’92 “Business for Social Responsibility helps companies develop responsible business practices.

We proactively work with our member companies on a diverse set of issues related to corporate social responsibility; How do we do this?

We encourage cross-sector collaboration between business and civil society. Obviously I’d rather work with companies that try to integrate these practices with overall corporate strategies, rather than with those for whom these are simply a part of PR strategy.”

Business for Social Responsibility (BSR) today is a unique hybrid organization that evolved in the early ’90s out of an advocacy organization started by former Stride Rite CEO Arnold Hiatt, who has long argued in numerous public pulpits that “the well-being of business cannot be separated from the well-being of the community and the nation.”

Global trade has brought many multinational corporations to the realization that to sustain business growth they have to pay attention to the environment, economic development and human rights. Mainstream business must worry about the impact of problems such as climate change, access to clean water, reducing conflict and promoting the rule of law.

“BSR is a membership organization,” Yeng explains, “with a consulting practice and a research and development group.” Companies from several sectors in particular join BSR: consumer goods; information and communication technology; energy and mining; pharmaceuticals and biotechnology; food and agriculture; transportation. As Yeng notes, these sectors are heavily scrutinized by media, investors and the public.

They look to BSR for help, for instance, with stakeholder engagement to further

inform their decision-making process. In turn, BSR helps them map out a plan and then implement it. “One of our recent projects involved a large U.S.–based agricultural company thinking about sourcing bananas from Africa,” says Yeng. “We’re helping them identify the various risks related to this possible business venture— and that includes defining sustainable practices, relaying and teaching these requirements to the growers, as well as monitoring their progress.”

Members (AstraZeneca, Chevron, Cisco Systems, IKEA International, Intel and United Parcel Service, are examples) get issue expertise, consultative help, training and up-to-date research on trends and innovations. BSR has, for instance, just published a Report on Corporate Climate Strategy, reviewing a range of business reactions to climate change.

Perhaps most important, BSR members connect with a network: industry peers, partners, stakeholders and thought leaders interested in dealing with the environmental challenges and social inequities that are unsustainable.

What are socially responsible business practices? Can they be defined, measured and reported? “That’s a hot debate,” Yeng says. “It’s hard to apply metrics to work that is qualitative, and the link between using socially and environmentally responsible practices and the bottom line hasn’t been firmly established yet.” The BSR Web site announces that social research analysts from 23 investment firms have released a brief that explains how companies “can use the Global Reporting Initiative (GRI) to increase the credibility, comparability and utility of social and environmental reporting.” “Reliable and commonly used metrics are important,” Yeng says. “They’re part of how companies should be reviewed by investors, investors

who look at a triple bottom line: economic impact, environmental impact, and social impact.”

Yeng’s next project for BSR will be leading their own first corporate social responsibility (CSR) report. She will need to help the organization come up with the right metrics, take a close internal look at what is working and what isn’t, and measure how they model what they promote. There are good examples of CSR reporting, done by peer organization, Accountability, and in other sectors by British Telecommunications, GE, Shell, and Starbucks. “The BT report is best in class,” Yeng says, “for correlating internal strategy with CSR practices.”

Last November, Yeng managed the annual BSR conference in New York—the largest forum for corporate social responsibility practitioners. More than 1,000 business leaders came from more than 50 countries and joined colleagues in the independent and public sectors. She took on directing the conference, having only joined BSR the previous summer. Arnold Hiatt, in fact, was the person who suggested that working at BSR would give Yeng the experience she was seeking—learning the practices of a top-rate nonprofit organization.

When she spoke with Arnold, Yeng had completed a mid-career master’s program in public administration from the Kennedy School at Harvard. While at Harvard, Yeng was interested in social entrepreneurship and public and private sector partnerships.

She helped found a nonprofit that set up business-plan competitions to increase the number and quality of new business ventures in developing countries. Her nonprofit, Global Entrepreneurship Network (GEN), awards prizes to the most innovative ideas, that is, those with significant

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Collaboration

aims at corporate social responsibility

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growth potential to serve local or global markets. Besides cash prizes, GEN helps top teams get advice from experienced professionals, introduces them to potential investors, and sends them to the Harvard Battle of the Business Plan competition in Cambridge.

Yeng Felipe Butler ’92

Prior to her master’s program, Yeng was Head of Strategic Marketing and Vice President of Sales and Marketing at the Institutional Investment Services business unit at Merrill Lynch Investment Managers. At Merrill, she founded the Responsible Citizenship Board, which enabled and encouraged employees to get involved in local community service. Her eight years at Merrill Lynch began immediately after her graduation from Dartmouth, where she majored in government and Asian studies.

Part of Yeng’s diverse experience includes a Rockefeller Grant, which she used to pursue an internship with the Philippine Commission on Human Rights, where she facilitated an empowerment training program for students. Just prior to Harvard, she volunteered for three months as Senior Project Advisor to the South Pacific Business Development in Apia, Samoa, a microfinance institution modeled after the Grameen Bank in Bangladesh.

Looking out and looking forward, as Yeng characteristically does, she sees her next area of interest as socially responsible investing—perhaps further developing a financial services practice for BSR. “It’s an important and growing field, not quite mainstream yet, but just about to experience some real growth,” she says. www.bsr.org CDE

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Marketing to Underserved Audiences Developing Civic Engagement Susan Clark ’76 “Forty percent of people in the United States read at an eighth-grade level or less. The Voting Rights Act of 1965 outlawed literacy tests for voter registration, but if the only source of nonpartisan information about California ballot measures is a state-issued ballot pamphlet written at a twelfth grade level, that functions as a de facto literacy test.”

Susan Clark’s communications and social change organization, Common Knowledge, has an unusual track record and unique niche. Common Knowledge offers its clients traditional marketing expertise— strategic planning, campaign development, qualitative and quantitative research, training and technical assistance. What’s different is their emphasis on developing community and civic engagement, especially the participation of lesser-heard voices. Combining these elements yields the practice they call “community marketing.”

Susan transitioned to her current work from a successful career in corporate marketing. She served as vice president of planning and new products at Del Monte Foods, director of marketing at the California State Lottery and as a brand manager at Procter & Gamble. In her

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heart, however, her real interest was in the needs and concerns of underserved audiences, and throughout these years she felt a pull toward working for a cause.

Susan points to one achievement, California’s “Easy Voter Guide,” as an example of the projects she finds most gratifying. “The Easy Voter Guide,” supported by state agency and foundation funding, has a circulation of three to four million for each statewide election in California. Available in five languages, the guide is distributed by over 2,000 organizations and more than 40 newspapers.

The print guide and its companion Web site, easyvoter.org, help “new and busy voters make sense of California elections and government.”

The project began when Susan was an adult literacy volunteer, as well as a member of the League of Women Voters. She was frustrated that people with limited education are shut out of most civic discourse. The League, historically a provider of nonpartisan information about the how, what and why of voting, did not have the capacity to reach out beyond the savvy readers who are their typical clients.

The ability to negotiate a ballot is particularly important in California, where routinely, voters are asked to make “30 to 40

decisions about elected offices and ballot measures, many of a highly technical nature,” reports www.easyvoter.org. “Despite (or because of?) record levels of partisan advertising, many voters report feeling overwhelmed by the long ballots they face.

In a recent survey by the Public Policy Institute of California, 77 percent said that the language of the propositions was too complicated and confusing.”

“We institutionalized non-participation,” Susan says. “We say we believe that everyone in a democracy has to participate, but what if they don’t have access?” To explore how to open up access to the process, she secured funding from the California state library to work with adult literacy students and other community members to co-create a voting engagement program.

“To really understand what will work for the community, we create working groups of target audience members. Every project we do is audience-designed,” Susan says. “The users describe the need, define the scope of the communications and help with the actual implementation. As a result, what we come up with together is more effective than having used just a focus group at the front or end of the project.”

“One quarter of California residents are from another country; another one quarter are from another state,” Susan explains.

“We found out that the image many new voters had in their mind was that voting would be like a trip to the Department of Motor Vehicles: long lines, taking a test, and no one to ask for help. Many people assume that non-voters are turned off by politics, but we found that ‘performance anxiety,’ fear of being embarrassed, is a bigger barrier.” Susan’s team of community members created a three-part engagement model that was shown to double voter turnout. “The Easy Voter Guide” is the most visible element of the program and has become popular with mainstream audiences as well.

Susan says Common Knowledge is fortunate to work with organizations that are willing to fund projects at a level that allows her to do research and involve the

community they’re serving. “We have a broad range of clients,” says Susan. “They come to us; and an essential part of our work is the network of ‘distribution partners,’ such as the California State Library, community colleges, and a variety of community organizations. We have ongoing relationships with people who serve other people.”

especially in lower-income and lesseducated audiences. Common Knowledge spearheaded a successful multiyear Civic Engagement Project for Children and Families and assisted the Common Ground Project in framing and facilitating community dialogues on welfare reform and affirmative action, in partnership with the San Jose Mercury News.

Susan is now working on projects about making climate change and energy reduction relevant for more of the general public. Some of her other projects include ProjectMoney.org—co-designed by adult learners—a free service that helps people who might have been intimidated learn about using a bank, saving money, using credit cards, filing tax forms, and finding other financial resources. For Merrill Lynch, Common Knowledge managed training and message and materials development for reaching new 401(k) investors,

Susan’s organization is flexible: It can staff up or use interns if necessary. She describes herself as a generalist. “I loved economics and art history equally at the University of Michigan,” she says.

She feels that her work with Common Knowledge is far from finished. She loves learning about new fields and working with organizations that are committed to helping people improve their quality of life.

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Susan Clark ’76 (foreground) with a working group including target audience members 9 Milton Magazine

Sally Bowles ’56 Sally Bowles has lived her remarkable professional life at the intersection of big, bold ideas that would affect millions of people, and the challenge of implementation. She has focused on making change happen. She was a member of the small team that worked with Sargent Shriver to develop the Peace Corps. She worked with John Lindsay to decentralize New York City public schools. She was the director of Medicaid and then in charge of welfare programs for the state of Connecticut. Sally left the public sector in 1990 to assist the president of the Rockefeller Foundation on a major initiative with Nelson Mandela in South Africa and later served as a consultant to the Rockefeller Foundation on its $45 million program to build international leadership concerning the global environment and sustainable development. She now is a director of the Charles & Helen Schwab Foundation and a consultant to several national nonprofits. Prior to that, she was president of the Emily Hall Tremaine Foundation. The Tremaine Foundation initiated the Coordinated Campaign for Learning Disabilities, the first national public-education campaign to inform Americans about learning disabilities. Sally has prolonged and enriched the legacy of public service established by her family.

“When I entered Milton, we had been living in India for two years; my father (Chester Bowles) was President Truman’s ambassador to India, right after Indian independence. Living there at that time was a pivotal experience. My father had left the business world in his mid-thirties to take up public service; so for me, it was public sector all the way.

“He was governor of Connecticut when I was 10, ambassador when I was 12, and he went on to serve in Congress.

I decided early on against running for elected office; I thought that what you had to do to get elected sort of distracted you from the things you cared about getting done.

“I have always been most gratified working at the junction of vision and implementation. There are lots of great ideas lining the shelves. My strong suit has been not so much developing or researching more ideas as taking some of the good ones off the shelf and making them useful for people.

I particularly like start-ups, when all of the big, basic questions have to be asked and answered—clarifying goals, picking plausible strategies, determining how the organization will be structured, financed and staffed.

“Six people began building the Peace Corps, and there were many huge choices that were made by brilliant people, talking to one another about volunteers’ roles, and selection, and training—so many other things. Watching that organization grow was a fabulous education. Then Kennedy died, and I was looking around for the next ‘new frontier.’

I thought it had to be John Lindsay in New York City.

“That was hardly a start-up, but decentralizing the schools was a huge change in a large-scale operation. It was an entirely new experience to work with an established, highly regulated bureaucracy with lots of history [New York City school system, Connecticut Medicaid, then Connecticut AFDC]. You had to ask the question: ‘How do you change without starting over?’ That’s a whole different set of challenges. I gravitate to the early stages of implementing an important, big idea.

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Making good ideas useful Beginning with building the Peace Corps

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“I’ve sometimes thought that the period when I’m at my best is when I know the least. That’s when you ask dumb questions, but they’re often good questions, because you’re not inhibited by what you know.

with my values, is large in scope, and is important. All along, I found I thrived on new situations, new environments, new relationships, and on learning an entirely new field.

“I think lots of people underestimate the power of their generic capacities; they shortchange their own native abilities, their intuition, their gut, their questions. I’ve said to them, ‘Now hold on, vision doesn’t spring from a spreadsheet; analysis only gets you so far.’ You need judgment, good antennae—to know why something is important, who cares about making a change, and who cares about the status quo. And you need to get into the shoes of other people without losing your own grounding. That’s not manipulative; it informs the process.

“My friend Peter Goldmark, who also worked with John Lindsay and had led such large governmental organizations as the welfare department in Massachusetts and the New York/New Jersey Port Authority, was then head of the Rockefeller Foundation. Lots of people can’t see the wider applicability of government experience or that the challenges are as tough as any in the private sector. It was fortunate that he did, and that he invited me to help him in South Africa.

“It’s too bad when the emphasis on higher degrees and specialization overshadows the importance of basic liberal arts.

That process of how you grow at school is so mysterious— which inherent capacities you brought and which were cultivated once you got there.

“I decided to leave government in 1990 (I’d been there since 1960), to see how it would be in a less regulated environment. I thought about foundations, where you could stand back, identify and seize opportunities to be the bridge, to fill the gap between an idea and its implementation. I realized that I am not fussy about subject matter— education, health care, another field—as long as it squares

“The foundation world enables important change but can be pretty far removed from implementation. I have to watch out, because many times I’d rather be the grantee, making change happen, working where the tough and interesting decisions have to be made.

“I figured out when I was a child that the person who had the most influence in my father’s daily work was his secretary. I didn’t care about title. I wanted four things: to work with strong people I respect, to be engaged with big ideas, to have influence, and to have fun. For my first job out of college, I decided to work for a congressman rather than a senator, because the office would be smaller, and I’d be exposed to the whole thing. That began a pattern of working with the whole picture.”

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Nelson Mandela, Sally Bowles ’56 and Oliver Tambo, African National Congress president at the time. London, 1990.

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P O L I T I C A L

A C T I V I S M

“GET ENGAGED” Deval Patrick, Milton Academy Class of 1974, was inaugurated as the 71st Governor of Massachusetts on January 4, 2007.

He is Milton Academy’s first governor; he is the state’s first, and the nation’s second, African-American governor.

While his leadership has already earned historic markers, Deval’s journey to office broke new political ground as well.

Marked by creativity and innovation, dogged optimism, and relentless grass-roots work, Deval and his core campaign staff galvanized a remarkably diverse group of volunteers and supporters.

Pundits across the country marveled that a candidate with little name recognition, little money, and (in the early days) a message from the party regulars that he should wait his turn (and his turn was not now) could come up with the elements of success. It was 56 percent worth of success, in a race that included the now-typical retinue of screened insults and innuendoes.

His themes struck home: • “I’ve learned how to build bridges across different worlds; how to take the time to listen, as I have to people all over this state; and how not to put people in an ideological box, just as I insist that you not put me in one. And I’ve learned one other thing: I’ve learned about the power of hope, the power of saying, ‘yes, we can.’”

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• “Standing on the brink of an uncertain future, with all the challenges we face today in Massachusetts, all I know how to do is to hope for the best and work for it.”

• “What we need today is a spirit of active collaboration, between government, business, universities, nonprofits, community groups. We need a new spirit of civic responsibility, less about party politics and more about problem solving. And we had better start by being clear-eyed and candid about our challenges—and creative and collaborative in finding solutions. ” • “Our cause succeeds only if you see this not as my campaign, but as yours. Not just my chance to be governor, but yours to rebuild our community, to reclaim your stake in your neighbors’ dreams and struggles as well as your own.”

While great numbers of Miltonians were volunteers, donors, partisans and celebrants, three Milton graduates of the ’90s were staffers who put their life plans on hold and took up crucial roles at the core of the campaign. Two knew Deval well from their student days—Doug Chavez and Steven Clarke, both Class of 1993; Doug and Steven were, early and often, among the many people—friends and family, professional colleagues, political cognoscenti—with whom Deval tested the idea of running for office. The third, Janet Lin, Class of 1997, was already a local legend, a community organizer and affordable housing advocate, with tested skills and the courage to take on challenges.

a government so weak that people had nothing; its weakness was the source of many problems, especially a weak economy without the capacity to grow. He saw a direct connection between a weak government and the lack of progress people were experiencing.

Three who made a difference Steven Clarke ’93 “I had committed to a Ph.D. program in political science and was on my way to California,” Steven said. “Doug and I had been talking with Deval about his candidacy, and after he announced, he asked me to be part of the team to get him started.”

Steven had completed a master’s in architecture at Columbia and was working in New York, but several important experiences working in Africa—in Namibia, Ghana, and Tanzania—led him to want to add policy development to his hands-on architectural skills.

“I have known Deval and Diane [Patrick] since my Milton years, and have always admired their compassion for others and sharp minds. They took Doug, me, and our other friends under their wings and have been like parents to us ever since,” says Steven. “I knew that if enough people had access to Deval, he would succeed.

Most of the staff recognized that the issue was access; Deval’s personal charisma and ideas about policy were a winning combination. I wanted to help.”

Steven deferred Stanford for one year, joined the campaign, and served as deputy finance director (although the campaign portfolios for all the staff were much broader than the title indicated) for a critical eight months; even after he joined his girlfriend, who had preceded him to California, he stayed involved in the campaign and worked on fund raising in San Francisco.

Doug Chavez ’93, left, and Steven Clarke ’93, right, with a Deval Patrick supporter, Anne Umphrey

Governor Deval Patrick ’74, Doug Chavez ’93, Senator Barack Obama, and Massachusetts Lieutenant Governor Timothy Murray

“Deval’s finance director, Liz Morningstar (wife of Tim Morningstar, Milton Academy ’93), taught me everything about our viral fund raising strategy and was a great mentor and colleague—she is, in short, a fundraising genius. Liz fostered camaraderie amongst the finance staff that was essential to meeting the challenges of grassroots fund raising. We grew into a tight team that grew even tighter and more effective with the addition of Janet [Lin], who was a joy to work with.

“Building from the few people who agreed to host the first fund-raisers, we worked with those who surfaced and were then willing to hold their own events. I spent time on fund-raising strategy and on calendaring out the milestones. I learned a lot and was happy that the fund-raising strategy complemented the overall campaign strategy,” says Steven.

“Deval made a personal commitment to run the campaign in a certain way. He wanted direct connection to the voting population—as opposed to trying to figure out what people were looking for and talking to that,” Steven explained. “I felt, along with Deval and other people in his personal circles, disappointed with the state’s trajectory. We heard people complain about how distant government felt from the people it served.

“Deval stayed true to his values, many of which he attributed to his education and his life experiences. He had learned that government could play a significant role in people’s lives, and he wanted people to re-engage in government. Deval was in Sudan after Harvard, and what he saw was emblematic of a developing country:

“Deval came from a background of civil rights activism; my parents were active in that, too. That movement utilized people, citizens; people changed government and changed lives. Lately, we have seen dramatic examples of incompetence in government, like after Hurricane Katrina—government by cronies, inattentive to people’s needs. Deval was interested in changing that.

“To his immense credit, Deval refused the sound bite technique. He was adamant and diligent about making sure issues were not dumbed down or oversimplified.

