As corporation counsel, Firestone leads the City of Boston Law Department to provide legal services to Mayor Michelle Wu, the city council, and city departments. In that role, he advocates for and defends the city in all legal situations, from everyday issues impacting the city to litigation that involves the United States Supreme Court. 

His office handles legal issues including housing and land use, procurement and contracting, labor and employment, and regulatory compliance—while promoting accountability and fair delivery of city services. Firestone explains that the office deals with “core representational issues every day, whether it’s city maintenance or our obligations to provide an excellent education in the public schools.”

As a current junior at ������Ƶ who commutes from Boston, I interviewed Firestone to learn more about his involvement with the city I am fortunate to call home. Throughout our conversation, we spoke about the ������Ƶ experiences that led him to become involved with local government, the inspiration he draws from his current role in the City of Boston, and our interests in Boston broadly and in our shared neighborhood of Jamaica Plain. 

At the heart of Firestone’s introduction to political organizing was the mentorship of a teacher who brought the community to the classroom. He credits former history teacher Bill Bailey, who taught a course on American politics and government. He says Bailey “wanted us to all get active in politics” and introduced him to the importance of participation in local and national elections. 

Firestone remembers clearly when he and fellow ������Ƶ students volunteered for the New Hampshire presidential primary in 2000, which he defines as “a really major moment for people of my generation.” That election revealed the importance of civic action, and he recalls learning how critical it was for him and fellow students to be involved in local campaigns: “That was my first experience as a high school student being involved in politics, and I’ve been active ever since.”

Firestone’s first official role in city hall was as an intern on the Boston City Council for a ������Ƶ senior project, where he worked in a councilor’s office serving the Allston-Brighton neighborhood. His early career experiences included federal legislative work and leadership roles in labor and academic policy organizations. He then held key positions in the Massachusetts Attorney General’s Office, rising from assistant attorney general to chief of staff. He also managed major political campaigns and voter protection efforts at the national level, prior to serving in senior leadership for the City of Boston.

Firestone’s commitment to the city is longstanding and authentic. Living in Boston himself, he explains how valuable the city’s assets are to residents: “We have incredible cultural resources here, co-located in Boston because for generations in this community, individually and collectively, we have invested in building and sustaining institutions. Whether it is museums, universities, or hospitals, they have a tremendous impact on the economy of the entire region, and in fact, really shape the economic and cultural life of the entire Northeast.” 

As local institutions face increasing federal funding and policy pressures, Firestone points to ways the City of Boston can support them. “Boston has a really critical role to play at this moment,” he says. “We need to stand shoulder to shoulder with [organizations] and recognize the collective value that we provide for the residents of Boston and for the entire region, and for the world, frankly.”

Firestone is proud of his commitment to the city. As a teen, however, envisioning making a political impact or becoming a catalyst for change can feel distant or intimidating. I asked Firestone how students should approach advocacy and politics, as this involvement can oftentimes seem confined to more experienced political leaders. 

“At a time when politics globally and nationally can seem so fraught, divided, and far away, there is tremendous opportunity for engaged young people to see their passion and their work and their beliefs reflected in their local communities,” he says. “Whether that is supporting a candidate for local office or attending a community meeting about an issue affecting your own neighborhood, these are great ways to experience the reality of the political process and ones that are available to students in high school.”

The experience Firestone had with volunteering at ������Ƶ is still available to students today. ������Ƶ continues to provide opportunities that develop our passion for making change in our communities. From ������Ƶ Students in Action (������ƵSA) to the more recent Positivity and Light Society (PALS), ������Ƶ supports students who strive to be, as Firestone describes, “connected to the world around them.” 

For Firestone, public service is most meaningful when it remains closely connected to everyday life in the community. “One of the great things about working in local government in a city where you live and where you have kids in the schools is you have a real, immediate connection to the residents and to the work that you’re doing,” he says. “It’s such a fulfilling way to practice public service. I feel very lucky.” 

