01 June 2006
Five With Drive
Profiles of five contemporary Americans with classic American values
By Paul Malamud
Paul Malamud is a staff writer with the Bureau of International Information Programs of the U.S. State Department.
In any business a successful brand generates sales. But creating the right brand for a new business can also be a statement about your life. That’s what entrepreneur Jennifer Wright-Tubbs, of Peoria, Illinois, is learning.
In March of this year, Wright-Tubbs, who has a background in advertising, launched her own running apparel business with the brand name iRUNLIKEAGIRL. The idea of this attention-grabbing logo is that it takes a schoolyard insult—”you run like a girl”—and turns it into a proud statement on the importance of athletics and self-motivation for women. “It’s definitely taken a negative and turned it into something more positive,” she notes.
“It’s about running through one’s daily obligations, running through life’s celebrations and disappointments, running for health, and running because you can,” Wright-Tubbs told her local newspaper, the Journal Star. Wright-Tubbs, herself an enthusiastic long-distance runner, says the point of the slogan is to motivate women to run successfully in many areas of their daily round—to live with gusto. “It’s a way of life, a sense of who we are,” she adds. No stranger to moving quickly, she debuted her line at the More Marathon (for women over 40), and then two weeks later in the famous Boston Marathon. In her first few weeks of business, she toted up tens of thousands in sales. Some of her customers were women reflecting “ageless girl spirit,” others were men buying for the women in their lives.
A native of Iowa, Wright-Tubbs took up jogging a mile around a track in college. After she moved to Chicago, she began running longer distances, entering the Chicago Marathon at age 27. Since then, she’s competed in eight marathons.
The iRUNLIKEAGIRL Web site invites women everywhere to discover not only what running has done for one woman, but how energy, self-motivation, enthusiasm—and a daring, no-limits attitude—can lead to what Wright-Tubbs likes to call “running with spirit.” Her business is just beginning. “The hard thing about this is taking care of it yourself right now,” she adds. In the process of relocating in Manhattan, she hopes to expand eventually and to begin moving from a Web operation into retail stores, a prospect that leaves her feeling “cautiously confident.” In the future, Wright-Tubbs has big plans to take her brand to more American towns and cities—possibly around the world.
Poor People’s Doctor
Paul Farmer was born into poverty—his large family spent part of his boyhood living in a converted bus in a Florida trailer park, as well as in a tent and on a houseboat. Yet he has gone on to become a major force in bringing health care to people around the world.
While a medical student at Harvard in 1987, Farmer started a Boston-based foundation, Partners in Health (PIH), with fellow student Jim Yong Kim, and established a health clinic in Haiti. This Haitian clinic, which reaches out to about 100,000 people, has become a model for similar clinics that fight disease and also offer a comprehensive range of social and self-improvement services in impoverished areas around the world. Partners in Health describes its goals as “to bring benefits of modern medical care to those most in need of them and to serve as an antidote to despair.” The PIH model provides mobile screening units, training programs for health outreach workers, clinics, schools, and in-home delivery of complex drug therapies, as well as research into infectious diseases. Innovative drug dosage protocols developed by Farmer and associates have reduced the mortality rates of drug-resistant tuberculosis and AIDS in places as far-flung as Siberia and Peru.
“A poor people’s doctor”—that’s how Farmer once described himself to Tracy Kidder, author of the best-selling book about him titled Mountains Beyond Mountains. Farmer hopes to go on to reduce famine, disease, and unnecessary mortality around the globe. “I believe we can convince people that it’s wrong for the destitute sick of the world to die unattended,” says Farmer. “We can change that.”
High-Fashion Designer
When Thu Thien Dao and Hue Thuc Luong came to the United States from Laos in 1979, they had dreams for their eight daughters. Their family ran a dry-cleaning and tailoring business in Houston, Texas, but like many hard-working immigrants, they wanted their children to get a good education and enter law or medicine.