His was less ideological than most races in the nation. He elevated the dialogue and focused on the problem. His supporters grew steadily over time. There were Republicans for Deval—all kinds of people for Deval. Many of the people in his campaign were not career political people.

“The people I’ve met here in California are very interested in this campaign; it was one of the most grass-roots campaigns in the history of Massachusetts. People were coming forward who were displeased with the direction of the state. For me, that’s important, to see people making decisions where the party affiliation is less important, and they’re paying more attention to issues. I ended up with tremendous respect for the amount of work and sacrifice that people who run for office go through. It was fascinating to see how much power is involved in the machinations of a state.”

Doug Chavez ’93 Back in New York, catching up on sleep after a campaign’s worth of deprivation, Doug said that the full historic importance of the election gradually dawned on him.

He found that Black Entertainment Television had named Deval one of five finalists for person of the year in 2006; a professor at Long Island University, where Doug’s sister is a student, asked Doug to speak to his political science class; and he was asked to speak on a New York radio program as well.

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Reflection is a luxury that requires some distance, and Doug was immersed in Deval’s candidacy from when it was merely an idea to when he became governorelect. “It’s hard to fund raise for someone who hasn’t officially declared yet,” Doug remembers. He did, however, and then left his job as a financial analyst with Sean John Menswear to work with other members of the earliest campaign team.

Doug was the utility infielder, with specialty areas that included connecting with and rallying minority and religious constituencies, but which also included fund raising—the task he found most difficult— especially after Steven transitioned to California.

“At the beginning of the campaign, I worked on getting the minority community behind Deval,” Doug says. “I’d been away from Massachusetts for 11 years, but I started meeting with political activists and community leaders. One of Deval’s major challenges was lack of name recognition; the other was lack of money.”

Doug had worked hard during the Kerry campaign, registering Latino voters in Philadelphia and Allentown, Pennsylvania.

“My number one goal is to improve the Latino community in this country,” Doug makes clear. The Latino community in Massachusetts didn’t know Doug: “‘You’re a New Yorker,’ they said,” Doug recalls.

“But I didn’t have any baggage, either.

Why should Latinos care? Latinos have been ignored by Democrats, because Democrats think they have us, and courted

by Republicans, who forget about us as soon as they win.”

Doug found the people he met tired of Romney and hungry for fresh air—a change. With the emotional power of personal experience, Doug introduced Deval to them: “Deval was a father to me, a mentor to me, he was hard on me. He cares about everyone. He cares about justice— he’s proved that in his work. He isn’t perfect, but he’s amazing, brilliant, the kind of person any state and this country needs.”

The June 2005 “issues convention” of delegates was the beginning of the breakthrough in name recognition. “Campaign leaders Nancy Stoleberg and John Walsh did a great job getting political activists from around the state to know Deval,”

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Doug claims. “We already had hundreds of student volunteers and campaign leaders, and those two had them all wear neon green tee shirts with Deval Patrick across the front. They were everywhere”; Doug says, “they were the buzz. Deval’s speech was electrifying. By the end of it the whole convention was screaming with him ‘Yes, we can.’”

The campaign viewed its flotilla of college interns as a key resource, and made efforts to make sure they were valued and felt like a part of something big, including setting up speakers for them, like Michael Dukakis. They put the students to work on visibility, at intersections, on bridges, in centers of towns. “We were a year and a half away from an election, and still they were out there,” says Doug. “Nancy and John wanted to build name recognition, and they were right. Deval has always been great at getting skilled people around him.”

People were energized; still, the summer of 2005, particularly September, was difficult: Spending threatened to outpace fundraising. Money eventually began to come in and the campaign was able to open satellite offices in Dorchester and in Springfield, which has a large community of color. “That made it easier for me to bring in volunteers of color,” Doug says.

“Although some came, going to the main headquarters in Charlestown was a challenge for many.”

After the convention, Doug added two other constituencies to his list: union activists (not the elected leaders) and the faith community (clerics). “I don’t agree with Deval on this or on that,” Doug says they responded, “but overall I like what he says.” He continued with the Latino communities, especially in Worcester, Lawrence and Fall River, and worked with the African-American community, too.

“Many white progressive liberals, and even some white conservatives, were onboard right away,” Doug remembers. “It took the African-Americans and Latinos longer.

African-Americans didn’t know him and asked, like others, what Deval had done for them. They were skeptical that the white community would elect a black governor.

My answer to them was ‘we need your help. Get involved.’”

“‘Go to the Web site,’ I said, ‘go to an event; meet the man; give him a chance.’”

Deval, John Walsh and strategist Doug Rubin were responsible for the campaign tone; race wasn’t going to be the central issue. “Deval was glad when someone in the audience brought the race question up,” Doug recalls. “‘I am a black man,’ he would say. ‘If people have a problem with that, it’s their problem, not my problem.’”

Between the primary and the general election, Doug focused on the Spanish-speaking media, newspapers and radio stations, going on for interviews after an initial interview with Deval. “Almost all endorsed Deval—Siglo 21, El Planeta, El Vocero,” says Doug. El Mundo, a traditionally conservative paper, did not officially endorse him, but clearly stated that the Republican candidate did not deserve the Latino community’s vote.

“Besides getting good, smart people around him, Deval is a great listener,” according to Doug. “Being a great listener is the key to being a great leader. He listens to everyone. Usually I like to talk—at a meeting, or any kind of gathering—but now I find myself listening a lot more, and I learn so much. I was humbled by the whole experience.”

Janet Lin ’97 “Well, I’m excited about this job and terrified, but the two people I work for are extraordinary leaders and mentors, Dan O’Connell and Deval Patrick,” says Janet Lin. She’s in her second day as chief of staff for Mr. O’Connell, the newly appointed secretary of housing and economic development.

“The governor has elevated the status of affordable housing and economic development by combining them both in this new secretariat. Labor and workforce issues, typically folded in to housing and economic development, are another secretariat.

This is revolutionary thinking and structure, to define economic development in terms of the quality of life that skilled workers in Massachusetts should expect, including being able to afford housing,” Janet explains.

“I staffed fund-raisers along with Steven Clarke, and people would ask, ‘What are you going to do about population loss in Massachusetts?’ This secretariat is a direct response to that concern.

“Going to fund-raisers, I used to think that the purpose of the question-andanswer session was that people who came deserved to have their questions answered.

Then I realized that this exchange was much more about an approach to governance.”

Janet was more than an observer of political activism when she was asked to join the Patrick campaign. At Brown she majored both in history and computer science, and began her work life first at Raytheon and then on an emerging technology at a start-up hatched in an MIT lab.

The daughter of two immigrants, Janet had always been serious about her grades—both at Milton and Brown—but she says “your outside-of-class life is almost more important; that’s where you find out who you are, where you define yourself as distinct from your peers.” She knew that her life would always involve activism, and while working she always volunteered. She was a community organizer working on affordable housing, tenants’ organizations, and youth activities.

Over time she began to feel like that work should be her full-time work.

When Sam Yoon, an affordable housing advocate and developer in Chinatown, decided to run for the Boston City Council—the first Asian-American to run for office in Boston—Janet volunteered for his campaign. After a month, Councilor Yoon asked Janet to be his campaign manager. “Thrilled and honored,” Janet agreed to be his interim until he found an experienced campaign manager.

Not surprisingly, Janet’s résumé attracted the attention of Liz Morningstar, the Patrick campaign’s finance director, who asked Janet to join the staff as deputy finance director in the fall of 2005. “At the time, I thought I had sacrificed a year of career building to work for Sam Yoon, and now I needed to think about sacrificing again.

On the other hand, [Deval] is the same guy that had so excited and inspired me at Milton, when I was a freshman and he was appointed assistant attorney general.

“When I began, Steven Clarke and Liz Morningstar were my mentors; they taught me so much. The campaign really thought, without any polls or research, that Deval would do well with female voters.

We all had portfolios beyond fund raising, and I was asked to build the ‘women for Deval’ constituency. I worked closely with Diane Patrick to do that, and she was remarkable. I am so taken with Diane.

Building this group was new terrain for both of us, and I really enjoyed that work with her. She and Deval have a model partnership.

“During the campaign, the governor always wanted to know, from people, ‘What is on your mind?’ He led us by example. His staff understood that they were extensions of him, of his approach.

We had to be excellent listeners. The way we interacted with people had to meet his own high standards.”

Milton election victories beyond Massachusetts Harold Janeway, Milton Academy Class of 1954, former president of the board of trustees, and now trustee emeritus, was elected to the New Hampshire Senate on November 7, beating the three-term incumbent 58 percent to 42 percent. Harold joins Martha Fuller Clark ’60 and Peter Burling ’63 in the 24-person body.

“Three Milties” in the Granite State Senate “may well be something of a record,” as Harold noted.

“I believe that we must bring balance to the New Hampshire Senate to make the legislature work for the people of the state,” Harold said during his campaign. “Governor Lynch’s nonpartisan approach deserves and requires a Senate that will work collaboratively to do what is best for New Hampshire. As your senator, I will make my top priorities affordable and accessible health care, a superior education system, fiscal discipline, and a sustainable environment.”

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“Sam Yoon had popped up on Deval’s radar scan, apparently, because he contributed to the campaign. Later, when I was about to go to the issues convention in June 2005, as a delegate, Deval made a call to introduce himself to me as a candidate.”

Globe Photo/Wiqan Ang

She learned the Boston political landscape quickly and realized that the black hole in Councilor Yoon’s campaign organization was fund raising. “There’s a direct correlation between dollars and success; you can’t avoid it,” Janet says. “Well, that’s how I learned to be a grass-roots fund-raiser. The donation cap was $500, so you had to have a broad reach to achieve volume. I realized that I had to set up and work with multiple, and often disparate, constituencies if we were going to raise the funds we needed.

Dan O’Connell, Massachusetts secretary of housing and economic development, and his chief of staff, Janet Lin ’97, greeting office workers right after the gubernatorial inauguration.

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S E R V I C E

OUR CLIENTS ARE AMONG THE

HARDEST TO SERVE Randy Quezada ’97 Nearly 35,000 individuals in New York City are homeless. That number represents 23 percent fewer children and 10 percent fewer families than in June 2004 when Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg announced his commitment to reducing the number of homeless New Yorkers by two-thirds in five years (2009). Just this past December, Robert V. Hess, commissioner of the city’s Department of Homeless Services (DHS), announced an important initiative geared toward achievement of the mayor’s goal: “In an historic agreement between the City of New York and the Veterans Administration to help end veteran homelessness in the City…the City will place 100 veterans into permanent housing in 100 days. Veterans Affairs and the City will also convene a Task Force that will report back in 100 days with a strategic plan to end veteran homelessness in New York City.”

As special assistant to Commissioner Hess, Randy’s job is to “make sure what the Commissioner wants to happen, happens.” From policy and program development to implementation of new strategies and initiatives, Randy “connects the dots.”

His challenge is to achieve real progress through “informal” management; that is, to get things done through DHS staffers who actually report to other leaders, such as deputy and assistant commissioners of the agency.

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DHS, like similar agencies in other cities, strives to “overcome” homelessness, a more comprehensive and strategy-dependent goal than managing homelessness through the provision of short-term, emergency shelter. Randy’s work involves management, qualitative analysis, and policy recommendation and formation. Recently he has been particularly involved in two special projects: the first is to end encampments on the city’s streets by moving homeless individuals into shelters or more suitable housing alternatives; the second is the campaign focused on homeless veterans. In the former case, an interagency task force meets regularly to coordinate how best to address the issues presented by encampments and their take-down while ensuring that clients are engaged and placed in safe and decent housing.

Before he came to DHS, Randy worked on immigration issues, such as immigrants’ voting rights, where the subjects of his activism and advocacy were policy-makers and the public at large. Now he must use the same skills to motivate DHS staff, rally them around agency and program goals, and motivate them to act outside of wellestablished comfort zones in order to meet new challenges.

“This public service work does not attract much press attention but I feel strongly that we must be there—in the trenches with our clients who are poor and homeless or at risk of losing their home,” Randy says. “The daunting social issues that they must struggle with on a daily basis make them the most challenging population to serve.

ted to public service. “Public service work is challenging—it’s important work and it is good work,” he says. Randy’s commitment grew out of his experience with Prep for Prep and was reinforced at Milton, he said, “where the emphasis was on how you fit into a community, and what you bring to the community to make it a better place.

“I’ve always envisioned a career in the public sector as giving back, taking care of others and not simply myself. I’ve always been very fortunate. School came easier to me than to some others and I had lots of opportunities. That fueled my desire to provide opportunities to people less fortunate than I am and to make sure that communities were not marginalized as a result of poverty and homelessness.”

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“DHS’ mission is two-pronged: to prevent homelessness wherever possible and provide short-term emergency shelter and rehousing whenever needed. On any given night we shelter 35,000 people. They have fallen off an unstable platform and require emergency shelter. We are about what it will take to get them back on their feet.

“I believe DHS is on the right track with respect to priorities; we’re working hard to meet the mayor’s goal of reducing homelessness by two-thirds by 2009. To meet this mandate, the agency is developing new strategies and new initiatives. We are working closely with many other city agencies to achieve this goal and to ensure the best outcome for our clients, which is permanent housing.”

Randy Quezada ’97

How do ideas surface? Ideas come from management, and most managers move up through the ranks. Randy is happy to be among the “idea people,” with direct access to DHS executives who are going to listen to his ideas. In fact, Randy’s main reason for leaving his prior position with a nonprofit organization was that the issues he worked on were not a priority for that organization.

Randy majored in philosophy and political science at Penn. He was a New York Urban Fellow and earned a master’s degree in public policy at the Kennedy School of Government [at Harvard University]. He has always been commit-

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S E R V I C E

From Distressed Neighborhoods, Building Healthy Communities

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Kate Grossman Sutliff ’91 Director of Housing, LISC New York

Jennie Bartlett ’00 Assistant Program Officer, Office of the Chief Operating Officer, LISC Washington, D.C. Local Initiatives Support Corporation (LISC) has generated $7.1 billion in community building investments, which in turn leveraged $16.7 billion in total development. These funds have helped build or rehabilitate 196,000 affordable homes and nearly 27 million square feet of retail, community and education space across the country.

In New York, Kate works with LISC where the concept was born After the nation viewed the 1977 devastation and arson in the South Bronx, the need to regenerate the country’s poorest urban neighborhoods was brought into urgent focus. To support the resident-led community groups on the frontlines combating the increasing blight, the Ford Foundation helped found a new type of organization in 1979: the Local Initiatives Support Corporation, more commonly known as LISC. While LISC began as a very targeted effort to help combat the major abandonment, arson, crime and disinvestment that was plaguing the South Bronx in the 1960s and ’70s, it has since grown into a national leader in community development, working in both urban and rural locations around the country. Today, LISC brings a holistic view to community development, helping transform distressed neighborhoods into healthy communities where people have access to affordable homes, jobs, reliable places to shop, and highquality schools.

New York City CDCs have faced a remarkable shift in the development landscape over the years, according to Kate. In the 1980s, the city had a huge inventory of taxforeclosed properties, which they decided to sell to community developers for one dollar, and in exchange, the developer built affordable homes and apartments. Due to the huge success of the program, this lowcost inventory is now nearly depleted, and new challenges abound. “It’s hard enough to develop affordable housing with today’s rising construction costs; imagine adding New York City’s high acquisition prices to the cost of development,” Kate says.

“In today’s environment, CDCs have to be extremely entrepreneurial,” explains Kate.

“The Fifth Avenue Committee, a Brooklyn CDC we work with, recently launched an initiative to build affordable housing in the underutilized space on top of public libraries. This innovative approach solves two problems at once. Outdated and deteriorating libraries are modernized and rejuvenated, and much-needed affordable housing is brought to a neighborhood where space for new housing is at a premium. Putting a project like this together requires a whole new approach to doing business; CDCs are redefining as they adapt to this changing environment.”

Kate started at LISC as a community development officer (CDO), responsible for a broad portfolio of CDCs, working on whatever deals her CDCs were developing.

“You build a broader array of skills working with multiple partners on a wide variety of projects—an approach that also helps keep you interested and challenged day-to-day. This structure also benefits the CDCs; with a single point person, a group gets a true advocate for its organization.”

Currently, as director of housing, Kate oversees the CDOs and her primary focus has shifted to management: training, troubleshooting, supervising, as well as spending time outside the office making sure the work CDCs are doing is visible.

Kate’s path to LISC led her through several different states and disciplines. After she graduated from Amherst College, she moved to San Francisco and began work at the Federal Reserve Bank. She then earned her MBA at Wharton, which was “a great complement to my liberal arts education,” Kate says. “I’ve always been committed to public interest work, but believe that nonprofits should function just as entrepreneurially, creatively, and efficiently as for-profit companies, with the same level of accountability to their stakeholders.”

After graduating, Kate moved to New York to continue work she had started with Edison Schools during the previous summer—helping open a charter school on the South Side of Chicago, and leading Edison’s national principal-recruitment efforts. From Edison, Kate joined LISC, where she has been for the past five and a half years. She continues her commitment to bringing quality education to lowincome communities by serving on the board of trustees of the Harlem Link Charter School.

“I am wired to seek out challenges in my work, and this work is certainly challenging,” Kate notes. “A job like this feeds all parts of me. I love numbers, and I get to spend a lot of time on financial modeling and underwriting. Relationship building is another critical facet of each day, and I enjoy the strong team environment here at LISC. Finally, I’m constantly energized by being part of the citywide effort to strengthen New York City’s most vulnerable families and communities.”

Kate Grossman Sutliff ’91 is the director of housing at LISC’s New York City office, which works with community development corporations (CDCs) in low-income neighborhoods primarily in Brooklyn, Harlem and the South Bronx. “CDCs typically begin as local, grass-roots, nonprofit organizations,” says Kate, “that were willing to step up and take responsibility for advocating for local residents and rebuilding their neighborhoods.”

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In Washington, Jennie concentrates on LISC’s strategic direction Over its 25-year history, LISC has opened 32 offices in cities across the country. At its national center in Washington, D.C., Jennie Bartlett ’00 focuses on the broad organizational view of this community development corporation.

“For the last two and a half years my work has involved supporting and strengthening our local offices,” Jennie explains, “which includes brokering partnerships, working with them on developing their program plans, and managing internal processes to facilitate an efficient and fluid relationship between local operations and national oversight.”

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During her senior year at Trinity College (Hartford, Connecticut)—where she designed a major in international urban studies with a minor in architecture— Jennie took a community organizing class, through which she discovered LISC. She was drawn to the organization’s mission and its work in Hartford on homeownership and community development.

Working with LISC as an intern, she focused her senior thesis on measuring the impact of homeownership on the revitalization of two Hartford neighborhoods.

After graduation, she stayed with LISC at the national level.

Since 2005, Jennie has worked at a corporate-wide strategic plan. “Assessing the history of the company over its 25 years of existence—determining what’s still rele-

vant, how the environment has changed, how to add more value—has been an incredible experience,” she says. LISC’s internal committee began with big questions: Can we achieve something locally when economic forces are increasingly regional, national and international? Can community development corporations (CDCs) accomplish something significant enough to affect the fundamentals of local life?

The metrics of success (noted at the start of this article) measure the organization’s success. “We saw how far we’d come, but we needed to address whether we could sustain a lasting impact, rather than just injecting short-term support,” Jennie says.