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This November, Rhee and Hettinger helped organize Reimagining Elite Higher Education, a three-day conference in New Haven, Conn., that brought together around 300 students, alums, and faculty members from 68 colleges and organizations. The event examined how universities could rebuild public trust while addressing inequality. At ������Ƶ, the discussion connected directly to themes explored in Dasgupta’s class, including governance and political theory. Rhee, a chemistry major, said he felt disillusioned with the culture of corporate recruiting at college. He expressed a desire for more students to prioritize community impact over maximizing the return on their investment in their degrees. 

After taking a gap year to organize for the 2024 election in rural Pennsylvania, he began thinking more critically about the relationship between elite universities and civic leadership. While canvassing far from his college campus, he realized how few residents had been contacted or engaged at all. 

“It was really interesting to realize that people graduating from a lot of these Ivy League schools have a disproportionate amount of impact on this country, despite their limited interaction with their immediate communities,” he said. For Rhee, leading the conference became a way to push back against that dynamic and help reshape campus culture. 

He collaborated with co-chair Hettinger, a senior from California studying psychology and education. As the first student from her public high school to attend Yale, she said perceptions of being an Ivy League student often felt polarized. Through co-leading the conference, she hoped to create space for more balanced discussion. 

“It didn’t feel like there was this nuance to be critical of the universities and understand their role and responsibility in building a lot of distrust in higher education while also recognizing the value of these institutions as places of learning,” Hettinger said.

Throughout the conference, participants revised a draft document titled “An Academic Social Contract for Our Time,” proposing reforms such as ending legacy admissions, providing need-blind acceptance, encouraging investment in local communities, and preventing career funneling—where students are encouraged to be oriented towards certain types of careers from their first year of college.

Students in Dasgupta’s classroom raised questions about whether elite education increasingly determines social status in the United States. One student asked what happens to democratic life when educational prestige replaces other forms of status and belonging. 

Dasgupta connected the conversation to Marx’s critiques of institutions that reinforce class inequality. Students and speakers debated whether universities today continue to function as engines of social mobility or instead reproduce existing social hierarchies. 

The visit challenged students to think beyond higher education as a pathway to individual success and instead consider its broader role in shaping citizenship. Rhee and Hettinger represent a growing movement of student scholars advocating for greater societal accountability within collegiate learning environments. 

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We couldn’t have asked for more beautiful weather for ������Ƶ’s reunion on May 16 and 17, 2026. Around 250 alums returned to campus, most from the classes ending in 1 and 6, which were being celebrated, though alums from all years were welcome to attend. Since this reunion was held during the academic year, alums enjoyed several opportunities to engage with students as well as one another.

Saturday’s events began with student-led campus tours and a historical walking tour of Concord, Mass. Alums had the option to attend a class with a current faculty member. Science Department Head Will Tucker shared a lesson about critical moments of scientific discovery in the 20th century and their impact on global events, from his course on chemistry and the Cold War. Several generations of alums came to his ������Ƶ Labs classroom, in a building new since many of them last returned to campus. Tucker shared that for their final projects in his course, students create a podcast that traces an issue from modern times to its origins in an event they learned about during the semester. Mathematics teacher Shawn Bartok offered a similar sample of a course he teaches about math and politics. In his interactive session, he invited alums to weigh in on a seemingly simple topic: “Which is best: french toast, pancakes, or waffles?” Giving them chances to experience many ways voting data can be collected and interpreted, he demonstrated plurality, ranked choice, and weighted voting systems based on the class’s responses. His students puzzled out weighted voter values to reach particular coalition requirements and simulated the prisoner’s dilemma, which highlighted the impact of game theory on voting and the conflict between individual self-interest and collective benefit. Alums left with a new understanding of what math reveals about cooperation and how political power can be measured.

The music recital hall in the Centennial Arts Center (C.A.C.) filled for the Alum Association Assembly. In addition to appointing the new 2026–27 Alum Association officers and a vote on revised bylaws, alums heard an update from Head of School Henry D. Fairfax. He recognized retiring faculty and staff members Jackie Decareau, Sue Johnson P’20, Nancy Boutilier, and Christa Champion, and he shared enthusiasm about ������Ƶ’s enrollment for next year, which includes students from many U.S. states and from Egypt, Japan, Singapore, Nigeria, South Korea, Thailand, Hong Kong, and China.