Their sixth daughter, Chloe, had a different idea, however. By age 10 she had become entranced with a CNN television show called “Style with Elsa Klensch.” As a teenager, Chloe began to pursue her passion for beautiful design in her family garage, making jewelry out of screws and washers and other leftover bits. After beginning college as a marketing major, she decided to follow her personal dream by enrolling in a design program at a community college and then paid a visit to New York City’s Fashion Institute of Technology.
“I love my mom and dad,” as Chloe recently told the San Jose Mercury News. “But you have to follow your dreams. You have to live for what you want to do.”
The New York trip led to a job in the eveningwear business, as Chloe helped to manage a small design firm and develop it into a multi-million dollar business. In 2000, she returned to Houston to found her own designer boutique, “Lot 8”—so named after the eight family daughters. Lot 8, sporting a collection of gowns, dresses, and sportswear, is now one of Houston’s best-known fashion boutiques, and has received national attention.
Chloe also participates in Bravo TV’s “Project Runway”—a reality show in which different designers compete each week to solve a design problem. Chloe was the winner of the show’s second season, which brought $100,000 to help launch her own clothing line. “I design for everyone,” says Chloe. “Good fashion is an equalizer.”
Student of Promise
Anna Umanskaya is not a typical American teenager. For one thing, at age 18, she lives on her own in an apartment in Brooklyn, one of the boroughs of New York City. For another, she approaches her life with an extraordinary sense of focused energy.
Anna recently won a New York Times scholarship for her college education. She shares the distinction with 18 other New York City high school seniors who, out of 1,400 applicants, won the award in 2006 on the basis of merit and scholarly potential. In addition to the $30,000 scholarship, which will enable her to attend Brandeis University, the Times also offers the winners a summer internship, a laptop computer, and academic counseling. Anna plans to study international relations in college.
Brought to the United States by her grandmother from Moscow at age 10, Anna had a difficult family life, with relatives living far apart and many moves. Finally, she struck out on her own. Currently a senior at Franklin Delano Roosevelt High School in Brooklyn, Anna works as a waitress in a coffee shop at night to earn a living. Yet she still ranks near the top of her class, does volunteer work with the elderly, and finds time to write creatively on her own. Last year she was the winner of Brooklyn’s annual Holocaust Remembrance Scholarship essay contest for high school students.
So far Anna Umanskaya’s life mirrors the traditional immigrant’s story in America—tough times, hard work, opportunity arising. “I had to have more,” Anna told the New York Times. “To make my dreams come true, to get into Brandeis, to be where I want, for a change.”
Counselor to Ex-Convicts
For some folks, finding a career requires some very hard work. That has been the story of Julio Medina of Exodus Transnational Community. He came up the hard way.
An arrest in his youth for selling drugs landed Medina a 12-year prison sentence. Yet, the experience—and the counseling he received in the New York State prison system by the religiously based Exodus Group—revealed to him that serving his fellow man can be a higher calling. Released in 1996, he began work as a counselor with substance abusers and the HIV-affected.
Eventually, Medina decided to devote himself to the problems of ex-prisoners trying to return to society. Based on his own life experience, Medina was well aware of how many released convicts revert to crime, and some of the reasons: difficulty getting jobs, emotional agonies, inability to form family bonds. In 1999, he obtained funds to form Exodus Transnational Community, a place where ex-convicts who are having problems re-integrating into society can find practical assistance.
Today, Exodus Transnational, headquartered in East Harlem, New York, has helped over 1,500 men and women returning into the larger world from prison, addiction, or homelessness. Exodus offers a program of self-assessment, counseling, and housing and employment referrals—even computer training. Exodus—part of a U.S. Department of Labor initiative—claims it has reduced its clients’ prison recidivism rate to the point where 75 percent return to normal lives. (Nationwide, about two-thirds of convicts wind up back in prison.)
Medina believes that the best people to help ex-prisoners are ex-prisoners themselves. “I think no one can do this better than men and women who’ve gone through the process,” he once told a newspaper. “We are the experts at doing these things. We are the ones who are going to turn this around.”