“We found that we can achieve a lasting impact, but the question remains, ‘How do we know these benefits will continue to grow?’”

tion.” An example of this comprehensive development is in LISC’s affiliation with the National Football League Grassroots Program, which has donated $2.5 million so that 16 cities around the country— from Seattle, Washington, to Jacksonville, Florida, to Brookline, Massachusetts—can build or improve upon existing community football fields.

“LISC is best at organizing and building partnerships at the local level,” Jennie says, “and we bring to the table our ability to provide national loan capital to help fund local initiatives. Choosing 11 pilot sites for the new sustainable plan was complicated, but we worked hard to choose the local offices that were already engaged in comprehensive community development and could successfully achieve the sustainable communities goals in five years. One of the greatest challenges of initiating the strategic plan is communicating its message and its vision, both nationally and locally. I am excited to be a part of this ongoing process.”

Jennie’s path to LISC started with Milton.

“I left Milton with the idea that I was charged with being an active, contributing member of society. Milton really instilled a sense of obligation in me, as well as a sense of capability.

“Our work at LISC demands fluency in a range of components—real estate, community development, finance, partnership building, strategic management. I love that this work combines so many fields of study and areas of interest. LISC has extremely high intellectual capital; similar to my experience at Milton, the company brings together smart, diverse, socially aware people who are dedicated to a mission. Addressing, on a daily basis, the economic and social dilemma of distressed urban and rural communities has been a profoundly grounding and educational experience.”

Erin Hoodlet

Jennie Bartlett ’00

From these discussions emerged five program objectives that, taken together, contribute to comprehensive community health and sustainability: expanding capital investment in housing and other real estate; increasing family income and wealth; stimulating economic activity— connecting to regional economy; improving access to quality education; and supporting healthy environments and lifestyles.

“We began as an affordable housing company, so we don’t want to move too far from our core competency, but we don’t want to limit ourselves either,” Jennie explains. “You need more than affordable housing to build and sustain a thriving community. You need to develop the entire neighborhood—environmental and childcare development, business and educa-

“THE ARC”: Brand-new community facility in Northeast Washington, D.C., that includes a full theatre stadium, dance studio, music and arts rooms, and rental space for CDCs (among other things); supported by Washington, D.C., LISC. 21

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Stewardship of the Earth: A Matter of Fairness and Responsibility

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Theo Spencer ’84 “People tend to think of global warming as a huge, overwhelming problem. The truth is that there are common-sense solutions that we can adopt to solve the problem—solutions that are both good for the economy and good for the health of our environment. We need to think and act optimistically. We need to look toward new technologies rather than relying on the old ones.”

The National Resources Defense Council (NRDC) defines its work as maintaining the integrity of nature’s resources. It “seeks to establish sustainability and good stewardship of the earth as central ethical imperatives of human society.”

This sense of responsibility for the earth drew Theo Spencer ’84 to work with NRDC’s Climate Center, one of the organization’s several program areas. The Climate Center works to establish policies within the United States that help diminish the major causes of global warming.

Headquartered in New York, with other main offices in Washington, D.C., Los Angeles, San Francisco, Chicago, and Beijing, the NRDC and its Climate Center advocates passing legislation that would reduce emission of heat-trapping gases such as carbon dioxide (CO2). One part of an emissions policy promoting global warming solutions is a cap-and-trade system. It creates a financial incentive for cleaning up dirty power plants and manufacturing emission-reducing vehicles by appointing a cost to polluting.

“One of my focuses has been on New York State vehicle laws,” Theo explains. “To reduce emissions, I’ve worked to enact the California tailpipe CO2 standards and make them apply in New York. Recently, my focus has been mainly on the interior West—states like New Mexico, Colorado,

power plants are the single largest cause of global warming pollution in the United States. I am spending time speaking with local officials and other environmental groups to fight the building of these plants. For my work in the interior West, I work with governors’ offices, state agencies, and other interest groups.”

Theo Spencer ’84

Montana, Arizona, Nevada—and I am working on clean energy policies in those areas as well.”

Before Theo joined the NRDC, he studied journalism and wrote for various newspapers and magazines, including Fortune.

During that time, he served on the board of the New York State Environmental Group. “As I became more interested in this, I became less interested in my other work,” Theo says. He left his job at Fortune the same time that the NRDC was given a large gift allowing them to start a new program area focused exclusively on global warming. Theo began by handling communications for the organization, but made his way to the campaign and policy work full-time, where his passion is.

“I got into this work not because I am out camping all the time, but out of a sense of justice and injustice,” Theo explains.

“People are doing things to the environment that are just outrageous. It’s an issue of fairness and responsibility. I’m not looking for everyone to be conscious of this out of altruism necessarily, but I want to make sure that people are doing what is right in a larger sense—that there are laws in place and that these laws are being followed.

“Right now I am working on fighting a proposal in Texas; TXU is looking to build 11 or so coal-fired power plants using old and highly polluting technology. Coal-fired

While tackling the larger issues that contribute to global warming, Theo points out that each of us can do our part to diminish our carbon footprints. “My advice is to buy efficient appliances, use compact fluorescent lightbulbs, pay attention to the type of car that you buy. Most importantly, pay attention to local and state politics. Be vocal about the candidates who approach the idea of energy and the environment in a responsible way.” www.nrdc.org

Lafcadio Cortesi ’79 Using the marketplace to protect boreal forests, key regulators of climate change Lafcadio Cortesi ’79 remembers spending summers during high school doing volunteer work on the behavior of temple monkeys in Nepal—an adventure that “turned [his] world on its head.” These experiences precipitated his professional life’s trajectory and purpose. For the past 20 years, Lafcadio has worked in North America and the Asia Pacific—from Indonesia to Papua, New Guinea, to Micronesia—facilitating environmental sustainability and justice.

Fascinated by the intersection of culture, ecology and economics, Lafcadio is based in the San Francisco Bay Area, where he works with Forest Ethics as the director of Boreal Markets and Solutions. Most recently he has focused on market-based approaches to transforming business models. “It’s fertile ground for growing the

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seeds of a new way of being for humans on our planet,” he explains. “I have been fortunate in planting some seeds that have blossomed over the years working with Volunteers in Asia, Greenpeace and the U.S. Agency for International Development–funded Biodiversity Support Program.”

Founded in 1994, Forest Ethics is a nonprofit environmental organization with staff in Canada, the United States and Chile. Its mission is to “protect endangered forests by transforming the paper and wood industries in North America and by supporting forest communities in the development of conservation-based economies.”

A boreal forest ecosystem, as described on Borealnet.org, is “the contiguous green belt of conifer and deciduous trees that encircles a large portion of the Northern Hemisphere. In North America, the boreal forest stretches across most of northern Canada and into Alaska. It has long been identified as one of the world’s three great forest ecosystems.” According to Lafcadio, boreal forest accounts for about 25 percent of the world’s remaining intact or roadless forest ecosystems and is one of the planet’s key regulators of global climate change.

change what they’re buying,” Lafcadio explains. The organization also teaches these corporations “how to leverage their purchases and influence into new protected areas, better forest management policies, and conservation economies in key endangered forest regions.”

Large companies such as Staples, Home Depot and Dell use these trees for paper, lumber or furniture. Victoria’s Secret, for instance, mails nearly one million catalogues each day, catalogues that are printed on paper created from the trees of this endangered area. From Forest Ethics’ perspective, this practice was a ripe opportunity for intervention. “We used public campaigning to expose the effects of [the company’s] consumption and negotiated solutions,” Lafcadio says. “We then convinced them to adopt a leadership policy

To protect boreal forest ecosystems and others like them, Forest Ethics determines which companies purchase the products that hasten the destruction of these forests.

“We run market campaigns that identify large branded customers of forest products and work collaboratively with them to

with regard to procurement. They agreed to take action and reduce consumption, to begin using 10 percent recycled fiber in their paper, and to ensure that the remaining virgin fiber does not come from ecologically significant areas that require protection.” An article in the December 7, 2006, issue of the Wall Street Journal highlighted Forest Ethics’ work on this campaign and the agreement of Limited Brands Incorporated (Victoria’s Secret’s parent company)—as well as similar agreements Forest Ethics has secured with Dell and Williams-Sonoma—to shift the catalogue industry and help it “go green.”

“If a corporation refuses to change its practices, we hold it publicly accountable— with media stories, street demonstrations, online strategies and paid media or advertisements,” Lafcadio explains. “When companies recognize their impact and take responsibility, we help them find alternatives, invent new ways of doing business and implement sound policies through our Corporate Action Program. Either way, we work to turn potential corporate adversaries into allies. Logging companies listen to their largest customers. Many of these customers, in turn, recognize that their company values, and those of their own customer base, call for demonstrating environmental and social leadership.”

To date, Forest Ethics has led initiatives that have resulted in the protection of over seven million acres of endangered forest in British Columbia and Chile. www.forestethics.org EEH

Lafcadio Cortesi ’79

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E N V I R O N M E N T

William C. Janeway Earns the 2006 Advocate Award from

Environmental Advocates of New York “…during the last decade the environmental challenges that face us have taken on an exponentially higher order of urgency and complexity. We must respond to climate change, threats to our clean water, air and health, and the loss of working farmland and open space. We need support for energy independence, stewardship of public lands, cultural institutions and urban, minority, wilderness and suburban parks and communities.”

—Willie Janeway ’81

Willie Janeway ’81 (right) explains to New York officials the need to protect ecologically important lands.

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s director of New York Government Relations for The Nature Conservancy, Willie is a powerful and respected voice on conservation issues, helping to build coalitions such as the Friends of New York’s Environment and leading, with others, the charge for state funding to protect New York’s endangered lands and waters.

His distinguished environmental career includes service as executive director of the Greenway Conservancy for the Hudson River Valley, executive director of the Albany Pine Bush Preserve Commission, and director of North Country operations for the Adirondack Mountain Club.

“Willie is, without question, one of the most impressive, successful and respected advocates

working in our state, and there is no better example of this than what was accomplished this year

by Friends of New York’s Environment under his leadership,” says Andy Beers, The Nature Conservancy of New York’s acting state director. Friends of New York’s Environment, a coalition of more than 200 organizations speaking with one voice, succeeded in persuading the Governor and State Legislature to increase the Environmental Protection Fund from $125 million to $225 million in the short span of two years. “…New York is blessed with some of the most diverse and beautiful places in North America, from the beaches of Long Island Sound, to the High Peaks of the Adirondacks and the shores of the Great Lakes.

“Because of Willie’s efforts we are all able to enjoy the natural splendor and abundant wildlife living in these remarkable areas,” says Rob Moore, executive director of Environmental Advocates and a close collaborator in the effort to increase the Environmental Protection Fund.

“He is a rare individual and someone who understands the intrinsic value of building strong coalitions.”

Environmental Advocates of New York is the state’s government watchdog, holding lawmakers and agencies accountable for enacting and enforcing laws that protect natural resources and safeguard public health. Environmental Advocates works alone and in coalitions, and has more than 7,000 individual and 130 organizational members.

The tax-exempt 501(c)(3) is also the New York affiliate of the National Wildlife Federation.

Willie Janeway is an indefatigable champion for the cause of land preservation who has earned the admiration and appreciation of his colleagues.

We are proud to honor his many accomplishments with our 2006 Advocate Award.

From the awards program, courtesy of Environmental Advocates of New York

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E D U C A T I O N

Citizen Schools

“Although we, as a country, are working toward bettering our school systems, school reform alone is not enough to lift all students. Citizen Schools is a new paradigm in the way of educating and strengthening students’ education. It enables more time for learning and the presence of more caring adults in children’s lives.” —Eric Schwarz ’79

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Co-founder and CEO of Boston-based educational program, Citizen Schools Citizen Schools began in Dorchester, Massachusetts, in 1995 with a vision of helping to improve student achievement by blending real-world learning projects and rigorous academics after school. The name comes from the idea that citizens within the community—lawyers, chefs, reporters, architects—would donate their time to working with a group of students in an apprenticeship relationship, sharing their strengths and teaching children some of the skills necessary to succeed in that particular career.

The teaching model of Citizen Schools, co-founded by Eric Schwarz ’79, took its cue from Howard Gardner of Harvard University, who described the power of apprenticeship learning in his book The Unschooled Mind. Gardner—along with John Dewey, described by Eric as “the patron saint of progressive education”— points to learning through doing as the root of great education. Eric notes that “Milton classrooms do that very well, but most students don’t get much exposure to it. At Citizen Schools we set students up with the best architects, for instance, and they have a model of success and someone who wants to share his or her knowledge.

The students have the chance to realize that math and geometry are not only important because their teachers say they are, but because they need those skills to, say, create the playground that they are actually planning and building.”

What started small, with Eric and cofounder Ned Rimer teaching journalism and firstaid, respectively, has developed into a national organization reaching over 3,000 middle-school-aged students in 15 cities across five states and engaging 2,400 volunteers. Outreach for volunteers began with Eric and Ned turning to their personal network of friends and co-workers. As the program developed, larger companies became involved as a way to support their employees. “There is a hunger in a lot of people to connect with children,” Eric says, “and many have been involved with Big Brothers, Big Sisters or some other similar organization. What we offer, though, is the

chance for mentoring with a purpose and playing to your strengths, and then passing that on to kids who are so eager to learn from you.

outside of school. Another major and constant challenge of any nonprofit organization is raising funding and cultivating partnerships.”

“The program gives students the chance to experience the joy of work and the fun in learning; it gives meaning to their academics and gives them a real-world context for learning. It provides them with aspirations, role models and a reason to work hard with an experience of success. The belief from the beginning has been focused on results, on tangible outcome gains.”

About 20 percent of Citizen Schools’ funding comes from government grants under the federal No Child Left Behind Act. The organization also receives funding from AmeriCorps and from individual and corporate donors. As the program grows, it continues to build up connections with larger corporations and supporters such as Goldman Sachs, Fidelity, the Edna McConnell Clark Foundation and Bank of America. With plans to increase the number of students served fourfold over the next five years, the organization also hopes to increase funding from $11 million last year to $35 million by 2011–12.

Although apprenticeship is a major part of the program, with each student participating in four apprenticeships each year, there is also a more traditional and comprehensive curriculum that provides homework help, study skills, tutoring, and field trips to colleges and museums. As Eric explains, the organization attracts a broad group of students—those who are really motivated, those who fall toward the middle of the pack, and those who are two to four grade levels behind where they should be. Ninety-one percent of participants are low-income.

“Low-income urban children have a 50 percent chance of graduating from high school,” Eric reports. “Yet alumni of Citizen Schools have gone on to Smith, Wesleyan, Boston College, MIT. We have four to five years’ worth of reliable data from a longitudinal study to support the success of our programs. The study compared 1,000 middle-school students involved in Citizen Schools for at least a full year against a matched comparison group of similar students of the same age.

Our students outperformed the comparison students on six out of seven academic metrics, including test scores, attendance, and promotion rates, and graduates were more than two times as likely to go on to a top-tier college preparatory high school.”

And what are the challenges of such an innovative and comprehensive program?

“Because this is a new paradigm, one of the first things we have to do is change the way people think of learning and education,” Eric says. “The common notion is that [teaching and learning] are limited to the school day and the classroom, yet there is so much room, and desire, for learning outside of the classroom. Students spend up to 80 percent of their waking hours

Citizen Schools has received several prestigious awards since its inception, including the MassINC Commonwealth Medal, three consecutive four-star ratings from Charity Navigator and, most recently, its third Social Capitalist Award from Fast Company Magazine, a partner of Monitor Group, which names organizations for donors “who want the highest possible social return for their charitable gifts.” This winter, the organization was also profiled on the front page of Education Week. www.citizenschools.org EEH

Ralph Alswang

Eric Schwarz ’79

Eric Schwarz ’79

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E D U C A T I O N

“Lights-on” in Denver after school Chris Myers ’80

Chris Myers ’80 Founder and CEO, OpenWorld Learning “The children keep exceeding our expectations of what’s possible. They keep pushing us to develop a more advanced and more challenging curriculum in order to keep up with them.”

When Chris Myers ’80 describes OpenWorld Learning, the education nonprofit that he founded seven years ago, his smile and excitement are infectious.

OpenWorld Learning (OWL) is an afterschool program for children in grades 3 through 5 that combines learning about computer programming with peer teaching. Chris launched the program “to give back for what [he] was given, by giving something important to other children.”

A scholarship student at Milton coming from a Boston elementary school, Chris observed that “At [his] previous school, concentrating on learning while dealing with the challenging social environment was difficult. At Milton the intellectual stimulation, the peer culture, and the social and emotional components of learning made it a wonderful, influential place.”

More than 500 children in the Denver Public Schools experience creativity, leadership and ownership through OWL. “I want to make the fun and challenging education that I’ve seen available for affluent children available for low-income children.” Over 80 percent of OWL students qualify for the

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federal free and reduced-price lunch program, and over 90 percent of OWL’s students are Latino, “the most appreciative group of students and parents you could ever dream up,” Chris says. “They are thirsty for knowledge, excited to learn, and grateful for an opportunity to be part of a good learning environment.”

Chris graduated from Harvard with a degree in Latin American history, eager to apply his enthusiasm for Latin American language and culture to a career. In 1989 he moved to Denver, Colorado, and began teaching elementary school, which he admits “is not a common career path for someone with a Milton and Harvard degree.”

Chris taught at the Stanridge British Primary School: a progressive private school “based in the belief that education should tap into children’s creativity and imagination and give students ownership and choices in their own learning.” Chris then taught fourth grade at a traditional, wealthy private school called Graland.

“There again,” he explains, “I was faced with the stark differences between private and public educations.” With this in mind, Chris led the establishment of the British Primary Program in the Denver Public Schools, teaching the British Primary model to Latino children in an inner-city Denver neighborhood.

While teaching, Chris was introduced to a book called Mindstorms, written by MIT professor and now OWL national advisory board member, Seymour Papert. Chris believes that the book, written in 1980, and Papert’s vision were 30 years ahead of their time. “Papert explains how personal computers can enhance the way children learn.

He writes about LOGO—the computer program that he invented to help children learn math—but also about what constitutes an ideal learning environment. I started teaching his computer programming language in my classrooms, and the children always responded.”

In June 1999, volunteering in a Boys and Girls Club computer lab that was equipped but not fully used stimulated some ideas for Chris. He began to think about a scenario where low-income children came to learn voluntarily, where he was not absorbed in discipline issues, and where he could use Papert’s model and LOGO in a computer-filled classroom.

Within six months, Chris had founded OWL and recruited Denver venture capitalist Steve Halsted as his board chair. OWL has since grown to include work in nine Denver public schools. “The program has a ‘lights-on’ effect,” Chris says. “We’re turning the lights on to all this existing infrastructure. We’re working with children 12 hours a week in school buildings without having to pay for the space, and our public school partners contribute $10,000 each year to the $40,000 operating cost. Our

pitch to foundations and corporate donors is that their dollars are being efficiently invested in leveraging existing resources.”

OWL’s teaching environment relies on discovery learning. “Few of our teachers have a background in computer programming, but they’re brave and they’re learners,” Chris says. “Our program involves making mistakes and noodling things out. Someone asked me once, ‘How do you develop a culture where the students aren’t afraid to admit they don’t know what’s going on?’ and I said, ‘Well, they see their teachers lost some of the time, too.’ But children know that a peer or adult teacher in the program can answer their questions.

“Most schools use computers as communication tools, but they don’t teach computer programming, most often because they don’t know how. We’ve learned you can teach computer programming by putting 9- and 10-year-olds in charge of the teaching, with teachers learning alongside them.