Fairfax also shared about the ongoing work driven by ������Ƶ’s strategic plan. Just two weeks prior, the Board of Trustees had approved a campus master plan, which considers every inch of ������Ƶ’s campus and provides a flexible framework for future leaders to make decisions nimbly and in alignment with protecting the character of the campus learning environment. He added that he has tried to attend at least one class each week: “I’m constantly astonished by our superstar faculty and the incredible students we have here.”

During the assembly, alums also had a chance to talk with current students. Betsy Green ’91, who was celebrating her 35th reunion and facilitated the program, said, “I challenge you not to be a little jealous after hearing about their amazing experiences and the amazing facilities and opportunities that they have.” In a panel discussion moderated by Assistant Head for Student Life Grant Hightower, three current students spoke about the importance of senior chapels and other ������Ƶ traditions, courses such as the Sitcom Project that they had enjoyed taking this year, and the independence they have in shaping their learning journeys. Alums began reminiscing at the mention of certain favorite local haunts, and they had a chance to offer advice to their younger counterparts. One tip: Always wear your ������Ƶ ring—you never know when you’ll run into someone connected to ������Ƶ.

On Saturday afternoon in the Ransome Room, Chris Labosier, science teacher and ������Ƶ’s sustainability lead, opened a discussion about sustainability at ������Ƶ and beyond by sharing the organizational structure for overseeing this work at ������Ƶ, which involves students, faculty, staff, and trustees, and he announced the recent publication of the school’s first annual sustainability report. Then Labosier and Elyn Tao ’27, one of ������Ƶ’s student environmental representatives, moderated a panel discussion about driving sustainable change, which centered around the sustainable finance industry and the many uses of public lands.

After beginning her career in commercial banking, Melissa Moye ’76 spent over two decades at the World Wildlife Fund, where she led the nonprofit’s efforts to create sustainable sources of financing for conservation in developing countries. She discussed how climate change is creating uncertainty around investing and the differing regulatory contexts in the U.S. and other regions of the world. “Even though I didn’t start out interested in science, I always was interested in going to wild places,” she said, and she reflected on the transcendentalist legacy of spiritual engagement with nature she absorbed in Concord, Mass. Also an impact investor, Moye highlighted a project she supported, a seaweed farm in the Faroe Islands, developed as cattle feed to reduce methane emissions.

Like Moye, Nina Callahan ’16 is an investor in a seaweed business, though the business she supports is using it as a substitute for plastic. She traces her “sustainability bug” back to ������Ƶ, when Sonia Lo ’84 visited as the Hall Fellow to speak about hydroponic farming in 2015. A few years later, while Callahan was studying at Middlebury, she interned at Lo’s farm as a plant scientist. But more than the science itself, what interested her was how Lo runs her business. She ended up studying environmental economics, then working at Barclays as an investment banking analyst, before joining Paine Schwartz Partners, a private equity firm that specializes in sustainable food chain investing. Callahan, who also became a vegan while a student at ������Ƶ, highlighted the importance of agriculture in addressing the climate crisis. She said working within the firm’s “farm-to-fork” purview is  “a nice intersection of creativity, environmental protection, and a tangible impact.” 

Haninah Levine ’01 shared that he’s a lawyer with the National Park Service, adding, “I think it’s the coolest job you can possibly have with the word lawyer in the title.” Levine has worked for the Bureau of Land Management and the White House Council on Environmental Quality, and he has been with the Department of the Interior for around 11 years. He said he appreciates that his job involves so many disciplines and intersecting interests, from preservation for wildlife habitat and backcountry recreation to historical and culture conservation. “������Ƶ cultivated in me a passion for always finding more about different things, and I’ve been lucky enough to find a career where I get to humor that impulse,” he said. He added that he hoped to see more people trying to get out of their comfort zones and talking with, and listening to, others who don’t share their assumptions and goals. 

