Postcards
Barbara Bush builds a healthcare startup
November 1, 2011: 1:25 PM ET
Wendy Kopp, the founder and CEO of Teach for America, is one of the most impressive social entrepreneurs I've ever met. Anyone who writes her college thesis about recruiting America's top young people to education—and then spends the next 22 years building an organization that now hires more college seniors than most any Fortune 500 company—gets my vote.
But I'm not here to tell you about Kopp. (She's had many profiles since I wrote about her in Fortune in 2006.) I want to tell you about someone who is a young version of the TFA founder: Barbara Bush. You remember Barbara as one of the twin daughters of President George W. Bush. Now 29, she has quietly moved beyond her Washington youth and has a global-health startup in the making.
Bush's creation is Global Health Corps. After graduating from Yale, young Barbara went to South Africa and worked in a children's hospital, where she got the bug to help lure young people into careers in global health. When she got home to the U.S. in 2008, her sister, Jenna, told her about two guys from Google (GOOG) whom she had met and had a passion and know-how in that field. Their first meeting was a weekend at Jenna's house in Baltimore. "We locked ourselves in her house for the weekend, and we wrote a business plan, which is not what I normally did when I was 25," Barbara says.
That was 2008. "Quit your job," both her dad and mom, Laura, told her, urging her to leave the Cooper-Hewitt Museum in New York City. (Barbara had once wanted to be an architect.) Ever since that day, Barbara has been working to mobilize recent college grads and young professionals to work for a year in a healthcare non-profit or government agency.
Global Health Corps is building quickly. More than 125 fellows have worked on health issues around the world, from Boston to Burundi. GHC fielded thousands of applications for 68 fellowships awarded in August. Like TFA, it's more difficult to get into this program than an Ivy League college. Bush's goal: 500 fellows a year.
Sure, Barbara Bush is privileged. And yes, she has extraordinary connections and access that aid her in building her startup. But this ambitious young member of the Bush dynasty could be taking it easy and enjoying the spoils. Instead, she is working creatively to improve the world and the lot of America's young people.
"I had no plans to be a social entrepreneur," she says. Sometimes the calling just happens.
Here's a clip of my interview with Barbara Bush at the recent Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit.
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Nancy Pelosi: Health care reform equals entrepreneurship
By Stephanie N. Mehta, Executive Editor
House Speaker (and powerful woman) Nancy Pelosi told a group of media executives and editors that the recently passed health insurance reform bill will lead to new jobs by enabling would-be entrepreneurs to take professional risks such as starting their own companies.
"The entrepreneurial spirit of America is unleashed," she said, because the bill allows people to leave unsatisfying jobs they keep only for the medical MORE
Stephanie N. Mehta, Deputy Managing Editor - May 4, 2010 12:14 PM ETPosted in: Entrepreneurs, health care, jobs, Leadership by Geoff Colvin, media, Nancy Pelosi, Postcards -
Living with autism: A father's story
April is National Autism Awareness Month--the time to talk about a disability that affects one in every 110 births in the U.S. and almost 1 in 70 boys. The lifetime cost of caring for a child with autism: $3.5 to $5 million, according to The Autism Society. But all the money in the world doesn't make dealing with autism easy. Here is one man's story about how his son's autism MORE
Patricia Sellers - Apr 14, 2010 11:51 AM ET -
Fixing health care...in the supermarket
by Jessica Shambora
Here's a familiar scenario: You have a sore throat or an earache. It could be just a virus, but you want to get it checked out to make sure. Good luck getting in to see your regular doctor right away.
Typically your best option is an urgent care clinic or the emergency room, where you could wait hours to be seen, in a room filled with other sick people. MORE
Jessica Shambora, Writer-Reporter - Dec 17, 2009 5:14 PM ET -
The real meaning of J&J's layoffs
by Jessica Shambora
We keep hearing how the economy is improving, but with U.S. unemployment at 9.8% and rising, the job market gives us nothing but anxiety. Today Johnson & Johnson (JNJ) added to the pain by announcing layoffs of 6-7% of its workforce. That's about 7,000 employees.
