Legal Aid for Entrepreneurs
The first client of the Institute for Justice was Taalib-Din Uqdah, who with his wife wanted to earn a living braiding hair in Washington, D.C. The city demanded he become Read more…
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Advancing the Science of Business-building
Ewing Kauffman was a congenital entrepreneur. After two years in his first corporate job he quit in disgust, vowing he would never again work for anyone else. He started his Read more…
Funding a Harlem Rebound
The Harlem Children’s Zone is a massive effort to bring 97 square blocks of the poorest neighborhoods in northern Manhattan to a positive “tipping point.” Beginning in 1989 the Edna Read more…
Homes for Philly’s Homeless
Among the ten largest cities in the U.S., the one with the highest poverty rate is Philadelphia, at 26 percent. Yet Philly has one of the lowest rates of homeless Read more…
Supporting Local Health-care Solutions
The Robert Wood Johnson Foundation, established by the head of Johnson & Johnson, has a special interest in health care and is one of America’s largest foundations. Big national foundations Read more…
Guiding Poor Kids to Business
Steve Mariotti owned an import-export business in New York when he was mugged by a gang of teenagers in 1981. He wondered what made young people act like that and Read more…
Training the Homeless to Do for Themselves
In the early 1980s when New York City was at an economic and social nadir, winter cold killed several homeless people. In response, donors launched the Doe Fund, named for Read more…
Helping Immigrant Families Flourish
Sister Jennie Lechtenberg was a Catholic-school teacher who took a sabbatical to tutor low-achieving first- and second-graders in a poor Los Angeles barrio. Seeing that children whose parents lacked literacy Read more…
Keck Observatory
The scientific telescopes that dethroned the Rockefeller-funded Hale reflector as the largest in the world (see 1928 entry) were also paid for by a private donor. In the mid-1980s the Read more…
Job Training for Hard Cases
Two Manhattan banker/donors disturbed by a chronic lack of employment among many inner-city residents. An East Harlem ex-convict and drug addict who got clean and then earned a master’s degree Read more…
Turning Addicts Into Workers
Bob Coté was clutching a vodka bottle one night when he saw three of his drinking buddies passed out on the street with urine stains on their trousers. Standing in Read more…
Olin Brings Economic Logic Into Our Legal System
Legal scholar Bruce Ackerman described the “law and economics” movement as “the most important thing in legal education since the birth of the Harvard Law School.” The movement’s roots go Read more…
Settling a Million Vietnamese Refugees
After the fall of South Vietnam, two million people poured out of that country plus Laos and Cambodia, many of them taking desperate risks in fear of their lives, often Read more…
Marriage Encounter
In 1967, a program developed by a young Catholic priest in Spain to help married couples create a deeper and more honest relationship was presented as a weekend conference to Read more…
Addicts Support Themselves in Group Living
If any group of unfortunates would seem to need outside, professional assistance, it would be substance abusers. Yet the Oxford-House movement has produced an amazing story of self-help. In over Read more…
Cultivating Community Colleges
In 1947, as the post-WWII boom in higher education was taking off, the President’s Commission on Higher Education urged the spread of community colleges to serve students of diverse abilities Read more…
Saving Traditional City Neighborhoods
American cities were just beginning to fall apart in the middle of the twentieth century—a process accelerated by many of the technocratic efforts undertaken to “improve” them, like “urban renewal,” Read more…
Artificial Intelligence
In its first half-century of existence, the Rockefeller Foundation was a powerful supporter of basic research in the sciences, medicine, and technology—driving many breakthroughs that increased economic prosperity and human Read more…
Highway Safety Breakthrough
John Dorr was an industrial chemist whose inventiveness allowed him to build a successful company, and then a charitable foundation which he eventually focused on practical solutions to everyday problems. Read more…
Ford Helps Privatize RAND
The RAND Corporation (the name is a truncation of “research and development”) began as a U.S. military project at World War II’s end. Air Force General “Hap” Arnold wanted to Read more…