Later that afternoon, alums filled the dance studio for a special performance of the spring dance concert, Kinetic Echoes. Choreographed by John Patrick O’Neill and the members of the ������Ƶ Dance Project, the performance explored memory through movement. Then Linda Coyne Lloyd Performing Arts Department Chair Michael Bennett gave a tour of the C.A.C., highlighting several of its adaptable features, including the adjustable seating in the Hammett Ory Theater, the customizable acoustics of the music recital hall, and the flexible Spencer and Colton Process, Presentation, and Performance (P3) Lab, which can be configured for exhibitions, performances, and multidisciplinary learning experiences.

The schedule also allowed plenty of free time for reunioning alums to chat on the quad, enjoy a lemonade and popcorn bar in the C.A.C., and get out paddling on the Sudbury River. An animal presentation engaged families who had come with children, as well as some ������Ƶ students. And a memorial service honored the memories of alums and former faculty and staff whose deaths the school had learned about within the previous year.

Late Saturday afternoon, alums gathered by classes for photos by the Senior Steps. The sun was shining bright over cocktail hour, when alums mixed and mingled in front of the C.A.C. Over dinner in the theater, alums enjoyed music by ������Ƶ piano teacher Jonathan Fagan ’11, former ������Ƶ music teacher Ross Adams, and Grace Blewer ’11. At the reception, Fairfax congratulated the reunioning classes, highlighted how special it was for alums to have the opportunity to interact with current students this year, and welcomed two alums to share some remarks. 

“������Ƶ does many things well, and one of them is teaching students to ask good questions,” said Jamie Klickstein ’86, P’15 ’18, who was celebrating his 40th reunion and reflected on his time on the Board of Trustees and the “instant kinship” he feels when meeting a member of the ������Ƶ community. 

Former Alum Association President Laura McConaghy ’01, celebrating her 20th reunion, remarked on the “amazing community that ������Ƶ has fostered” and her ongoing connection to ������Ƶ through her relationships with fellow alums rooted, like she is, in common trust, love of learning, and care for each other and the world. She concluded with a toast to “the many twists and turns that are still ahead.”

The festivities wrapped up on Sunday morning with a leisurely farewell brunch. This was the final reunion before the first Alum Weekend will take place, according to a new schedule, in spring 2028. In this updated multiclass reunion model, alums from neighboring classes will be invited together, encouraging the deepening of connections across the ������Ƶ community.

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“Cancer itself doesn’t discriminate, but the rest of the world does,” she said. “Living with the same disease, two hosts battle the tumor with wildly different circumstances, and their chances for survival can be vastly different. These differences are human-made, and they can be human-fixed.”

Her idealism is grounded in 22 years of experience in treating breast cancer patients. As the section chief of breast medical oncology at NYU Langone Health, a role she began this year, Ko runs a translational research lab that investigates tumor biology and the social determinants of health. Previously, she taught and practiced for 14 years at Boston University and its affiliate hospital, Boston Medical Center. This “safety-net hospital” for the uninsured sits just 2 miles—but a world away—from the renowned Dana-Farber Cancer Institute, she said: “We serve wildly different patient populations, and the cancer experiences are as different as if we were in two different countries.”

Ko showed a map depicting the 1930s redlining that codified discriminatory mortgage lending with lasting effects on Boston communities. In largely affluent, white Back Bay, she said, only 15% of residents are enrolled in MassHealth, the Massachusetts state plan that provides free or low-cost insurance to low-income residents. In contrast, more than half to three-quarters of residents use Mass Health in Roxbury, Mattapan, and Dorchester, where two-thirds of Boston’s Black population is concentrated. Deep structural inequities correlate with a staggering 20- to 30-year difference in life expectancy between the two areas.

“We privilege the privileged,” Ko said. “If you have wealth, you will get great care, and the denial to get care based on poverty, lack of insurance, and racism is the legacy and reality of our current health system.” She showed a graph from the New England Journal of Medicine, charting the survival gap between Black and white women over time. Black women, she explained, have a 40% higher risk of dying of breast cancer.