With LOGO, students invent, design, build, create, problem solve. They make mistakes throughout the process, they get error messages, they scratch their heads because what happened doesn’t match what they thought would happen, and they have to revise their theory and test something else.

“Watching our students learning from and teaching their peers is a wonderful thing for us. In selecting our student leaders we look for curiosity, determination, creativity, a love of learning, and a passion for helping others—the same qualities that employers look for, that we all look for in trying to solve the problems of our country and our world.”

With OWL thriving in nine Denver public schools, and plans to expand to 15 in 2007, the program’s leadership dreams of its becoming a national and international program. “We have a lot to do to realize that dream. We need more great leaders, great teachers and great funders, but we believe in the program, and we’re getting startling results. Our students are learning things that I wish I knew at their age. I hope that with help from our organization and others, our students will find themselves able to take advantage of other equally positive learning environments.” www.openworldlearning.org EEH

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A T

M I L T O N

Faculty Advisors Shepherd Young Strategists

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ccording to Janet Lin ’97, the 28year-old chief of staff for Massachusetts Secretary of Housing and Economic Development Dan O’Connell, activities outside of class are what help you define who you are; they help you come to an understanding of yourself as a distinct person. At Milton today, announcements and exhortations positioned to catch the passing eye crowd the walls as they always have. Add to that email conferences laden with debate, information, schedules, assignments and deadlines. Opportunities outside of class, say faculty who advise the many organizations and projects, seem to be multiplying.

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Sixteen student organizations are devoted to service, national and international political activity, and fund raising—these are apart from groups that focus on culture and identity, journalism, and the arts.

Several of the 16 include subgroups that act as clubs on their own. The twenty faculty members who advise those groups met to help describe the public life at Milton today: the students they work with, the goals students set, the challenges they encounter, and what they learn.

Advising high schoolers eager to take on (or change) the world is a specialized craft in itself and no single template works universally. Students are crossing a developmental threshold during these years.

As engaged, idealistic teenagers they encounter everything from bureaucratic red tape, sensitive political turf and lackluster response to outsized success and community exaltation.

Faculty are often amazed at the competence of even the younger students. “Some come,” says Community Service advisor Andrea Geyling, “deeply committed, eager to involve their peers, and gifted at logistics.” Then, of course, others need a lot of “support,” as Andrea gently puts it, to understand the responsibility they take on when they commit to something.

“I’m always surprised by how big and ambitiously they dream, how strategically they think,” says Ann Foster (History Department) who advises Amnesty International. Her chairs this year wanted to heighten the visibility of Amnesty and the awareness of Amnesty’s issues, which the student leaders called “abstract and somewhat distant issues for high school students to really care about.” So, building on JAMNESTY, their hugely successful

Among the faculty advisors who help guide Milton’s student organizations are (row one) Leya Tseng Jones, Dar Anastas, Christine Savini; and (row two) Joshua Emmott, Heather Flewelling, Andrea Geyling and James Mills. Missing from the photo are Sally Dey, Ann Foster, Marie-Annick Schram, Rod Skinner, David Smith and Heather Sugrue.

fund-raising concert of last spring, they proposed and pulled off “Human Rights Week” this fall, with an activity every day, ending with a Friday-night discussion with a Darfur survivor. “I’m happy when they progress from designing and selling tee shirts to holding open meetings on things like the treatment of prisoners,” Ann says, “and they do.”

So much happens through email, the faculty said, with some amazement. Connecting, explaining, organizing, assigning, marketing, signing up, reporting results— email speeds functions up, and perhaps contributes to students taking on more than they should. It’s more of a tool than a substitution for personal contact. Bell Athayu (Class III), from Thailand, sent this response to a question about the group she started:

Hello Ms. Everett, I am one of the student leaders of the Free the Children club. We started the group this year as a fund-raising club, hence our main goal this year is to fund raise for improvements in the lives of children around the world. We are officially registered as a high school chapter of Free the Children (for more information on the organization, please visit www.freethechildren.org). Right now, we have about 10–15 committed members who attend our meetings regularly on Fridays.

Our first fund-raising event is coming up this Tuesday. We will hold a sale for people to buy bags of holiday treats for themselves, friends, or teachers. We will then deliver the candy bags to people’s mailboxes the following week.

Another upcoming sale that we have scheduled is in January. We will be selling Starbucks’ bottled Frappuccinos during exam week. All of the money we raise will be donat-

ed to Free the Children and will be put towards building schools, buying school supplies, and sponsoring clean water and health care for children in Asia and Africa. We are aiming to raise $1,000 from the two fundraising events.

We also have many fund-raising events planned for the spring, such as a sticker sale and “mini swap-it.”

I hope the information was helpful. If you have any more questions about our club, please feel free to email me.

Thank you, Bell Milton’s connection with Boston is another defining feature of extracurricular activities; it changes the character of what students can do to further their interests.

The Community Service program conContinued on page 34 31

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LORAX, named for the Dr. Seuss character who “speaks for the trees,” was established in 1987 and is an environmental group working toward raising awareness of the environment in a time when these issues are especially serious for global well-being. The first to initiate organized recycling on campus, and having had members attend international environmental summits, the members of Lorax this year are hosting an environmental film series, planning a garden and compost system on west campus, and trying to eliminate Milton’s use of Styrofoam while selling mugs made from recycled plastic.

World Health Organization (WHO) club is a place for dis-

Young Republicans promotes open thought and encourages political activism, providing a haven and support network for conservatives on campus while attempting to break down political stereotypes. The group campaigned for Kerry Healey during the 2006 Massachusetts gubernatorial campaign and is now planning a fund-raiser and letter-writing campaign in support of the USO. This year the group has also raised money for Iraqi schoolchildren, the victims of the 2004 tsunami, and for a house that treats wounded soldiers.

cussion about medical issues around the globe, raising awareness about these issues and funds for people affected by them. Having donated $1,750 last year to the Mapendo Clinic in Kenya, which cares for HIV-infected refugees, Milton WHO has officially established a fund-raising bridge with the organization, donating all profits to its cause. The group has sponsored field trips to medical-related sites such as The Body World 2 exhibit at the Museum of Science, Boston, and hosted prominent speakers, including the former Hong Kong representative of WHO’s international organization.

Common Ground is a multicultural, action-oriented student association working to help Milton Academy fully embrace all of its diversity. Its underlying principle is to educate the community about ethnic, racial, religious, gender, sexual, physical, class, family and geographic differences, while celebrating the “common ground” that brings all groups together at the School.

Focusing on a particular theme each month, the group hosts speakers, discussions and a popular film series to provide a forum for open discourse. The group aims at debunking stereotypes, challenging assumptions, and involving students in social justice issues and facilitating action.

I N V O L V E D Model UN, as an organized program, began in 2003 when 12 students attended the NHSMUN conference, which is a national conference for high school students held in New York City. Since then, Model UN at Milton has grown to include about 40 students each year, who attend at least one of two conferences—the national high school conference and the Harvard Model UN conference.

The goal is to get students involved in current affairs by researching and representing a specific nation’s position on an issue such as AIDS, climate change, women in politics, or the situation in Iraq. Through preparation, discussion and debate, the students who participate in Model UN gain a more complete picture of the importance of the United Nations and difficulty of drafting resolutions, which allow each nation to maintain sovereignty while still coming to a compromise.

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Free the Children was found-

Free Tibet Club is an official

ed this year and is an officially registered chapter of the parent organization. The club began with the goal of fund raising for the well-being of children around the world, particularly in the area of education and health care. The organization is also very involved in stopping child abuse and child labor. For a recent fund-raiser, the group sold about 250 bags of chocolate truffles and candies, making nearly $700, which the group donated to Free the Children’s project in Sri Lanka.

The money will cover the expenses of building a new washroom for a school in the Ampara District in Sri Lanka, where 40 schools were destroyed by the tsunami in 2004. Any remaining money will buy backpacks full of school supplies for 10 students.

The group is now organizing a mini swap-it and working on the Clean Water project.

chapter of Students for a Free Tibet, a grass-roots organization that includes students from all over the world.

Milton’s chapter was officially started last year and since then has held conversations with the Asian Society to debate the Chinese occupation of Tibet and held numerous fundraisers. One such fund-raiser included selling “Freedom Bracelets”—bracelets woven with yak hair by Tibetan nuns living in exile—and “Free Tibet” tee-shirts. The money raised goes toward sponsoring a child living in Tibet.

Self-Governing Association (SGA) includes every member of the Upper School student body, a membership formalized at the Class IV Book Signing Ceremony. Its membership expresses an awareness of and responsibility for upholding all School standards. The SGA is led by Milton’s two co-head monitors and elected members of Council, representing every class, every campus house, and both boarding and day students. In addition to partaking in all student disciplinary decisions, the SGA undertakes many Schoolwide projects each year to better the School as a whole and to facilitate relations between students and the administration. This year, the SGA has successfully begun to refurbish and clean up the Student Center by challenging students on ‘Blue’ and ‘Orange’ teams to compete in a year-long cleaning competition.

Public Issues Board is a nonpartisan organization aiming to raise the level of discourse at Milton and promote student engagement of political issues on the local, national, and global scale. The board is focused on encouraging students to express their opinions of world and local news in an effective way, and it strives to meet these objectives by writing The Issue, its online newspaper; sponsoring debates about timely issues; organizing visiting speakers for its Straus Dessert series; and oganizing the bi-annual Seminar Day. The group also sponsored a mock election for students during the 2006 Massachusetts gubernatorial elections.

O N F.L.A.G. (Forward-Looking Liberal Action Group) is devoted to promoting progressive ideas and causes through discussion and action, working to educate the School community about these issues and show students how they can get involved with politics.

Stemming from Students for Kerry, the group supports and works toward electing Democratic candidates for local and national office. Spending most of the fall working on Deval Patrick’s campaign, the group is now running an environmental action campaign which includes getting compact fluorescent lightbulbs in dorms and other campus buildings; running educational meetings about bio-energy; organizing a letter-writing campaign to Governor Patrick and Senators Kerry and Kennedy about the issue; and voicing their support for environmentally friendly Milton buildings.

AIDS Board raises awareness

Habitat for Humanity was established at Milton in 2005, and though not an official Habitat campus chapter, the group does community service in keeping with the spirit of the organization. They aim not only to help build houses, but also to educate the Milton community about the causes and effects of homelessness. This year they have helped construct a home for a family in Brockton, Massachusetts, and are planning more local building projects and further fund raising to support future construction.

Members of the group have also participated in two trips to the Mississippi Gulf Coast to repair communities devastated

by Hurricane Katrina in 2005.

of AIDS and HIV and raises funds to help those affected by the disease. This year, the board raised money for orphans at the Center for Poor and Less Privileged in Lesotho, Africa, an area with the fourth-highest prevalence of HIV in the world.

For World AIDS Day the board distributed fliers, hung posters and spoke at assembly about the statistics and effects of AIDS and HIV. Future events include addressing Class IV Health classes, hosting children from Mattapan’s SPARK Center, and bringing speakers to campus.

Children for Children raises awareness within the Milton community to promote the health and education of children in underdeveloped countries. In October, the group held a “Trick or Treat for UNICEF” fund-raiser which enlisted members of the Lower, Middle and Upper School to participate in a drive collecting small change. Proceeds from this and various food sales enabled the group to donate approximately $5,000 to UNICEF at the end of December. Plans for a silent auction to benefit an underprivileged school in South Africa, known as the Christel House School, are now in process.

C A M P U S Animal Rights Club’s general goal is to educate the Milton community about issues in animal welfare, with a focus on small changes each person can make to benefit animals and promote ethical practices. The group raises money to support various animal welfare causes, including the local animal shelter. In past years they have made and sold hemp bracelets to raise money for the shelter; they were also involved in the effort to determine the number of vegetarians on campus so that dining services could plan its menu with sufficient nutritional options.

Amnesty International was

Community Service Board began serving the community in an organized fashion in the 1950s. It engages participants in responsible action for the shortand long-term well-being of the community, on campus and beyond. Through service, the program encourages respectful connections with others, personal responsibility and commitment. It invites thoughtful exploration of the issues that shape our communities, in hopes that students learn from interaction with the surrounding world. Through Milton’s Community Service program, students volunteer with 28 organizations in and around Boston including Rosie’s Place (shelter for women), the Greater Boston Food Bank, Mujeres Unidas (ESL tutoring), Special Olympics and Boston Home (for adults with multiple sclerosis).

nationally established in 1961.

Milton’s chapter is dedicated to freeing prisoners of conscience, gaining fair trials for political prisoners, and ending political killings throughout the world.

The group hosts letter-writing campaigns, discussions, and various event speakers on campus. This year’s Amnesty group focused on the Human Rights and Poverty campaigns, holding a Human Rights Week in early November that raised awareness about these issues.

Amnesty is now working on its second annual spring JAMNESTY concert, all proceeds of which go to their campaigns. The group also hosts Straus Desserts with faculty speakers and debates concerning Amnesty’s global issues.

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nects 200 students in weekly service at 28 sites, including the Milton area and Boston. Every student on the Community Service Board manages the relationships with the adults at one or two sites. That means—with Andrea Geyling’s training— they determine the site’s needs, check in periodically about how the Milton students are doing there, and help evaluate what went well and what might be changed.

Through parents, local graduates and Web sites, students find—among Boston’s riches—the speakers, experts in a field, practitioners or advocates who will come to campus to engage with students at debates, Straus Desserts, club meetings or fundraisers. “They find the speakers, they invite them, they make the arrangements, do the promoting, and then introduce them to the crowd when they come,” says Sally Dey of the History Department, advisor for students on the Public Issues Board who plan Straus Desserts.

Of course, guiding students who like to act as independent agents provides some “teaching moments” for the advisors, as well. The email that wasn’t appropriately crafted, the follow-up that wasn’t definitive, the details that might have been more helpful, the assumptions that were faulty, the conversation that needed more finesse—these are “effective” mistakes: that is, you must own them, they stick in your memory, they change how you do something the next time.

Another area that advisors watch carefully at Milton is students’ intense desire to engage each other and the adults in wrestling with the complex ideas and events of our time. The debates that surge through online conferences, whether they start in the Young Republicans conference or class conference (each Class, IV through I, has its own conference), sometimes erupt into the campus mainstream conversation. Lessons about honest dialogue, respect for others’ points of view, the effects of carelessly written opinions, understanding your role in a community: these are frequently difficult, but if handled well, by skilled teachers, coaches and student leaders, these can turn into life skills that seem rare enough in the adult world. Involved students make gains in political sensitivity and savvy, communication skills, and resilience (learning not to take everything personally).

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Students want to talk about things.

Common Ground, the group that promotes cross-cultural dialogues and activities, is running the second year of a successful film series. Students pick films that involve issues like class, gender, sexual orientation, physical ability and disability, and race—Real Women Have Curves, School Ties and Good Will Hunting. They arrange the couches in Straus to promote comfortable group viewing, thinking and discussing. They market the series, attract the group and then facilitate the conversation. Typically, 50 students participate in these Friday-night events. THIN, the award-winning film of recent visiting artist and photographer Lauren Greenfield, drew a full house.

The groups’ leaders moderate difficult conversations, and students often teach their peers more directly. Under the umbrella of the Public Issues board, a smaller group (80 students) work on the Model UN program. This group participates in three major weekend-long conferences each year. The first is at Harvard, where 2,300 students participate from around the world; the second is the New York National High School Model UN (NHSMUN), held at the UN building, and the third is a May conference in Boston, sponsored by the UN Association of Greater Boston and held at Northeastern University. Students meet nearly weekly to prepare one another for these conferences. They do research and develop position papers, which the board meets to review. Two students, Alicia Driscoll and Olivia Greene, teach the newer students techniques involved in developing excellent position papers for the model UN meetings.

In many ways, these students are like those of earlier generations: energetic, caring, and curious. They are quite different in one significant way, however. They are digital children. Unfazed by what may be unfamiliar, they know exactly how to find and use information. Part of their wiring tells them that whatever they need is within their reach, that there are many ways to think about solving problems, that there are people around the world they can see and “talk to” about anything at all. The Internet is a source of knowledge and power, and they are familiar with using both.

Students may start out ahead of faculty in technological fluency, but they have room to grow in many areas. These activities

give students a chance to get their hands dirty (literally, if they’re active in Habitat for Humanity), work side-by-side with other socioeconomic groups, witness the impact of their decisions, and learn how to reflect on what they’ve observed. Other more complex and subtle learning opportunities come their way as well. David Smith (English Department) mentions that the leaders learn to cultivate successors; Heather Flewelling (Director of Student Multicultural Programs) notes that they can learn how to generate buy-in from the rest of the community. Heather has also observed that students learn to listen to other positions, not “solely for the purpose of gaining the counterpoint. They need to understand different perspectives to design a successful strategy.”

Elected leadership has its own learning curve. Students in the Self-Governing Association find that having power is not always easy. Knowing more, being on the inside track, becoming aware of a picture bigger than most students see, has a downside. Students have to absorb flak, for instance, for not delivering on a promise, or for understanding why a promise can’t be fulfilled. They are accountable, as well, for disciplinary decisions, because they sit as equals in a committee evenly divided between faculty and students—an experience they particularly value.

If working with students in these many ways seems very time-consuming, it is.

Helping students achieve a balance between what they’d like to do, what they need to do, and what they can do, is often difficult. When students are passionate about their interests, helping them see the need to pull back from something is a tough sell. Faculty need to insist upon accountability, physical presence, and the idea that they’re not in this alone: their friends and the community depend upon them.

The dominant experience, as one faculty member put it, is “amazing relationships between students and adults all over campus.” Undertaking all these projects and programs is consistent with Milton values.

“We have a high-powered intellectual community here,” Heather sums up, “and this outside-of-class activity is a normal part of trying on identity—finding out who I am.”

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“That energy clearly paid off.”

The countless hours Milton students devoted to all aspects of campaigning proved to be a crucial force for Governor Patrick.

Tara Venkatraman and Kenzie Bok, Class I

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he students fanned out across the stadium to distribute pamphlets about littleknown gubernatorial long shot Deval Patrick. Even from across the arena, they could identify each other by the neon green tee-shirts they had received from the campaign that morning. Despite the long train rides to and from the Paul A. Tsongas arena in Lowell, the group of high school students had given up a sunny Saturday in May to work the annual Democratic State Platform Convention. They knew that, in the man who gave his speech that afternoon to a standing ovation, they had found a candidate who was an inspiration, not just an alternative. As Eliza Heath, Class II, a F.L.A.G. member who heard Deval speak

for the first time that day, reported, “Hearing Patrick speak won me over completely…When he didn’t agree with a view that someone brought up, he said so, but he also explained how he had gotten to his decision and how he planned to work with people who disagreed with him.” Zachary Schwab, Class I, agrees, saying, “After getting to know him, you feel like you can invest absolute trust in him…I hooked on to his campaign [in May 2005] because I trusted him, and he ran his campaign in the way I would have hoped he would.”

The students were all members of Forwardlooking Liberal Action Group (F.L.A.G.) of Milton Academy, the campus group founded by Tara Venkatraman, Class I, in the fall

of 2004 as Students for Kerry. Early in 2005, the group had split into subcommittees to investigate each of the potential candidates for the Massachusetts gubernatorial election in 2006. Based on an analysis of where the candidates stood on various issues, the club membership had ended up voting to back Deval Patrick. Now the Platform Convention represented F.L.A.G.’s first volunteer work for the candidate.

