The Good Girls
William Norwich Meets Three Young Women Whose Paths Have Led Them To Farflung Locales And To Lives Devoted To Altruism
March, 2010
Along with Sasha Heinz, the wife of Chris Heinz and daughter-in-law of Teresa Heinz Kerry, and Carolina Gonzalez-Bunster, founder of The Walkabout Foundation, former First Daughter Barbara Bush is one of three impressive young women I got to know – or in the case of Barbara, got to know better – in New York recently. All are transcending the traditional merry-go-round of charity balls and cocktail fund-raisers most associated with their social set and instead are coming full gallop to not-for-profit causes dear to their hearts, using every advantage ascribed to their generation, from Facebook to face time with the people they help.
After graduating from Yale in 2004, Bush, 28, worked in the educational-programming department at the Cooper Hewitt National Design Museum in Manhattan. But she had known for years that her passion lay in the area of health, so when in 2008 her sister, Jenna Hager, attended an AIDS conference at the United Nations and met people like then-executive direction of UNAIDS Peter Piot, M.D., FACE AIDS founder Jonny Dorsey, and Google employee and AIDS activist Andrew Bentley, introductions were made. Over a weekend at Hager’s house near Baltimore, the Global Health Corps (ghcorps.org) was created, with Piot serving on the advisory board. Inspired by Teach for America, it seeks to improve the quality of health-care services in countries like Burundi, Malawi, Rwanda, and Tanzania with the help of recent college graduates. “This is the organization I was looking for when I finished college,” says Bush, who left her museum job in the last months of her father’s presidency to quietly focus on GHC.
The organization was launched with a $250,000 grant from Google.org. Bush’s pitch to its board “was the most intimidating feeling I ever felt,” she says. “One of the things we are saying is you don’t need to have medical or nursing experience to help – one of our fellows who was doing distribution for the Gap now is helping to organize the distribution of HIV/AIDS drugs in Zanzibar.” Her enthusiasm prompted me to ask if, by any chance, given her political legacy, this is a lead-up to a run for office? You should have heard the response. Suffice is to say, she answered no.
Nor is Heinz running for office, although she has floated the idea to tease her husband. The Harvard graduate with a master’s degree in applied positive psychology from the University of Pennsylvania is currently pursuing her doctorate in developmental psychology at Columbia University’s Teachers College. The 31-year-old, who recently traveled to Nepal with Americans for UNFPA (the United Nations Population Fund), has joined forces with Planned Parenthood (plannedparenthood.org), where she is on the board of directors. Her mission is to appeal to women her age to revitalize the membership.
“Anyone can host a salon to raise awareness on an issue they care about,” says Heinz, who hosts “friend-raising” salons at her Tribeca apartment. “Invite a local speaker, or watch a documentary. Why do I devote myself to Planned Parenthood? Every opportunity I have had in my life, including my schooling and being able to marry the person I wanted to marry – all the things women my age take for granted – really comes down to one advantage: I can control my reproductive life.”
On a Sunday afternoon before she returned to her M.B.A. studies in social entrepreneurship at Oxford’s Said Business School (that means an M.B.A. in philanthropy), Gonzalez-Bunster, 26, told me the genesis of The Walkabout Foundation. “In 1994, two weeks after graduating from high school, Luis, the oldest of my four siblings, severed his spinal cord in a car accident. Since then, I’ve wanted to do something for him,” she explains. “I’d graduated from Georgetown, gotten a master’s in comparative politics at the London School of Economics, helped launch the London office of the Clinton Climate Initiative, and then worked in the wealth-management division at Goldman Sachs in Dubai when Lehman Brothers collapsed and everything tumbled.”
The unstable economy proved a “crisatunity” – a crisis but also an opportunity that begets a rallying to action and change. “I stopped. I took stock of my situation. I asked myself, ‘what do I really want to do with my life?’ And I quit my job.” Returning to her family’s home in Greenwich, Connecticut, Gonzalez-Bunster found Luis training for the New York City Marathon, competing in a hand cycle as he had done in 2001. His preparation consisted primarily of swimming up to 140 laps in the family pool each day. As the weather turned cold, she suggested he swim indoors at the local YMCA, only to discover that there was no outdoor ramp or elevator to accommodate a wheelchair. She was galvanized into action: “Instead of joining another organization, I wanted to do something that honored my brother and also something where I didn’t have to spend money to raise money. What could we do? We could go for a walk.”
Last summer, along with her mother, Monica, two younger brothers, plus as many as 50 supporters at times, she walked about 500 miles over four weeks on the mountainous path from Biarritz to Santiago de Compostela, while Luis and their father did a road route on their bicycles, sleeping in a different village every night – and raising awareness about spinal injuries and more than $160,000. (For details about this summer’s walk, visit thewalkaboutfoundation.org). Though the Clinton Foundation, Gonzalez-Bunster had already pledged a great portion of those funds to purchase some 1,000 wheelchairs for people in Haiti. She had been planning a trip this month to finalize the distribution of the wheelchairs, when, in January, the earthquake struck. Within the week, Gonzalez-Bunster and her father traveled from the Dominican Republic, where the family has a home, to Haiti, where she met with Paul Farmer of Partners in Health to organize delivery as quickly as possible.
“I saw people prisoners to their injuries, being pushed in wheelbarrows or supermarket carts.” Mobility, in the form of wheelchairs, “gives them independence and freedom,” both literally and figuratively.
“Natural disasters are the perfect recipe for spinal injuries and the loss of limbs,” she said later, telephoning from the Miami airport as she waited for a connection back to England and her second semester at Said. “I met one doctor who alone had done over 60 amputations in the past 48 hours.”