While J&J faces lots of industry-specific challenges--patent expirations, increasingly complex regulation, healthcare reform--the news is stunning. Particularly because J&J is known for its MORE
Jessica Shambora, Writer-Reporter - Nov 3, 2009 7:46 PM ET -
Power Point: American medicine overpromised on cancer screening
"I'm admitting that American medicine has overpromised when it comes to screening. The advantages to screening have been exaggerated."
-- Dr. Otis Brawley, chief medical officer of the American Cancer Society, today in The New York Times. We're fascinated with this dilemma of modern medicine: Screening for breast and prostate cancers has increased diagnoses but done little to curb fatal cancers. One reason is that some cancers detected during screenings aren't MORE
Jessica Shambora, Writer-Reporter - Oct 21, 2009 1:48 PM ET -
Top women stand up to cancer
Elizabeth Edwards, former Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Carly Fiorina and other cancer survivors convened for a discussion called "Stand Up to Cancer" at the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit in mid-September. Hollywood producer Laura Ziskin was also on the panel. She's a co-founder of Stand Up To Cancer, an entertainment-industry-led initiative that funds cancer research, requires scientists to work together, and is helping to accelerate progress toward curing the disease MORE
Patricia Sellers - Oct 1, 2009 11:14 AM ET -
Carly Fiorina, Elizabeth Edwards speak up for Stand Up To Cancer
Participants at last week's Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit were joined by two special guests via satellite: Former Hewlett-Packard (HPQ) CEO Carly Fiorina and Elizabeth Edwards, wife of former Presidential candidate John Edwards. The women were unable to attend the Summit in-person due to ongoing treatment for cancer, but they were eager to show their support for Stand Up To Cancer (SU2C), an initiative backed by the entertainment community to MORE
Jessica Shambora, Writer-Reporter - Sep 24, 2009 3:26 PM ET -
Next big thing: Going digital
By Beth Kowitt
Want to know what the next big thing is for investors? Look for industries that haven't hopped onto the digital wave, said Nancy Peretsman of Allen & Co. during Fortune's Most Powerful Women Summit.
"You can see that for very few businesses," said Peretsman in a session on investor insight with Juliet Flint, partner at venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins.
Essentially none of the women at Fortune's conference can say MORE
Jennifer Lai - Sep 15, 2009 4:38 PM ET -
Power Point: Do whatever it takes
"We will get in a rocket and fly around the moon if that is what it takes to get everybody together and get an agreement."
-- White House press secretary Robert Gibbs on President Obama's proposed health-care reforms. While Gibbs opted for sarcasm, the President took the philosophical route, recalling landmark social reforms. "These struggles always boil down to a contest between hope and fear," he said. "That was true in MORE
Jessica Shambora, Writer-Reporter - Aug 20, 2009 7:07 PM ETPosted in: health care, Obama, politics, Postcards, Power Point, President Obama, robert gibbs, Washington
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Fortune senior editor at large Pattie Sellers has written some of Fortune's most talked-about cover stories, including "Marissa Mayer: Ready to Rumble at Yahoo," "Oprah's Next Act," "Can Meg Whitman Save California?" "The $100 Billion Woman" (Melinda Gates), and "Remodeling Martha" (Martha Stewart). She has helped oversee Fortune's "Most Powerful Women in Business" package every year since its launch in 1998. Pattie is Executive Director of the Fortune Most Powerful Women Summit, the preeminent gathering of women leaders in business and beyond. She oversees MPW programs that enable women leaders to extend their influence and empower the next generation—such as Fortune MPW Entrepreneurs and the Fortune-U.S. State Department Global Women Leaders Mentoring Partnership. Beyond her Fortune duties, she is also developing Live Content across Time Inc. Pattie grew up in Allentown, PA, graduated from the University of Virginia, and started at Fortune in 1984. Her blog, Postcards, is about how power players lead, manage others, and navigate their careers.
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