Over the next 18 months, the students who had volunteered at the Platform Convention, along with many other F.L.A.G. members, spent countless hours collating mailings, stuffing envelopes, and phone banking for Deval Patrick at his campaign

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headquarters in Charlestown. Their turnout on Saturdays and Sundays during the school year made them the most consistent group of student volunteers of any age, a notable achievement in a campaign fueled by youth volunteerism. Many of them heard the candidate speak on numerous occasions—at the College Democrats convention in Somerville, on the UMass Boston campus, at the Holiday Inn in Brookline—and with numerous other dignitaries, including Senator Barack Obama, Senator Ted Kennedy, and Fomer President Bill Clinton. They held signs, cheered familiar lines, and observed the subtle changes in the stump speech as the campaign wore on. Eliza remembered: “For me, the best moment on the campaign happened during my Class III year…It was rainy and there were only about 50 people there, but he spoke with as much intensity as he did later in front of thousands of people. At that point, the campaign had no money, people were talking about [the campaign] collapsing, and about half of all the student volunteering was being done by F.L.A.G. members, but Patrick spoke as if we were leading the polls no contest. I remember thinking that, even if the campaign never got out of the parking lot, my effort wasn’t being wasted.”

Some students took their support for Patrick a step further and became interns in his campaign; among them were Alicia Driscoll in the summer of 2005 and Hannah Lauber and Tina Nguyen (all Class I) in the summer of 2006. As interns, Hannah said, “we sent out hundreds of mailings, made phone calls, set up canvass packets for people from all over the state and went canvassing ourselves. We made what the campaign managers talked about a reality.”

Both the interns and the many Milton Academy volunteers had the opportunity to see a remarkable campaign take shape and to participate every step of the way. Alicia remembers that, “One of my favorite experiences on the campaign was watching one of Governor Patrick’s first televised interviews along with the other interns and getting to share my thoughts and reactions.

At that point, I really felt as though my perspective mattered.” F.L.A.G. members

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Massachusetts Governor Deval L. Patrick, Milton Academy Class of 1974

gathered signatures, sent their parents to town caucuses, staffed the polls the day of the primary, discussed the gubernatorial debates with friends and neighbors, and made final Get-Out-The-Vote phone calls on Election Day. As the grass-roots campaign grew from that small group in the parking lot to a statewide movement, so did the students’ sense of accomplishment and achievement. “It made me nervous to see so many commercials on TV for Gabrieli or Kerry [Healey], but none for Deval. But at the same time, I knew that I was part of what was keeping him in the game,” reported Zach.

Echoing Zach’s remarks, all of the students—about 30 all told—experienced elation at every Patrick success and even redoubled their efforts for a final victory as

Their turnout on Saturdays and Sundays during the school year made them the most consistent group of student volunteers of any age, a notable achievement in a campaign fueled by youth volunteerism.

the race got closer. Eliza revealed that, “My favorite campaign activity was phone banking in the last stretch of the race. Coming into a room full of mostly teenagers and college students, finding a little corner to work in, and praying that I had enough free minutes on my cell phone to keep my mom from killing me for making five hundred phone calls in one afternoon—that’s when I knew I was part of something huge.” Gail Waterhouse, Class II, also remembered the last weeks of the campaign as a highlight, saying, “The best moment of the campaign was going down to Worcester a couple weeks before the election for a rally. President Clinton and Senator Kennedy, two very inspirational speakers, were there…So many people showed up to give support to Deval Patrick and Tim Murray—I think we filled the entire Worcester DCU Center. I came away from that experience completely reenergized and ready to finish out the campaign strong.”

That energy clearly paid off. On the evening of Tuesday, November 7, 2006, several of the Milton Academy students who trickled into the Hynes Convention Center were wearing their neon green teeshirts from the 2005 Platform Convention.

Many arrived straight from headquarters; other students had volunteered to staff the Election Night event, while still others arrived directly from after-school commitments. As the group gathered in the Center of the packed convention Center and rumors that the TV news stations had called the election for Patrick began to fly, the students exchanged high-fives and hugs, feeling as though this victory was their victory. They had experienced—and contributed to—the rare case of a political underdog’s come-from-behind win. As Gail put it, “Everyone complains about how apathetic teens are toward current events, and I think that students getting involved in a gubernatorial campaign really turned heads and made people realize that what Deval had to say was important and that his ideas were innovative and exciting.”

Kenzie Bok ’07 Tara Venkatraman ’07

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Human Rights Week November 6–10, 2006 Events The Voice Mural, a public forum for individuals to speak their minds (photos, quotes, thoughts, etc.)

Tuesday Activities Period (Wigg 214): Open Discussion on Guantánamo Bay

What is Amnesty International?

Wednesday, 6:00 p.m. (Straus): Human Rights Speaker Sifa Nsengimana, Massachusetts Coordinator for the Coalition to Save Darfur; a survivor of the genocide in Rwanda Friday Activities Period (Wigg): JAMNESTY 2007 Brainstorm Friday, 7:00 p.m. (Straus): Born into Brothels: Calcutta’s Red Light Kids (http://www.kids-withcameras.org/home/)

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ill Newman-Wise, Class II, and Hanna Tonegawa, Class I, head Milton’s Amnesty International chapter, and this year put their efforts to the dual challenge of raising awareness about issues and raising the profile of the organization on campus.

Hanna Tonegawa and Will Newman-Wise

“Our main challenge is to get students to look outside their busy world, to help them understand something they’ve never experienced and can’t imagine.”

—Will Newman-Wise, Class II

great discussions,” the leaders reported.

Will and Hanna hope Human Rights Week will become an annual tradition at Milton, just as the group’s spring event, JAMNESTY, has become.

“Amnesty International is a worldwide movement of people who campaign for human rights. [Amnesty’s] work is based on careful research and on the standards agreed by the international community.

We are independent of any government, political ideology, economic interest or religion.” (www.amnesty.org)

JAMNESTY, an April outdoor music extravaganza, with student bands and performers from Milton and other schools, drew hundreds of students last year and netted $1,000 for Amnesty International’s freedom campaign. Students are working already to reach that success this spring: 75 percent of the funds raised go to Amnesty International; 25 percent seeds the Milton chapter’s activities for the following year.

Hundreds of students over the years have participated in Amnesty’s letter-writing campaigns—demonstrably effective global campaigns to alert the public to human rights abuses that put individuals or communities at risk. This year’s heads, who adopted Human Rights and Poverty as their campaign, strategized to find a more powerful way for students to connect with human rights problems.

Hanna, who is from Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts, was inspired to get to know the “outside” political world by students just ahead of her: Alice Tin (Hong Kong), Seohyung Kim (South Korea), and Laura Yeo (Canada), all Class of 2006. Will came to Milton from Singapore; in his former school, students were engaged in international concerns and he wanted to continue that.

“Why not a whole week of daily focus on human rights?” their group thought.

Amnesty’s “Human Rights Week” premiered this November and attracted plenty of participation: “new information and

Will says, “Students may think these issues are irrelevant, but they don’t realize that they’ll be the leaders making the decisions, making the choices, very soon.”

CDE

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Faculty Perspective

Self Education Education either functions as an instrument which is used to facilitate integration of the younger generation into the logic of the present system and bring about conformity or it becomes the practice of freedom, the means by which men and women deal critically and creatively with reality and discover how to participate in the transformation of the world.

and principles, as well as articulate them to an audience that often embraced an opposing view. I also learned to appreciate the conflict that exists in a place where people have different opinions or ways of seeing the world. What I didn’t recognize at the time, however, was the negative impact of the school’s pressure against my perspective.

—Paulo Freire

On October 11, 2006, Milton Academy hosted its fourth religious speaker since the 1952 Endowment for Religious Understanding had been established. I was pleased to hear that it would be Bishop John Shelby Spong, the retired bishop from the Episcopal Diocese in New Jersey. I had met Jack Spong during my academic studies at Harvard Divinity School and remembered him as decidedly controversial, yet he was also overtly faithful. He proposes a very modern understanding of the biblical tradition to correspond to our postmodern society and sensibility. Bishop Spong rejects religious fundamentalism as divisive and contrary to the core message of scripture, to love one another. The bishop’s message is one of social justice, of standing with those at the margins of society and struggling with them to guarantee that their voices are heard. While Bishop Spong illustrated the dark side of religion, expressed through violence and hurtful speech, he simultaneously asserted the optimistic ideal of religion: “Live fully, love wastefully, and be all that you can be.”

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have always believed that education is a process of questioning and that a teacher’s job is to challenge her students, widening their vision to a broader perspective, as well as deepening their awareness. Education is about acknowledging our preconceptions and allowing them to be broken down in order to reconstruct a worldview out of greater understanding. When I moved to Dallas five and a half years ago, I took this fundamental intuition about education with me. I knew Dallas was more conservative than the Cambridge I had grown accustomed to, but I also knew that I was prepared for a wholesome fight, the kind of intellectual wrangling that is native to the world of academia.

For the five years of my tenure in Dallas, I was defined over and against the culture of the school and its administration.

I was branded the “radical feminist liberal” who questioned the Bible, who criticized the patriarchal representation of God, and who identified herself as culturally Christian and spiritually Buddhist. Needless to say, all of this was unacceptable, and I quickly learned that my view of education was quite different from the school’s objectives. There is a lot to learn from being the “troublemaker” in a place. It was an opportunity for me to reflect seriously on my own values

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Bishop Spong’s visit was an early turning point for me at Milton. First, his speech was a vocalization of my own intellectual and spiritual understanding, which had been in hibernation for some significant time. Second, just listening to the Bishop’s expression of his own theology reignited my passion for theological thinking and reflection. Jack Spong’s presence on the Milton campus provided me with a certain sense of freedom—free to speak my own mind when necessary, free to bring a critical theological perspec-

Suzanne DeBuhr

tive to the Milton community, and free to fully embrace the aspects of my character, which in Dallas had been used to dismiss my observations of that community.

Bishop Spong’s presentation also catapulted me into the dynamic, open exchange of ideas that is inherent to the Milton community. Controversy tends to follow Jack Spong, and Milton was no exception. In the conversations that followed Bishop Spong’s talk, I was able to assess the current perception of religion within the Milton community. Many students were intrigued by the bishop’s talk, agreeing with his insights that the Bible must continue to be reinterpreted to have legitimacy in our modern world. In a sense, Bishop Spong’s speech was an invitation for some to rejoin the debate over Christianity in American society from both a modern and critical perspective. On the other hand, a significant group of students felt offended by the bishop’s analysis of fundamentalist Christianity. They questioned his faith and wondered if characterizing the Bible, as well as some of Christianity’s doctrinal statements, as merely symbolic, compromised his position as a representative of mainline Christianity.

Jesus’ divinity corresponded to the fulfillment of human potential. Overall, Jack Spong demonstrated for this community the meaning of engaged education—of venturing into uncharted waters, broadening our vision, and allowing discoveries to unfold with each new piece of knowledge.

Being at Milton for the past few months has revitalized my faith in the educational process. I admire this community’s courage and willingness to invite and listen to diverse voices, among them Jack Spong’s, not because they promote the correct agenda or the right way of thinking, but because they challenge us to discover our own truths and become active participants in our own education. I am grateful to be in a place where I am welcomed into the fold and encouraged to express my most genuine self. I believe that true education takes place only by engaging critically and creatively with the questions that affect our deepest sense of self and perception of reality. Education is about the transformation of the world—one individual at a time.

Suzanne Y. DeBuhr, Interfaith Chaplain

Whether one agreed with the bishop or not, what became very clear is that he got everyone talking and thinking and reflecting on our own individual faith perspectives. What also became clear to me, in my official position as chaplain, was the need for a theological foundation in the conversations that followed the bishop’s visit. Jack Spong’s theology and his understanding of the Bible, although new concepts to our students, were inspired by post-Enlightenment scholars, such as Rudolf Bultmann, who developed the concept of demythologizing biblical stories, and Friedrich Schleiermacher, who constructed a Christology in which

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Post Script Post Script is a department that opens windows into the lives and experiences of your fellow Milton alumni.

Graduates may author the pieces, or they may react to our interview questions. Opinions, memories, explorations, reactions to political or educational issues are all fair game. We believe you will find your Milton peers informative, provocative and entertaining. Please email us with your reactions and your ideas at cathy_everett@milton.edu.

Social Venture Partners New philanthropy that includes thinking about, acting on and investing in social change

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year ago when I moved to Denver to get married, I wanted to volunteer before pursuing my master’s degree in social work. My husband suggested Social Venture Partners Denver (SVP), an organization that matches business-minded professionals with Denver-area nonprofits needing their expertise. My husband was already involved with SVP and was hoping that I, too, would become inspired by the organization. In meeting with the organization’s executive director, I immediately decided to become a partner. What intrigued me most was that each year SVP works with three local youth-focused nonprofits that are in varying stages of development. These nonprofits are selected annually by a special grantmaking committee made up of partners who decide which organizations to fund. At the time, SVP’s three beneficiaries were Colorado MESA, which provides opportunities for minority and female students to become more familiar with math, engineering and science in the hope that they will pursue one of these disciplines in college; OpenWorld Learning (OWL; www.openworldlearning.org), which supports children’s school success by tapping into the power of digital technology and peer teaching to ignite learning after school, during summers, and at home; and YouthBiz, Inc., a social enterprise that teaches leader-

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ship and business skills to inner-city teens.

My dilemma became choosing among these organizations.

Being a partner at SVP means making a minimum financial contribution each year of $2,500. Funds from all the partners— SVP Denver currently has 48—are pooled and invested as grants to local nonprofit organizations that have been selected by SVP’s Grantmaking Committee. Once a grant is made, SVP works with the nonprofit to improve its ability to deliver effective programs by appointing partners with specific expertise—from fund raising to marketing to technology—to help the organization succeed and grow. According to SVP, “The combination of financial contributions with ‘time and expertise’ is primarily a response to needs expressed by many nonprofits and mirrors the practices of investors in start-up businesses and entrepreneurs in the for-profit world.” SVP looks to invest in organizations that will be affected by the contribution of its funds and skills.

Partners can attend SVP lunches every few months to hear grantees talk about their organizations and goals. During the first lunch group, I met Christopher Myers, the founder and CEO of OpenWorld Learning, also a Milton Academy alumnus, who spoke passionately about his organization.

I learned that Chris’ experience at Milton inspired him to start OWL, now an award-

winning after-school and summer program for primarily low-income children in the Denver Public Schools. OWL develops leadership skills through creative use of digital technology and peer teaching. Its students design their own software using a computer program called MicroWorlds, which is a child-friendly computer programming language that was first developed at MIT. Those of you who attended Milton’s Lower School may remember working on a crude LOGO-based program where you could command a “turtle” to move right, left, up or down. MicroWorlds is also LOGO-based and uses turtles, only MicroWorlds is much more sophisticated and graphics rich. After speaking with Chris about OWL and about Milton, I decided to make OWL my focus through SVP. I volunteered once a week during the summer at one of the elementary-school sites and also joined the OWL Community Outreach Team, whose goal is to help the organization with public relations through organizing benefits and other events.

The year I joined SVP, I had the opportunity to be a part of the 2007 Grantmaking Committee, which was a rewarding and valuable experience. By using criteria established by SVP, the 2007 committee narrowed down approximately 35 proposals from Denver-area organizations, eventually selecting one new grantee called

Smart-Girl. Smart-Girl is a research-based proven program of prevention and enrichment that uses positive peer influence to support and inspire middle-school girls to make smart choices and become confident, capable and self-reliant women.

Colorado MESA and OWL will also continue as 2007 grantees. Not only was it unforgettable to become involved with selecting a grantee, but having the chance to discover so many fabulous Denver-area organizations was astounding. I have kept each proposal to use as future social work resources from groups such as Denver Urban Gardens, which helps low-income families supplement their diet with pro-

duce grown in nearby public gardens, and Horseback Miracles, which provides therapeutic horseback riding for high-risk teens. An additional bonus to joining SVP is that most partners are young professionals in their 30s and 40s, so it has been a chance to meet other young people interested in philanthropy.

SVP Denver was started in 2000 and since then has contributed more than $450,000 to local charities and thousands of community service hours to grantees. SVP Denver has supported 11 nonprofits whose focus is K–12 education and youth development. In 2007, the committee will also accept proposals focused on early childhood education. For those of you interested in SVP

but live elsewhere, there are 20 SVP organizations in cities including Boston (617-338-2590 ext. 270), Rhode Island (401-274-4564 ext. 3399), Dallas (214-8555520), Seattle (206-374-8757), and Los Angeles (310-281-7509). To find an SVP near you, visit www.svpi.org/whoweare/ affiliates.asp. Most affiliates focus on children and education in some capacity and I’m sure would love your help. For more information, visit www.svpi.org.

Jenna Bertocchi Stapleton ’92

Jenna Bertocchi Stapleton ’92, Christopher Myers ’80 and OpenWorld Learning (OWL) students and teachers in Denver, Colorado

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Post Script Milton at the Midpoint of the Last Century: One Collection of Memories

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y doctor—whose two sons went to Milton—recently had a copy of Milton Magazine on the table in his office waiting room. Ruminating on it, it came to me that I should submit a story. I wrote up a tale about taking a subway ride to my 55th reunion dinner with my classmate, Alf Bigelow. I had talked him into it, to walk the walk from Milton Village like old times. The Red Line was not quite like old times. We opened up a conversation with some older teenage girls. One, pausing, thoughtful, leaned forward to ask us, “Are you married?” “No, no, we’re just on our way to Milton Academy,” we rejoined.

Editors at the Milton Magazine seemed more interested in tales of the past than the present.

Milton memories: Of course, the alcoves. My first night at Milton it occurred to me that I could stand on my bed and look over into the next alcove. One thing led to another and, before you know it, I became acquainted with my new neighbor through the medium of a pillow fight. Soon we became further acquainted with Mr. Pocock, the floor master. Later he told me he counted on at least a night or two before having to discipline his charges. Do they still have imaginative punishments at Milton? I well remember (isn’t memory incredible) being supervised by Mr. Millet while I cleaned all the windows of Warren Hall, each window huge, 20 panes large.

Once, in the late fall of 1947, on my way to dinner on a dark night, I hit a fellow student on the back with my book bag, only it wasn’t a boy, it was the housemaster’s wife. F. Allen Sherk sentenced me to shoveling the sidewalk of Wolcott House that entire winter. Well, the winter of 1948 turned out to be the snowiest winter of all—four or five straight weekends it snowed ten inches, so at the end of the winter there was four feet of snow. I was shown no mercy. Add to

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that being on the hockey team, for which I had to take part in shoveling off Lake O’Hare (That marshy pond out there— is it still called a lake?) where we played hockey.

Ping-Pong. I took up the game again not too long ago, resurrecting an abandoned table in our basement. I am playing less chess, though. I remember one year I played 56 games against my roommate Harry Coulter—the same with whom I pillow fought. We also played roof ball off the many dormers and corners of the dormitories, finding that Forbes House was best for that. I later introduced the game to my son when he was ten or so, playing off the roof of our own house.

I was in the Milton Bird Club. Mr. Morrison drove us down Dorchester Avenue through Boston to Route 1 to go to Plum Island. David Perry, the headmaster’s son, was my birding buddy. Early one morning I broke into his house, tiptoeing around to wake him up to go birding. A couple of years ago, I helped found a bird club in our town—the Menotomy Bird Club. I’m still at it, and I often take that same trip up Route 1.