The factors of these disparities are complex and interrelated, and they commonly contribute to a pattern of patient denial, Ko explained. For women living in poverty, financial instability, language barriers, and the significant challenges of taking time off work or family care to receive medical attention can lead to delayed diagnosis and treatment. Even once patients start getting care, being treated for cancer can become a “watershed moment” leading to financial collapse, she said, sharing the story of one of her patients who could not work during chemotherapy and, no longer able to pay rent, lost her housing. For insured patients whose income barely disqualifies them for assistance programs, high co-pays can also be ruinous.

Ko detailed the systems that health care teams at hospitals such as Boston Medical Center have developed to mitigate these inequities: BMC contains a food pantry and provides robust interpreter, health care navigation, and social work services. “These types of services get really strong because they have to,” she said.

Although well-intentioned individuals keep trying to fill such gaps, she acknowledged, “it’s a much bigger problem to fix than these one-offs,” requiring the development of more equitable systems. In the meantime, she suggested, how we talk about patients’ experiences matters.

Through her clinical practice, Ko understands how difficult it can be for underserved patients to keep appointments and follow medication schedules. While patients can often be labeled “difficult” or “noncompliant” in their medical records, “I see something different,” Ko said. “I see a patient who lacks trust.” She said medical care providers have the responsibility to earn that trust, give their underserved patients extra time, help them schedule appointments and scans, and affirm their lived experiences.

Ko explained that many academic studies of health care disparities are hindered by the quality of available data and subject to selection bias; their authors don’t have a practical understanding of the intersection of societal conditions and treatment outcomes because they don’t practice in hospitals that serve these patients. “The granular experience of navigating the medical system for the underserved is not adequately captured in the literature,” she said. 

Shedding light on this disconnection is Ko’s current project as she completes a fellowship year at the Harvard Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study. At Radcliffe, she’s working on a book, Seeing the Unseen, to bring public attention to health care inequities through the stories of some of her patients, humanizing the experiences of women diagnosed with breast cancer for whom she has provided care.

Speaking at ������Ƶ, Ko tied the power of personal stories to her own experience—as a child of Chinese immigrants, as a ������Ƶ student for whom belonging had sometimes been a struggle, and now as a medical professional motivated to help shape a more just health care system. “I always felt that this ������Ƶ tradition of the chapel was an antidote to that feeling of not having a place to belong,” she said. “Because here at ������Ƶ, I think our community’s opportunity to connect with each person’s authentic self every few days as a ritual in a chapel helped me see people as individuals with multitudes.”

The post Through Her Patients’ Stories, Oncologist Naomi Ko ’91, P’21 ’26 Makes Health Care Inequities Personal appeared first on ������Ƶ.

Community work has never been easy. Now, against the backdrop of a hyperpartisan public sphere, listening to learn and engaging in dialogue rather than debate seem like rare skills indeed. What can the people who practice them teach us?

We spoke with three ������Ƶ alums who offer their distinct perspectives on communication, ones based on research, community-building leadership, and their own lived experiences. Their common thread is a commitment to creating more equitable and inclusive systems—and a focus on how we talk to one another to do so. Here’s what they’ve learned.

Katrina Pugh ’83

Kate Pugh ’83 has been studying dialogue for 30 years. She’s seen that facilitated discussions don’t often change people’s mental models, which reinforce assumptions and perpetuate othering. So as she was researching what kinds of speech deepen understanding and coordinate meaningful action, she wanted to develop a conversational framework people could internalize and self-facilitate.

“I don’t think you can have a mindset of ‘we’ if people haven’t stood back and said, totally neutrally, ‘Let’s look at what we just said,” says Pugh, a lecturer in the Information and Knowledge Strategy program at Columbia University. Even if people are willing to do that, she adds, they can benefit from a rubric that’s “practically defined and quantitatively justified.”

With a Columbia colleague, Nara Altmann, Pugh published a framework called “Conversation for Civility, Collaboration, and Creativity” in 2024. Based on Pugh’s doctoral research, this presents five “discussion disciplines,” or conversational features associated with rhetorical intent: courtesy (demonstrating goodwill and respect), inclusion (recognizing another participant or drawing them out), integrity (making informative or declarative statements), integrity-Q (inquiring or seeking clarification), and translation (summarizing or synthesizing what’s been said). 