One of my fondest memories was rock climbing with Ad Carter. The Quincy Quarries, Rattlesnake Cliff in the Blue Hills, Crow Cliff out there somewhere, camping out at the Pawtuckaways. He took us skiing in the Blue Hills, too, with cable bindings that you could switch according to whether you were skiing cross-country or downhill. Then he took us to Cannon Mountain on winter break where I ruined my knee and used crutches for six months. I still ski, but almost entirely cross-country, and that is typically out my door to the neighboring park.

I was a tennis player in my days at Milton; Warren Koehler was our coach, Al Norris having just retired. No Western grip and two-handed backhand. I still play tennis occasion-

Oakes Ames Plimpton working in his cabbage patch

ally with my son, but I gave up the game of squash, which Frank Millet taught me at the Milton Club. Did I ever beat him? I can’t remember. So there are memory gaps.

I remember becoming first interested in politics my first year at Milton with the headline, “Mayor Curley in Jail!”

Later, my schoolmates and I were graced with talks by John F. Kennedy and Robert Kennedy. The first was about the war and PT boats, and the latter was about being district attorney. Ted Kennedy was in our class; he ran the campaign of Ed Reed for President in our school mock elections. Joe Kennedy, their father, gave our commencement address, but I recall his talk not quite measuring up to the power of his sons’. Other visitors included Dame Myra Hess, who played a piano concert in the library. T. S. Eliot, who attended Milton for one postgraduate year, was a visiting lecturer. I cannot remember the content of his talk, but I do remember the anomaly of our literary headmaster, Arthur B. Perry, leading a Milton cheer for him.

So many vivid memories to share of my Milton days. I could go on.

Oakes Ames Plimpton ’50 Oakes is retired and living in Arlington, Massachusetts. As he explains, the “back-to-the-earth movement of the 1970s inspired [him] to join an organic communal farm,” and he has followed farming since. He now manages the Arlington Farmers’ Market and coordinates the Boston Area Farm Gleaning Project. He has self-published a book about the farms and farmers that attend the Arlington Market, and is working on the third edition of Robbins Farm Park: A Local History. He is married to Pat Magee, a Drumlin Farm teacher-naturalist, and has a son, Robin. Reach Oakes at plimag@rcn.com.

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Post Script A Milton Reconnect A family history, intertwined with Milton over decades, leads to a 21st century commitment

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ow comfortably postured in my septuagenarian years in the relaxed style of Savannah, Georgia, I thought it might be time to re-read my late grandmother’s memoirs; reflect on what Milton Academy was like back in the beginning of the 20th century; and consider what Milton meant to our family.

My grandfather graduated from Harvard College in 1885, and upon graduation taught school for a short time before the allure of higher financial rewards attracted him to enroll in Harvard Law School.

After graduating and joining a law firm, it did not take long before he developed an unpleasant distaste in suing people.

He then realized that the most satisfying employment for him was teaching classics.

Thus began his Milton Academy career.

his four children, were becoming a severe strain. Near the end of those five difficult and lonely years after his wife’s death, his own health began to suffer.

In 1912, Emily Locke, the lifelong college friend of the children’s mother and frequent visitor to the household, married grandfather Ward, realizing full well that her new husband’s days were marked.

Shortly thereafter, little Andy summed up the situation pretty well as he climbed into his new stepmother’s lap one day when she was receiving a caller, patting her cheek and explaining to the visitor, “This is our new little mother. We haven’t had her very long. Now I have three mothers— Mother-in-Heaven, Mini and you.”

By the early 20th century, grandfather Ward was happily married, enjoying an expanding family, when tragedy struck.

My namesake and father, Andrew H. Ward, was only two weeks old in 1907 when his mother died. Over the next five years, three little girls and their younger brother were cared for by a gray-haired, stately German lady, affectionately nicknamed Mini, who served as housekeeper, hostess, nurse, governess, seamstress and music teacher. This kindly, competent lady did a good job under the prevailing circumstances, but the pressure of grandfather’s teaching job, his many services to the town of Milton, coupled with his conscientious efforts to uphold his duties by

Milton Magazine

Milton Academy was also very considerate with scholarships to our family’s next generation that attended this wonderful Milton institution. Accordingly, at this point in my life, the very least that I can do is fund a day school scholarship. One third of the funds have already been supplied to the School, while the balance is in a segregated portion of my IRA. I will manage those IRA assets over the next three years before depositing the balance with the School endowment.

I believe in an active, individualistic life where learning is a daily adventure.

Hopefully, this scholarship will provide someone else with the same opportunity.

Change is constant, but Milton Academy has adapted without sacrificing principles or values.

Andy Ward ’51

Andy Ward ’51 and his wife, Elizabeth

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When grandfather Ward’s illness became more pronounced, a group of Milton Academy trustees headed by P. E. Forbes and N. P. Hallowell raised a trust fund and explained that it was mainly for the future education of the children. As a crowning blessing, the trustees granted free education to the children and upgraded the 127 Centre Street house on school grounds for use until such time as the children became self-supporting. The kindness and generosity of grandfather’s friends was overwhelming and greatly appreciated.

The Head of School Learning How to Disagree

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hen I came to Milton, an admission video for prospective students included a prophetic clip. Students from Class I were discussing the culture of the School. Abdi Soltani ’94, looking intently into the camera, said, “We disagree all the time. That’s a lot of what we learn here—how to disagree.”

During my first year, I realized that Abdi’s comment reflected not only a cultural reality at Milton but a philosophical imperative.

At Milton we believe that learning how to disagree with one another is essentially related to developing a passion for learning and a respect for others. Curiosity, the desire to know and understand, expresses itself in great questions and also in newly minted opinions. The hands-on environment at Milton is a perfect incubator for insatiably curious adolescents to learn about differences.

Learning how to disagree—to do it without ending the conversation or poisoning the atmosphere—is difficult, however. People often talk glibly about the merits of meaningful conversations with those who hold different points of view. Do they see many adults who model this skill? Does today’s public discourse offer any examples? Are the college campuses across the country supporting open intellectual inquiry? Each of us knows individuals who feel that anyone who disagrees with them is adversarial, or prejudiced, or misguided, or ignorant or even evil. Adults have clearly not succeeded in following through on what, theoretically, they believe. How many of us even recognize and acknowledge our own perceptual biases?

The Milton community is replete with selfstarters; being involved is endemic and exciting. Students think, talk, write and act.

They eagerly take up issues that are com-

plex, and often sensitive: affirmative action, the war in Iraq, the rights of Palestinians, the true nature of Christianity or Islam, Israel’s role in the world, the impact of slavery, the affect of class in America and in their School, contemporary images of women, individual rights and the Internet.

Those form the tip of the iceberg.

The tools they use to research a point of view, or promote an idea or conduct a conversation, have changed the game. To say that the technology of their era has changed how they lead their lives and develop their relationships is an understatement.

While they care deeply and express themselves energetically, they are young, still learning, and often not aware of the potential impact of their comments. They are capable of enlightening their peers, startling them into new questions, as well as angering or hurting them. The new phrase to indicate someone’s line has been crossed is “I’m offended.” One person’s sense of offense, however, is another person’s proclamation of “the truth.”

We rely on faculty to help direct and manage this aspect of growing up—along with all the other challenges we assign them.

They stimulate students to think, and try to help refine their ideas by adding history and context. Once the conversation begins, they must observe the to-and-fro, weighing the pitch and tone and impact. They must judge when or whether to intervene and how to shift the situation to capture its maximal teaching benefit. That’s a tall order, requiring wisdom and skill.

This fall, having read the business bestseller Difficult Conversations, faculty explored with Vantage Partners, a consulting group that developed out of the Harvard Negotiation Project, the dynamics

of how (and why) to discuss what matters most. We learned how to parse a verbal exchange, becoming more accurate in judging what the messages are. We worked at the art of changing conversations from stand-offs to learning opportunities.

Having accepted responsibility for engaging with young people, and with one another, we are committed to making progress in doing it well.

To better prepare students, we launched— after a year of study—a curriculum designed to name and describe crucial values, and help students understand how to apply them in their lives. As a result, Milton students now have a continuous, multi-faceted four-year program—a sustained conversation with adults and peers about how to understand themselves and others in a community and a broader world, and how to make good decisions.

The teaching schedule for this curriculum is purposefully flexible, so that the weekly course meetings can respond to any issue that arises on campus that needs adult-student conversation in groups where the participants are comfortable with one another.

We embrace diversity at Milton, as well as the corollary need to build a community where individuals feel support for who they are and what they believe. Intellectual honesty is a value that needs to be defined and practiced in a diverse environment, one that resembles the world in which we live, and an environment committed to teaching and learning. If we can successfully make the connection between the art of dialogue and the growth of knowledge and identity, we will be helping students develop critical life skills. Learning how to disagree is a valuable work in progress.

Robin Robertson

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In•Sight “The Edge of One of Many Circles,” a sculpture by Sarah Sze ’87, alight in the Schwarz Student Center.

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John Horner

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OnCentre

A Sunfl

o

wer Fie I woke ld up one mo I looked outside rning.

I steppe . d with m out of bed ys I looked hoelaces tied. a that loo t those flower s ked like the sun or a gold e Sunflow n blanket bea uti e if you h rs will help yo fully spun. u av They ch e a bad day. eer you up in e very wa —Tara y.

Sharma , Grade 3

Doing Good: Third Graders Give a Little Help to Their Friends Ideas about helping others begin at an early age. Milton’s third graders embrace the charge to “do good” with a project that combines curriculum work in all areas of study. The love of a book, a butterfly and a sunflower gave rise to the third-grade philanthropy project this year.

The Book: Over the summer, rising students in Jane McGuinness’ and Susan Wheelwright’s thirdgrade classes read the book Owen and Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship, which chronicles the experience of a young hippopotamus orphaned

by Southeast Asia’s tsunami of 2004. Rescued by the members of a small town in Kenya, “Owen” is sent to a sanctuary, where he

becomes the unlikely friend of a 130-year-old tortoise named Mzee. The Haller Park Sanctuary in Kenya is still home to this pair of friends whom Milton’s third graders have come to adore and check in on regularly through the sanctuary’s Web site. Owen and Mzee also helped kick off the third-grade social studies unit on Africa.

The Butterfly: In a science unit, students study the life cycle of the monarch butterfly, learning about each stage of development and tracking the colorful creatures’ journey to Mexico. Students raised monarch butterflies in the classroom and let them go for their migration. While learning about this migration, third

graders also learned about the oxymel trees of Mexico being cut down for building and firewood.

These trees host the monarch butterflies for a few months each winter in the generational migration south. Without these trees, the migration, and birth of the next generation of butterflies, is fatally interrupted.

The Sunflower: As part of last year’s third-grade “planting and growing” science unit, students planted sunflower seeds, one of which took root and grew to be over 12 feet tall, producing over 1,500 seeds. In this year’s math unit, students counted and divided the seeds into three groups: one for planting, one for the classroom’s bird feeder, and one

to sell in support of the Haller Park Sanctuary in Kenya and for an organization that supports the migration of the monarch butterfly called Journey North.

“Susan and I are here for guidance,” Jane says, “but the students decide what they want to do. They’re creative and they understand how everything ties in. They’re aware that they’re working for a worthy cause. We ask together, ‘What can 8- and 9year-olds do as an altruistic deed?’ and they come up with great ideas.”

Students designed seed packets and decorated them with watercolor paintings and original poetry. After much discussion, the class decided upon a price of $4 per packet, and sold the packets to parents, friends and other Milton Academy community members.

“The students understand that the money supports both the animals that we have come to love and the butterflies we have followed, to keep them alive and flying,” Jane says. “It’s a great way to teach children about giving to organizations that aren’t necessarily the popular names that you know. It’s the fruit of their own work that benefits these causes. The whole project is connected to our curriculum in many ways.”

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Milton Magazine

Artist Sarah Sze’s “The Edge of One of Many Circles” A Gift of Lisa and Richard Perry ’73, and Tracy Pun Palandjian ’89 The Gift

Sarah’s Words on Her Work

What looks fragile, whimsical, spun of thread, filled with light—and at the same time is shaped of steel, designed to hold—balanced in the air, several stories high—more than 800 pounds of visual intricacy?

“I begin by coming to the site, seeing the nature of the building, who uses it, how they use it, how the space works,” Sarah says.

“The Student Center is about flow. You move from a low, dark entrance to an immense openness. I wanted to emphasize the drawing in. When you enter the building you see a part of the sculpture, and then as you come in it opens up to a full structure—in the part of the building that is all about light and openness. I wanted the sculpture to come cascading down from the highest corner, and hover over a broken plane (the Student Center staircase being the ‘cut in the flat plane’). You can view the piece from all around it. It’s like the piece at the San Francisco MOMA (Museum of Modern Art) in that respect: You can see it from above, from directly below and from all sorts of angles. People will live with the piece—rediscover it all the time.

During the day it’s backlit and has a skeletal quality. At night, looking from the outside, it’s lit up. So it has a day life and a night life.”

What is complex, multidimensional, chock full of shapes, colors, objects and ideas, and at the same time affirms the grace, simplicity and openness of an extraordinary building?

Sarah Sze’s work, “The Edge of One of Many Circles” in the Schwarz Student Center bonds sculpture and architecture to yield an extraordinary artistic experience. The experience is new each day, because her piece beckons you in from different starting points and draws you toward the center along different routes.

Sarah Sze, Milton Academy Class of 1987, has created installations and permanent sculptures in august museums and cultural landmarks all over the United States and the world, including Paris, London, Milan, Leipzig, Kanazawa (Japan), New York, Chicago, San Francisco, Boston, San Diego and Seattle.

The Dedication On September 29, 2007, Milton Academy dedicated “The Edge of One of Many Circles.” Trustees, faculty and students gathered to celebrate the sculpture and thank trustee Richard Perry and his wife, Lisa. A collector of contemporary art, Richard told students that he felt they should be able, at Milton, to experience and be inspired by the work of this extraordinarily accomplished graduate. Richard used the Wizard of Oz story, replete with energy and creativity, as inspiration for his own speech. On behalf of the students, Samantha Yu and Aditya Basheer, co-head monitors, accepted the sculpture that distinguishes their Student Center.

Sarah Sze ’87 at work in August 2006 with a member of her staff

Ladders and trusses disguise the steel cables that hold the sculpture from the ceiling struts, so the work seems suspended in air.

“It doesn’t look like a marionette,” Sarah says. “I wanted a piece where the structural and the aesthetic are confusing: you don’t know where one stops and the other begins. The piece is about building, and you can recognize elements about building—bridges, towers, levels, building tools. As you look, the idea of fragile delicacy is sustained, but it’s pushed to the limit by the strength implied in the building elements. Experientially, I want people to be lost (in exploring), and then find a recognizable moment, like the stairs.

Continued on page 50

Sarah’s sculpture cascades from the highest point in the Schwarz Student Center ceiling, to hover above the staircase.

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Perry Gift, continued

Historians, writers, artists, religious and scientific thinkers are among Milton’s fall visitors to campus

Those moments draw you in, like the first line or last line of a novel.

“The piece seems alive. It imitates something that is moving, growing. All the things included are gestural: for example, the blue cups are spinning up and spinning down. The work looks at ‘behavior’ in objects. At the bottom, for instance, the circles gather like bees around trash.

It’s as if the objects have some motivation.

“The white structure is all fabricated. I could have left it that way, I suppose, but to the fabricated things I added real objects.

The piece is more complex because of the interplay of the two.

“The interplay between fabricated and real relates to that question: What is the line between real life and art? Why is this object valuable to us—because of its aesthetic importance or its practical value? The levels, for instance, are both decorative and practical. I want to blur the lines.

“In terms of sculptural properties, I’m interested in instability.

When you’re doing art as your life’s work, your major ideas have to come from some personal space and from reflecting upon your time. In our time, the onslaught of information and the speed of change create a sense of constant instability. We can be lulled into a sense of safety because of things like the progress in medicine, but then something we couldn’t be prepared to handle happens, reinforcing the lack of predictability or stability in our world.”

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Bill McKibben

Paul Watanabe

Lorrie Moore

Environmentalist and best-selling author of The End of Nature and Enough

University of Massachusetts Department of Political Science

Prize-winning author of Birds of America and other works; University of Wisconsin’s Delmore Schwartz Professor in the Humanities

Mr. McKibben visited campus September 13 as a guest of the science department. He is a scholar in environmental studies at Middlebury College, has been a staff writer at The New Yorker and is a contributor to many publications, including The New York Review of Books, Outside and The New York Times. His major concerns include global warming, alternative energy and human genetic engineering.

In his book The End of Nature, McKibben writes, “In the past, we spoiled and polluted parts of…nature, inflicted environmental ‘damage.’ But…deep down, we never really thought we could [wreck nature]: it was too big and too old; its forces…were too strong, too elemental. But, quite by accident, it turned out that the carbon dioxide and other gases we were producing in our pursuit of a better life could alter the power of the sun, could increase its heat. And that increase could change the patterns of moisture and dryness, breed storms in new places, breed deserts...We have produced the carbon dioxide—we are ending nature.”

Mr. McKibben’s new book, Deep Economy: The Wealth of Communities and the Durable Future, is due to be released this March.

Dr. Paul Watanabe knows firsthand of the Japanese internment that took place in the United States following the Pearl Harbor bombing. He recalls that his brother, only five days old at the time, and mother were sent to an assembly center—essentially a former horse stall at the Santa Ana racetrack in California—and later to an internment camp in the early 1940s. For Milton students, he traced the history of the internment initiative. The question of that time is the question of today, he said. “What is the right balance between preserving civil rights and protecting national security?”

Dr. Watanabe, Milton’s ninth annual speaker in the Hong Kong Distinguished Lecture Series, visited campus on October 4 and posed that question. He compared Americans’ response to Arab Americans following the September 11 tragedy to the response toward Japanese Americans during World War II. “When someone, because of his race, religion, or ethnicity is held in suspicion,” Dr. Watanabe concluded, “we all potentially become the victims of suspicions ourselves. Aren’t we all diminished and damaged in some significant way when other people’s sense of self, identity and dignity are compromised?”

Lorrie Moore visited campus on November 1 as this year’s Bingham Visiting Writer. Ms. Moore read her story “Dance in America,” answered students’ questions, and continued her conversation in Straus Library.

David Smith, English department chair, introduced Ms. Moore by imploring students to listen intently to her words. “…What I don’t want you to overlook…is the richness, whether of humor or of compassion or of nuanced insight.” Ms. Moore explained that the parent/child bond—which is one subject broached in “Dance in America” and throughout her work—is something that she has “been interested in from the beginning.” She explained, “It’s such a basic plot line in our lives that it’s hard to write about people without at least a little of that.”

Ms. Moore’s fiction, reviews and essays have appeared in such publications as The New Yorker, The Paris Review and Best American Short Stories.

Henry Louis Gates, Jr.

Lauren Greenfield

John Shelby Spong

James Meeks ’97

W. E. B. Du Bois Professor of the Humanities, Harvard University; Director of the W. E. B. Du Bois Institute for African and African American Research

Noted by American Photo Magazine as one of today’s top 25 photographers; documentary filmmaker of the award-winning film, THIN

Episcopal Bishop of Newark, retired; pastor, professor, author, national critic and commentator

Milton alumnus and decorated veteran of the Iraq War

Dr. Gates of Harvard University talked with students on January 10 as the 2007 Martin Luther King Speaker. One of the most influential American cultural critics, he is widely acknowledged for moving African American studies from the ideological positioning of the 1970s and ’80s to a scholarly sphere.

Lauren Greenfield was on campus November 29 through December 1 as this year’s Melissa Dilworth Gold Visiting Artist.

Ms. Greenfield was one of only three females chosen by American Photo Magazine, along with Mary Ellen Mark and Annie Leibovitz. She is the creator of “Girl Culture” and many related projects that deal with the influence of popular culture on how we live. Her photography deals most specifically with issues of gender identity, body image and eating disorders. Her photographs have been published regularly in magazines including the New York Times Magazine, Time, The New Yorker, ELLE, and Harper’s Bazaar.

Dr. Gates has authored and edited several books and written numerous articles for The New Yorker, Time Magazine, The New Republic and The New York Times.

He is also the editor of Transition magazine, an international review of African, Caribbean, and African-American politics.

Through scholarly efforts such as publishing bibliographies of noted writers—Nigeria’s Wole Soyinka, for example—and republishing historical texts like Harriet Wilson’s Our Nig, or, Sketches from the Life of a Free Black, written in 1854, Dr. Gates has defined an African-American literary and cultural tradition. He also authenticated and facilitated the publication of The Bondwoman’s Narrative by Hannah Crafts, the only known novel by a female African American slave and possibly the first novel by an African American woman. In 1997, Dr. Gates was named one of Time Magazine’s most influential Americans.

Her recent documentary film, THIN, delves into the lives of four women struggling with anorexia and bulimia. The film was met with international acclaim and premiered at the 2006 Sundance Film Festival.

Bishop John Shelby Spong visited Milton on October 11 as the fourth speaker for the Class of 1952 Endowment for Religious Understanding. With his modern interpretation of the Bible and advocacy for social justice and acceptance across religions, Bishop Spong’s message sparked much discussion, in Straus Library, where he met with students, and in classrooms across campus. Overtly faithful and committed to the Christian tradition, he claims that by “adhering to the spirit of the Bible, and not to the letter of the Bible [we might help] build a world where we all have the opportunity to live fully, love wastefully and be all that [we are called to] be.”

Serving as a member of the clergy for nearly 50 years, Bishop Spong now spends much of his time writing and speaking, having lectured at many theological institutions, including Harvard Divinity School.

As part of Milton’s Veterans’ Day program on November 8, alumnus Jim Meeks ’97 returned to campus and spoke with students about his experience as a first lieutenant in the United States Army, stationed overseas as part of Operation Iraqi Freedom. After earning a bachelor’s degree from Harvard, Jim spent the better part of three years in Ramadi and Baqubah, Iraq, in the 34 Armor Battalion. As the officer in charge of Task Force Centurion’s detention facility in Ramadi, he was responsible for the supervision, health and welfare of seven prison guards, four interrogators and up to 90 Iraqi detainees, an experience that he described as “eye-opening.”

Injured by a roadside bomb during his first tour of duty, Jim was sent back to the U.S. to recover and decided to return to Iraq to continue the mission alongside his fellow soldiers. He impressed students with his sense of the ethical challenges involved in implementing any war, the complexity of this particular initiative, and the enormity and scale of the operation. He left them with the idea that any single soldier knows only his experience, and knowing the “situation” in its entirety is a near impossibility. Jim received the Bronze Star Medal and a Purple Heart for his work in Iraq and is now an M.B.A. candidate at Stanford University.

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Alumni Author Recently Published Work Cell of Cells: The Global Race to Capture and Control the Stem Cell

By Cynthia Fox ’79 The three-word title of this timely book by Cynthia Fox ’79 captures the essence of stem cells; that is, a stem cell is just a single cell but it also might, under the right conditions, give rise to cell dynasties, an extraordinary feat that normal differentiated cells of vertebrates seem unable to accomplish.

Within over 400 pages of explanatory text (and supported by detailed sourcing notes at the end of the book), Cynthia treats

the reader to the personalities, politics and places involved in some major stem-cell advances in the past half decade. Based on her end notes, it appears that she traveled the world to speak to leading researchers in locations including Egypt, Israel, South Korea, Singapore, Australia, Japan and the United States.

Cynthia weaves together notes from those interviews with stories taken from newspapers, scientific journals, conversations with stem-cell recipient patients, and politicians, creating a type of scientific whodunit. She takes the reader on the cloning rollercoaster of successes and setbacks, describing this global scientific race as it has unfolded so far.

She does not just list what we know (or believe we know) today about stem cells; instead, she traces growth of our knowledge through a series of laborious but creative and intriguing experiments conducted around the world from about 1998 to 2006.

She clarifies motivations, separates genuine breakthroughs from deceits, and identifies psychological as well as political and financial restraints to progress in locating and understanding stem cells of all types. For example, even after the first normal adult stem cell (a blood stem cell) was successfully cultured (in 1988, in mice), continuing psychological constraints delayed discovering adult neural stem cells. She writes, “…the vast majority [of scientists] believed the adult brain could not contain stem cells. If the brain were constantly replacing neurons, where would the memory go?” Once the shocking discovery of neural (brain) stem cells was reported (in 1992, in mice), scientists began to look more carefully for stem cells in all types of tissues, including cancerous tissues.

cells to say, “Become functional pancreas cells, please”? This is a hugely challenging question, but one whose answer holds so much promise for millions of humans suffering from diabetes, neurological disorders, cardiovascular problems, cancer, or, literally, degeneration of any body part.

Cynthia also points to the role of politics that has encouraged globalization of embryonic stemcell research. In Chapter 1, titled “Unmade in America,” she describes how religious beliefs of President Bush have driven research on human embryonic stem cells to other countries and greatly slowed American progress in learning how to culture and to induce differentiation in these totipotent cells.

A key impediment to progress on human embryonic stem cells (hES) has been our inability to reach consensus on one key issue: “When does meaningful human life begin?” In scattered chapters, Cynthia addresses understandings from a variety of cultures. For example, she writes that “…the Koran says the soul doesn’t enter the body until 120 days.” Many Jews believe “human life is a process…with ‘ensoulment’ only starting to take root around the fortieth day after conception.

When human embryos develop naturally, the stem cells “know” what to do to produce all of the essential tissues and organs, from heart to kidney to skin to pancreas. Outside of a body, or in laboratory culture dishes, how can we tell these very same cells to do what we would like them to do? For example, how do we communicate chemically to stem

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Later in her book, Cynthia walks the reader through state-of-theart blood cancer treatments and kidney transplantations. She also introduces research suggesting blood stem cells from a young source might help rejuvenate age-damaged tissues.

It takes time for humans to consider and then to accept or reject some technological advances that are products of scientific human minds (e.g., in vitro fertilization or genetic modification of food crops). Today, about 50 years since the deliberate production of the first mammalian chimera, many humans are comfortable with the idea of saving a life through transfer of body parts (e.g., kidney, skin, heart, liver) from donors.

“Much of the Western world, in the 1980s, had codified into law the notion that meaningful human life ends when the brain goes.” And “therefore, many scientists by 2003…believed that

Alumni Named Great Minds of the Business World meaningful human life begins the moment the human brain begins to form…approximately 14 days after conception. (The United Kingdom, among other nations, codified this.) That moment occurs long after human ES (hES) are formed, around day five. This, added to the fact that a full 70 percent of [human] embryos never make it to birth naturally, should render hES cells “moral” for use, by President Bush’s own standards, many scientists believed.” This variety of religious beliefs has clearly slowed the development of global guidelines on stem-cell research.

What might be some productive uses of stem cells? Can stem cells be injected and used to rebuild breast tissue of post-mastectomized women? Can stem cells be precisely injected into damaged heart muscle to repair and rejuvenate those areas? Can donor bone-marrow cells be used to stimulate attack of host cancer cells? And what about serious problems? Can injection of stem cells lead to cancer or atherosclerosis if injected in the wrong place or at the wrong time?

Cynthia has made these possibilities understandable to any reader intrigued by this scientific frontier.

Linde Eyster Science Department Faculty Advisor to Helix, Milton Academy’s Science Writers’ Club

programs and, among other philanthropic undertakings, serves on the board of Habitat for Humanity.

Two Milton alumni—Kimberly Steimle Gori ’92 and Milton trustee Austan Goolsbee ’87— were each named one of the “Top Forty Under Forty” business executives in their respective cities, Boston and Chicago, this past fall.

Kim, who is the vice president of marketing and business development for Suffolk Construction, was honored as one of the city’s top young business executives by the Boston Business Journal in its annual “40 Under 40” listing, which bases its selection on “professional, civic and personal accomplishments.” A recent Suffolk press release announcing Kim’s honor explained that she “has been with Suffolk Construction since 2002, when CEO John Fish hired her to lead the company’s marketing and communications operations.

[Kim] made an immediate impact at Suffolk assembling an expert team of creative and public relations professionals to promote the Suffolk brand. She quickly became a trusted advisor for Fish, counseling him on a

Austan Goolsbee ’87

wide range of communications endeavors including branding and business development initiatives, media and public relations, event planning, speechwriting, and website design.”

Austan Goolsbee ’87, Robert P. Gwinn Professor of Economics at the University of Chicago Graduate School of Business, was named one of Chicago’s bright young businesspeople in a similar listing compiled by Chicago Business. Austan specializes in the application of economics to new technology fields, especially the Internet. He attended Yale University, where he earned both his bachelor’s and master’s degrees. He earned his doctorate in economics at MIT. Among Austan’s several dozen published papers in economic, tax and technology-related journals, he has had regular columns on Slate.com, owned by The Washington Post, and The New York Times. He has written on everything from online versus retail competition in the computer industry through state income apportionment. Austan was also the economic advisor to Illinois senator Barack Obama during his 2002 campaign.

40 After graduating from Milton Academy, Kim attended the College of the Holy Cross and then embarked on her professional career in marketing with McDermott & O’Neill Associates.

In addition to her business focus, Kim is committed to giving back to the community. She oversees Suffolk’s charitable

Kimberly Steimle Gori ’92

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Who’s in charge? And why?

On Wednesday mornings, the students are. to make about upcoming activities, athletic events, and projects, faculty members let students know what to expect in the week ahead.

Sixth graders are their own kettle of fish. They need support and attention and, at the same time, increasing independence. They need space of their own, chances to express plenty of physical energy, and constant intellectual stimulation.

Within a program that meets these developmental needs and prepares sixth graders for the culture and academic challenges of the Upper School, Wednesday community meetings are a weekly highlight.

dents walked in: Why did you choose ______ ? What do you think about ______ ? What’s going to happen in ______ ?

Next up on the agenda was the Problem of the Week. The meeting leaders gave the answer to last week’s problem and posed the problem for the upcoming week, a problem they had created, which is then posted on the community board for all to solve.

Students look forward to it; perhaps that’s because students run the meeting. Wednesday community meetings are carefully structured to provide opportunities for leadership, connection and expression.

Two students lead the meeting each week. For five to seven minutes, they present two things about themselves that they’d like to share. At one meeting, for example, two boys presented an in-depth PowerPoint presentation about how much they loved Harry Potter books, why they were worth loving, and how they would rank each of the volumes relative to the whole series. They opened the door, and all the stu-

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For “word of the week,” they had chosen trigonometry. Never having lived a moment without Wikipedia, that’s where they started with their definition, but not where they ended.

Next, the two students selected slips of paper from the Kindness Box to read out loud. Students fill the box during the week, with citations of small kindnesses they have experienced from their peers. This is a favorite exercise, and the two boys could continue for quite some time: “Nina gave me some Laffy Taffy.” “Jason found my index cards.” “When I was really parched, John gave me some water.” “Emma saved a seat for me.”

Carrie Ellis, sixth-grade dean, says, “Developmental levels really inform the sixth-grade year.

[The students] are on the cusp of childhood and adolescence.

Working with younger students—we have reading buddies in the first and second grade and we run field day for the Lower School—we have opportunities for leadership, and we discuss their roles, asking, ‘How do you want to be known as sixth graders?’ The community meeting is an opportunity for leadership among their peers.”

Faculty members are allowed onto the program near the end of the meeting. Along with students who have announcements

When all the components of the meeting wrap up, students have praised one another and reinforced the themes faculty are working to stress in the life of the School. They have laughed out loud, shared interests, been challenged, applauded and started the day on an upbeat note.

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Sports Frank Millet is the inspiration for a national squash tournament Over Martin Luther King weekend, the top junior squash players from across the country gathered at the Murr Center, Harvard University, to compete in the inaugural Frank Millet Championship Tournament. The United States Squash Racquets Association (USSRA) selection event generated intense competition from 178 of the nation’s best young squash players.

The Massachusetts Squash Racquets Association (MSRA) Junior Committee, which organized the event, named the competition after Milton Academy faculty member and squash coach Frank D. Millet.

The top 32 rated players in eight divisions, including 114 boys and 64 girls, competed in 368 matches over the three-day weekend.

Will Sullivan, John Nimmo, Casey Cortes, Alli Rubin and Sarah Loucks, all Class III, were among the Milton Academy students selected to play in the tournament. Casey Cortes took

Frank Millet shares a word

Frank Millet, Casey Cortes ’09 and Tom Poor

first place in her division, while Will Sullivan and Alli Rubin both advanced as far as the quarterfinals.

“It was a most pleasant three days,” said Mr. Millet. “The tournament was well-run by Northeastern squash coach Chris Smith, aided ably by Tom Poor, Lenny Bernheimer and the new MSRA Committee members, including Bill Nimmo, Jim Sullivan and Gary Rubin. Players, both boys and girls of all ages,

When asked about the honor, Mr. Millet replied, “It’s rather nice,” and changed the topic to the good work of all those involved in the tournament.

Alli Rubin ’09 advanced to the Girls 17 and Under Quarterfinals

came from as far as the West Coast, Philadelphia and Chicago.

They displayed excellent sportsmanship and it seemed that everyone had a good time.”

Greg White Photos courtesy of JD Sloan

Will Sullivan ’09 advanced to the Boys 17 and Under Quarterfinals

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Class Notes 1936

1947

Rosemary Crocker Kemp reports that she is living in a nice retirement home in Meredith, New Hampshire. Her daughter is nearby and gets her out and about often. Rosemary sees her grandsons and their wives frequently, as well. She writes, “My job as class secretary lasted a long time and I enjoyed hearing from many classmates, including Louise Ireland Humphrey ’37.”

Henry Lauterstein reports, “At age 77 I’m in reasonably good health and have enjoyed my retirement, particularly time spent with friends and family (two daughters and sons-in-law plus four grandchildren). As for our beloved country, the recent election in November proved encouraging.”

1948

1939

Martha Wiencke has moved to Kendal Hanover, a retirement community.

Our sympathies go to Henry Walcott, who lost his wife this past April.

1949

Stephen Wellington has been living in Pike, New Hampshire, for the last 33 years. He and his wife, in addition to having had a very full married life of 60 years, have five children and eight grandchildren.

1940

Cynthia Wright Lasserre DeVezeron writes that she was delighted by two class gettogethers in 2006. The first was a mini reunion in Switzerland with Coleman Norris, June and Jack Robinson, Micheline and Bernard Florin, Shirley and Dave Jenkins, Peter Runton

and Linda Squires. The second gathering was a weekend in Maine with Lele Hall in August.

Cynthia writes, “I extend the invitation to classmates wanting to come to Provence. I have a large house and unlimited rosé wine!”

1954 Liz Biddle Barrett writes, “Our little house in Dover and nearby family and friends are a continuing joy. Our lovely sun-drenched acre is surrounded by the woods, walls and an active bridle path on one side. Rud and I delight in planting trees and shrubs to feed and shelter birds. Yardwork, horticulture and tennis keep us limber. We’ve lost our beloved Oratorio Society of New York, but have resumed piano and cello, a fine substitute.”

the CSC Rink at Trinity College (pictured). The Williams Hockey Center is named for Ben’s brother, Albert “Bert” C. Williams ’60, who died in a car accident while a student at Trinity. Here at Milton, the Williams Family Squash Courts honor the life of Bert’s and Ben’s other brother, Ralph B. Williams III ’51. Four generations of this athletic family have made their mark in Milton record books and can boast three Robert Saltonstall Medal winners: Bert Williams ’60, Ben “Banjo” Williams ’78, and David “Tiger” Williams ’80.

1955 Paul Robinson reports that he had a good visit in December with Whip Filoon, Bob Crook and Al Scullin.

On November 18, 2006, Ben Williams dropped the ceremonial first puck onto the ice in the new Williams Hockey Center at

Mary Bottomly writes, “I’m pleased to say I’m living down by the creek at the same address. I have much interaction with my children and grandchildren—it’s wonderful! I’m fortunate to have a large backyard and a vegetable garden to complete the scene.”

1945 Philip Dickson writes, “After standing our ground and fighting two hurricane seasons in Vero Beach, Florida, we finally moved back to Bethesda, Maryland. We have decided Florida is for visiting, not owning.” Phil reports that he had three stents inserted in February and is slowing down, but that his wife, Suzzi, is very active, as always.

Ben Williams ’54 drops the ceremonial first puck onto the ice in the new Williams Hockey Center at Trinity College.

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1956

1959

Rupert Hitzig is the president of Bizazz Media, a new media production company. They have produced an award-winning documentary on Danica Patrick and the Indy 500.

Sam Taylor writes in from Hood River, Oregon, where he is practicing a little medical oncology in “The Gorge” between windsurfing sessions. He has started biking and skiing in the off-season.

Sam comments, “It’s awesome out here.”

1957 Anne Wyatt-Brown is editing a new journal, the Journal of Aging, Humanities, and the Arts. She urges anyone with an article that would be of interest to an interdisciplinary audience to send it her way.

1958 Lisa Hartmann Blake writes, “Baha’i is, as ever, my top priority. I’m making pottery for Ito galleries here and there and I am loving being a grandma.”

Joan Corbett Dine writes, “Zingy San Francisco has superseded Prague as our new home.” Joan’s husband, Tom, is CEO of the Jewish Community Federation.

She writes that she is “re-inventing [her] musical self”—singing, whether in solo performance or choir, taking voice lessons, and working at sight-reading brushup and greater mastery. She is reverting to ballet as exercise. “If one cannot retrieve the body in San Francisco (I hate the defections from service by previously loyal body parts), it’s all over! It’s great to be back.”

Ruth Cheever Drake reports that she is still living in Burlington, Vermont, but that she and her husband have chosen to skip the winters. They camp south and west, spend lots of time in Mexico, and this year spent time in California and Vieques, Puerto Rico. When they’re home they take classes at the University of Vermont, volunteer, and spend as much time outdoors as possible: birding, kayaking, sailing and biking.

Class of 1974 celebrates Patrick victory

1960 Robert Norris is dividing his time among nonprofit endeavors, a suburban law practice and tending to his garden and his grandchildren. He and his wife celebrate four children, now all married, five grandchildren, and reason to believe that number might increase. He notes, “While it is true that my experience at Milton is not the same as that experienced by today’s students, it is encouraging to see similar lessons learned: aiming high, importance of public service and a sense of curiosity and fun play.”

In the statehouse, from left, Anna Waring, Cassandra Perry, Deval Patrick, David Moir, and Annette Buchanan, all Class of 1974

1963 Bill Beyer writes in, “I’m very proud to have received the “William Booth Award” from the Salvation Army for helping the Army help others. My best to all.”

1965

At the inauguration, Mrs. Aubrey (Smith) Carter, former faculty, Anna Waring, Annette Buchanan, Cassandra Perry, and Peter Smith ’77

Trinkett Clark, the wife of Nick Clark, passed away on October 29, 2006, after a brief but courageous battle with liver cancer.

Bay Bigelow, Ralph Hamill and Ben Taylor, three of Nick’s dearest Milton classmates, attended her service.

1969 Eliza Kimball reports that her son, Arthur, graduated from the University of Chicago in 2004 and is a staff writer for the Providence Journal. Her other son, David, is a sophomore at Trinity College. Eliza works as a Senior Political Affairs Officer in the Department of Peacekeeping Operations at the United Nations, covering Iraq, Nepal, Kashmir and the Western Sahara.

At the gala, Cassandra Perry, Robin Lynch (also 1974), Annette Buchanan, David Moir

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on global justice and reconciliation, and I proclaim a tolerant, intellectually probing, generousspirited Christianity and interfaith mission. It all started at Milton.”

1978 Steve Heckscher continues to enjoy running his own business—selling grocery store receipt tape advertising—while his wife, Oksana, has just started working at Monegram International as a bilingual rep. Steve is studying Russian in order to be ready for his next conversation with Oksana’s mom and pop.

1979 Catharine MacLaren ’87 married Eric Baldwin on September 16, 2006, at Tyrone Farm in Pomfret, Connecticut. In attendance at the celebration were Milton alumni Tom Clayton ’85, Cassie Robbins ’87, Chloe Breyer ’87 and daughter Clara Scholl, Stewart McDowell ’87, Anne Davis ’85, Melissa Coleman ’87, Ian MacLaren ’93, Catharine MacLaren ’87, Anne Bridges ’86, Lori (Dandridge) Cunningham ’87, Connie Pendleton ’88, Alethia Jones ’87, Kate Zilla-Ba ’87, William MacLaren ’63 and Nicholas Burger ’93.

Bitter Ocean: The Battle of the Atlantic, 1939–45, David F. White’s second book, has just gone into a second printing in Britain and continues to sell well in the United States. His daughter, Margaret, is a senior at Brearley School preparing for college. David would love to see any classmates passing through New York.

1971 Congratulations to Lorna Role, Ph.D., professor of anatomy and cell biology at Columbia University, who was the recipient of the Sidney R. Baer Jr. Prize from the Mental Health Research Association for her significant contribution to the field of psychiatric research. The $40,000 prize honors a psychiatric investigator who is conducting particularly promising research. Lorna’s research is on the mechanisms of central nervous system development and synaptic plasticity related to neuropsychiatric disorders.

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1972

1974

Thomas Exton has joined Wildlife Trust as the Executive Vice President for External Relations. Wildlife Trust, based in New York City, is a conservation organization that empowers local conservation scientists worldwide to protect nature and safeguard ecosystems and human health.

In his new role, Thomas will lead the development and communications initiatives as well as implement the organization’s multimillion-dollar major gifts for endowment building and program support. He directs anyone interested in learning more about Wildlife Trust to its Web site, www.wildlifetrust.org.

Sarah Smith Ferguson writes that she is still in the Chicago area working as a clinical nurse specialist in diabetes, and her husband, Rick, is still flying for United Airlines. Her older son, James (21), is serving in the Army and is currently stationed in South Baghdad. Her younger son, Brian (18), is going to college and playing bass guitar. She urges folks to, “come and visit us—we’re on the train line to Chicago.”

1973 Amanda Cannell is teaching art to seventh- and eighth-graders at Norwood School in Bethesda, Maryland. She also notes, “Miranda Wheeler ’08, whose beautiful design is on the cover of this fall’s Milton Magazine, was a student of mine.”

1975 Foerd Ames is working with the Ocean Wave Energy Company.

The group’s Web site is www.owec.com, for those interested in learning more.

1976 Margaret Davis reports that she has been appointed the Associate Dean for Advancement at the Washington National Cathedral.

She writes, “I have merged my head, heart and skill set to work

Bryan Austin writes, “…went to the Patriots/Dolphins game with Tad Walker and his five boys…all the boys are Miami fans.”

1980 James Scullin shares, “I enjoyed the 25th reunion. We are now with our fourth child, working and enjoying life in Geneva, Switzerland.”

1981 Anne Myers Brandt is living in Cambridge with her husband, Cameron, daughter, Charlotte (3-), and son, Sebastian, who turned two in January. Anne is practicing residential architecture part-time in Boston.

1982 All is well for Chris Papageorge, wife, Marianne, and their two sons, Stephen (3) and Nicholas (8).

Wrenn Flemer Compere recently opened a “Music Together” center near her home in the Mad River Valley of Vermont—“It’s so much fun, and I actually get paid for it!” She also started chipping away at a degree in music therapy. Her family is well, and her children, Anna (13) and Pierre (11), are growing fast.

reducing errors in care for ambulance patients, I have been writing for Slate on contemporary issues in medicine.”

1990 Ellen Casey Boyd and her husband, Stephen, welcomed a son, Bronley Stephen Boyd III, on November 3, 2006.

Taylor Clayton, age 4, son of Tom ’85 and Cassie Clayton ’87

1985 David Schore and his family have moved from Manhattan to Old Westbury, New York, on Long Island. He and his wife recently welcomed their daughter, Summer, who joins Hunter (6-) and Tyler (4-). David has also moved his company from Manhattan to Jericho, New York.

Tom Trigg and his wife, Sara, welcomed a baby boy in August.

Tobias Reid Trigg, born on August 18, joins big brother, Tucker.

1988 Mike Kobb recently returned from a business trip to China, which he hopes will not be his last. Pictures of the trip, including a brief vacation in Tokyo, can be found at www.mjkobb.com.

Mike reports that he is “neckdeep in home renovation projects” after buying a house in 2004. He writes, “I can see the light at the end of the tunnel, but I’m still wondering whether this might be an oncoming train…”

He is looking forward to the 20th reunion and hopes to see some folks who have been unable to make it to previous reunions. (“This means you, Sam Prud’homme, Ethan DeSilvey and John Pierce!”)

Mark and Shannon McGlame Pinson ’89 welcomed Tyler Bray Pinson into the world on January 4, 2006.

Congratulations to Jenna Moskowitz and Jacob Farmer, who were married this past October in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

1989 Louise Armstrong Barton and her husband welcomed their third child on Christmas Eve of 2005 and named her Katharine, after her grandmother, Katharine Cortesi Armstrong ’63.

Sean Nagle and Sachie Kozawa are happy to announce their marriage on September 10, 2005, in Palos Verdes, California. They live in Sherman Oaks, and Sean will complete his master’s in computer science at California State University, Northridge, this year.

Amy Saltonstall Isaac and her husband, Johnathan, welcome a daughter, Georgia Saltonstall Isaac, born on August 6, 2006.

Rudolph Reyes just had his three-year anniversary working as a regulatory policy lawyer for Verizon and loves it. He and his partner, Brody, bought a turn-ofthe-century Victorian house in the Potrero Hill district of San Francisco and are in the long process of renovating. Rudy is also singing in the San Francisco City Chorus and its smaller chamber group “Vox Dilecti.”

Sandra and Henry Morales ’91 welcomed their baby girl, Madison Taylor Morales-Warken, on October 5, 2006.

He also reports that he and Adam Wolff recently formed a Mountain Biking Club, which allows them “to explore the unbelievable wonders of the Bay Area while getting some muchneeded exercise.”

1991 Brad Critchell continues as an investment banker at Credit Suisse in New York City. His twin boys are about to turn one year old.

Henry Morales and his wife, Sandra, welcomed a baby girl on October 5, 2006. Madison Taylor Morales-Warken was born 8 lbs, 1 oz, and 21 inches long. Henry and his family live in Carlsbad, California.

Abbott Fenn writes in: “Having earned a Ph.D. in economics on top of his law degree, both from the University of Chicago, Ethan Fenn has opened a law practice in Burlington, Vermont, which, according to www.fennlaw.com, maintains a widely varied general practice, but is most distinctive for service in the field of law and economics.”

Emily Fenster reports, “I am living in Oakland, California, with my partner and our 3-year-old daughter who really, objectively, is the most amazing human being.” Emily works part-time as a clinical supervisor at Seneca Center, a nonprofit that serves children and families.

Zachary Meisel writes, “My family and I moved back to Philadelphia last year where I have returned to Penn as Assistant Professor of Emergency Medicine. In addition to conducting research in

With his fiance Martha Noel, Peter Kellner '87 visited Galen Chase '87, at Galen's Wyoming ranch. Martha is a medical student at Stanford; she and Peter will marry in Carmel, California, this August.

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This past fall, Jessica ResnickAult married Peter Gimbel, whom she met while at Brown University. Jessica and Pete were married at Endicott House in Dedham, Massachusetts. It was a fabulous celebration with many friends and family members.

The couple is living in Houston, Texas, where Jessica is a staff reporter for Dow Jones Newswires/the Wall Street Journal, covering energy, and Peter is a graduate student.

Jessica would love to hear from any classmates visiting Houston.

2000

Darren Ross, Jon Cope and André Heard, all class of 1993, are pictured here with their daughters Phoebe Ross, Adelaide Cope and Zöe Heard after a raucous 4th of July barbeque in Manchester, Massachusetts, at the Ross homestead.

1992

1993

1995

Sharon Sears writes, “Greetings from Durango, Colorado! I am in the thick of my first year as a faculty member in the Department of Psychology at Fort Lewis College. Durango is a really cool town surrounded by the Rocky Mountains with excellent art, music, food and outdoor activities. Fort Lewis is a small, liberal arts college. I am excited to be teaching courses including health psychology and research methods. In addition, I am experiencing the joys of student advising, committees, and making research connections in the community. My appreciation for my own teachers grows each day as I experience all of the things that go into this academic adventure. If any alumni or faculty have the opportunity to visit Durango, let me know!”

C. Dana Critchell continues her residency at Thomas Jefferson Hospital in Philadelphia.

Brad Anderson received his Ph.D. from Yale in 2005. He is now teaching at the Trinity School in Manhattan and at Yale in the summer. In December, he judged a poetry competition organized by another Miltonian.

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Graham Goodkin and his wife, Laura, recently welcomed a baby girl named Emma Livingston.

Gigi Saltonstall writes, “Ali (Burnes) Balster’s baby, Katie, is about to turn one. I see them as well as Ali’s husband, Nick, often. Kate (McGuinn) Motley is living in Louisville, Kentucky, with her husband, Matt. I am heading down for a visit later this month. My sister Amy (Saltonstall) Isaac ’90 is enjoying the latest addition to her family, Georgia, born in August.

Darren Ross reports that he, Jon Cope and André Heard have somehow found women to marry them and bear them children. This past summer the group got together for a raucous 4th of July party at the Ross homestead in Manchester, Massachusetts.

Laura Snydman will finish her residency in internal medicine at Tufts-New England Medical Center this spring. She will be staying on another year at TNEMC as the Teaching and Research Scholar in Medicine.

1998 Monica McKenney, mother of Cara McKenney, passed along the good news that Cara’s boyfriend Tze Chun’s film, Windbreaker, was recently selected for the Sundance Film Festival. The film is somewhat autobiographical, 11 minutes long, and was created on a $600 budget.

Greg Marsh was married to his wife, Julie, on September 16, 2006, on Cape Cod. He recently accepted a position at Google as a University Programs Specialist.

Will Connors writes in, “Despite daily heckling, a night in jail, torrential rains, and frequent failed attempts to talk to beautiful Ethiopian women in Amharic, I am thoroughly enjoying living in Ethiopia as a freelance writer/ editor. If anyone is in the area, look me up. I’ll be the awkward, balding white guy in jeans.”

2001 Hayden Jaques is living and working in Kansas City, Missouri. He works at Louis Dreyfuss Commodities, trading wheat and corn. Hayden was able to take some time off before he started work to attend his Milton five-year reunion, as well as to travel to Brazil with his four-year Milton roommate, Gates Sanford.

2003 Congratulations to Tom Coleman, who was crowned Temple University’s 2006–2007 Homecoming King.

2004 Colleen Leth reports that she is in her third year at Barnard College, where she’s majoring in art history with a minor in architecture. She is busy participating in a lot of campus and New York City art initiatives, as well as rowing crew at Columbia and working part-time for the curator at the Whitney Museum. This spring she is headed to Paris to study abroad.

2005

Deaths

William Faulkner writes, “I absolutely love Tulane and could not imagine a better place to go to college than New Orleans, postKatrina and all.” Will is a linguistics and Latin American studies major with an architecture minor. He is looking forward to spending his senior year at Pontifícia Universidade Católica do Rio de Janeiro in Brazil.

1927 1929 1928 1934 1935

2006

1941 1943

Alice Minkoff, mother of Sam Minkoff, reports that Sam is attending Boston University, where he is majoring in engineering. He is currently the president of his residence hall of over 400 students.

Daniel Charness is enjoying his freshman year at Wesleyan, where he plays varsity squash and is continuing his cello studies.

1936 1937 1940

1945 1946 1948 1950 1952 1953 1955 1956 1962 1968 1971

Eleanor Snelling David Howland Charles Mason, Jr. Morris Earle John R. Bemis Peter Greenough P. Hickox Beall Jean Richmond Stone Elizabeth Hurd C. Snelling Robinson II Francis Houston John T. Potter Margaret Skinner Armistead Charlotte Crocker Cleveland William W. Worcester Joseph W. Powell III Leslie Jones Jackson Giancarlo Uzielli Conrad Nobili Herbert Parker II Edward W. Weld Ruth Baker Ursul Joseph Mattison III Marion Cajori Jay W. Tracey III

David Howland ’29 Milton alumnus David Howland, Class of 1929, passed away February 27, 2006, following a lengthy illness. In his time at Milton, David was a boarder in Robbins House and a recipient of the Robert Saltonstall Medal.

Coached by Milton’s beloved and departed Herbert G. Stokinger ’24, David would visit “Stoky” and his wife, Esther, at every chance. David was the son of former Milton trustee Charles P. Howland.

He is survived by his wife, Nancy (Moller) Howland ’33, and two children, Faith Howland ’61 and Charles P. Howland ’63.

From Concord Journal, March 16, 2006 [David Howland] was born in New York City on Jan. 13, 1911, the son of the late Charles P. and Virginia (Lazarus) Howland.

Mr. Howland was raised in New

York, New Haven, Conn., and Walpole N.H. He graduated from Milton Academy and Yale University. A talented schoolboy and college athlete, he was a member of the Yale varsity football team.

Mr. Howland enlisted in the U.S. Navy in 1941 and served as a lieutenant commander during World War II. He married Nancy in 1937, and after the war they settled in New Canaan, Conn., where they raised their two children. In 1993 they moved to Carleton-Willard Village in Bedford.

He worked as business manager for a small plastics company in Stamford, Conn. As an avocation he was an active old-book dealer, continually adding to his fine collection of early children’s books and jigsaw puzzles and delighted in finding out-of-print books for others.

Errata Milton Magazine regrets errors in captions printed in the 2006 fall Milton Magazine. Correct captions appear below.

Class of 1961; row 1 (left to right): George Cushing, Steven White, Charles Howland, Gorham Brigham; row 2 (left to right): Dan Bergfeld, Paul Harrison, John Cooper, Peter Wilder, Bill McKenna; row 3 (left to right): Nat Barbour, Peter Talbot, David Lewis

Graduates’ Weekend 2006; (left to right) Paul Harrison '61, Nat Barbour '61, and Claudette Harrison, Paul's wife

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Milton Academy Board of Trustees, 2007 Julia W. Bennett ’79 Norwell, Massachusetts Bradley Bloom Wellesley, Massachusetts William T. Burgin ’61 Dover, Massachusetts James M. Fitzgibbons ’52 Emeritus Chestnut Hill, Massachusetts John B. Fitzgibbons ’87 Bronxville, New York Austan D. Goolsbee ’87 Chicago, Illinois Catherine Gordan New York, New York Victoria Hall Graham ’81 New York, New York Margaret Jewett Greer ’47 Emerita Chevy Chase, Maryland Antonia Monroe Grumbach ’61 Secretary New York, New York Franklin W. Hobbs IV ’65 President New York, New York Ogden M. Hunnewell ’70 Vice President Brookline, Massachusetts Harold W. Janeway ’54 Emeritus Webster, New Hampshire Lisa A. Jones ’84 Newton, Massachusetts George A. Kellner Vice President New York, New York F. Warren McFarlan ’55 Belmont, Massachusetts Carol Smith Miller Boston, Massachusetts Tracy Pun Palandjian ’89 Belmont, Massachusetts Richard C. Perry ’73 New York, New York John P. Reardon ’56 Vice President Cohasset, Massachusetts Kevin Reilly Jr. ’73 Baton Rouge, Louisiana Robin Robertson Milton, Massachusetts H. Marshall Schwarz ’54 Emeritus New York, New York Karan Sheldon ’74 Milton, Massachusetts Frederick G. Sykes ’65 Rye, New York Jide J. Zeitlin ’81 Treasurer New York, New York 62

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Join us for

Graduates’ Weekend 2007 June 15 and 16

You can count on: • Catching up at Friday-evening class parties on campus • Connecting with Milton faculty in classes they teach • Treating yourself to music and drama performed by talented students • Exploring the old, the new and the restored spaces with student guides • Reliving your Milton days by staying overnight in the Milton houses • Resurrecting old favorites at the Alumni Glee Club Sing • Honoring graduates at the Memorial Chapel Service • Sharing in Milton’s plans with Head of School Robin Robertson

And just this year, not-to-bemissed events on Saturday, June 16: • The Dare to Be True Luncheon celebrates Mr. Frank D. Millet in honor of his 90th birthday • The all-class reunion party Saturday night celebrates the ethnic neighborhoods of Boston For the latest reunion information or to register, go to the “Alumni” pages at www.milton.edu, or call Nika Thayer Mone ’94 in the alumni relations office, at 617-898-2394.

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“…we were not in a hothouse, but rather an incubator, getting fattened up intellectually and morally for the rigors of the tough outside world…”

Still Fired Up

Susan Hall ’57 Today, when I play tennis within sight of a basketball court, I can’t wait to finish my match and go shoot hoops. This ripely middle-aged woman sinking the ball from the center line is jaw-dropping to the young African-Americans from whom I’ve scrounged a ball. Of course, I never learned the lay-up, because in my day we played on the half court and it was safer to shoot from outside. Drilled into me still are the muscle memories developed

by Miss Sullivan and Miss Bailey in the Milton boys’ gym.

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Just as firmly etched in my mind is the architecture of sentences Ms. Pundy would construct on her blackboard. When she called on me, she would search for my name: Katherine? Alice? Marion?

Florence? Susan?—names of my aunts and mother, whom she had also taught.

The Punderson sentence structure was central to our understanding of excellence, a standard we confronted at each turn on the campus. So, too, was the sense that we were not in a hothouse, but rather an incubator, getting fattened up intellectually and morally for the rigors of the tough outside world in which we were to engage.

Milton today scours the mean streets and distant countries to ferret out deserving talent. In widening its embrace, the school has remained remarkably vibrant and relevant. Now, late in life, I, too, have widened my embrace, teaching (for the first time) foster children in their foster homes throughout New York City—in Brownsville, Bushwick, BedfordStuyvesant and the South Bronx. In bringing to these fragile children that same fired-up enthusiasm for learning I osmosed at Milton, I am giving back in a tangible way what I was so privileged to have been given. In my last act, it is give-back time for sure, and for this reason I have made a provision for Milton in my estate.

Milton students perform in A Chorus Line, December 2006.

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