Using the framework, Pugh demonstrated that even a small shift in emphasis can dramatically influence conversational outcomes. In her doctoral research, she trained the first large language model, Google’s BERT (Bidirectional Encoder Representations from Transformers), to detect the five discussion disciplines and their impacts. Her research team had trained the model on data from public town halls about proposed aquaculture projects that had been hand-coded with the five discussion disciplines. Using the trained model, the team analyzed around 600 dialogues and evaluated the relationship between the shares of the discussion disciplines and the conversation outcomes.

“Sure enough, we found some really interesting relationships,” Pugh says. For example, when the share of inclusion increases by 10 percentage points, the likelihood of intent-to-act rises by 45%. Just as in “helping conversations,” greater acknowledgement and visibility make people more likely to take their roles seriously and commit to action. Similarly, with another dataset the team saw qualitative evidence that increasing proportions of questions and translation results in greater innovation.

These findings led Pugh to her mission to build a movement based on those five discussion disciplines. Even in in-person or online discussions dominated by indirection, disdain, or cynicism, they suggested, a group can move from transactional or defensive interactions to more curious, risk-taking, and forgiving dialogue.

In 2024, Pugh and Altmann co-founded the network, along with Columbia colleagues Eve Porter-Zuckerman and Steve Townsend. Its first meeting drew around 100 individuals committed to overcoming polarization through conversation. “People were genuinely ripe for attending to the features in conversation and how we can influence them,” Pugh says. Now she’s developing services and workshops for companies, nonprofits, and schools, as well as virtual trainings. Pugh says the framework is particularly applicable to organizations in transition; people in helping professions, such as teachers or hotline staffers; and nonhierarchical networks. But it’s broadly accessible too. 

“The goal is that anybody could say, ‘We need more questions in this conversation,’ or ask, ‘Is anyone doing translation?’” she says. “These are systems-thinking skills that help us be more versatile. The disciplines create space for us to break habits of disparagement and dismissal and recognize each other as co-creators.”

Pugh grew up in Lincoln, Mass. At ������Ƶ, she competed in cross-country and tennis, played flute in the chamber orchestra, and took part in a mainstage production. “������Ƶ was a really good, introspective place for me,” she says. “I could just be whatever I was.”

She majored in economics at Williams College, where she grew interested in understanding group interactions and wrote her senior thesis on the impact of unions on profitability measurement. Later, while earning a combined master of science degree and MBA at the MIT Sloan School of Management, Pugh was introduced to organizational learning and the lens of dialogue: “I said, ‘Oh, my goodness, this is the language I’m speaking.’”

To every professional role, she has brought her interest in dialogue—the nucleus of collaboration. Early on, she worked for major firms such as PwC, J.P. Morgan, Intel, and Fidelity before transitioning into knowledge management consulting. When the stock market crashed in 2008, she took time off to write a book, Sharing Hidden Know-How, about how to use conversation to elicit knowledge. Since 2011, she has taught the science of communities and networks at Columbia, where for six years she ran the master’s program in information and knowledge strategy. 

During the pandemic, Pugh returned to graduate school, earning a Ph.D. in ecology and environmental sciences in 2022 from the University of Maine. She now consults with corporations and organizations on change management and artificial intelligence (AI) design for sustainability. Since its founding in 2023, Pugh has also been a partner in Weaving Futures, a collective designing impact networks to create conditions for human flourishing.

What does she make of our contentious public discourse these days? “We’re in a terrible mess,” Pugh says. “First, we have a political sphere that is all about division and accusation. Second, we have a social media sphere that is all about reinforcing perspectives we already hold or amplifying them to be more edgy or negative. And third, we have AI, which can encourage us to settle for partial solutions and pull us away from social interactions.”

She offers some advice: “Remember that our conversations really do have an impact—from those conversations with a 2-year-old to those conversations with your bus driver. You could be the best thing that happened to them today.”

Even in our fragmented digital environment, she adds, “Pay attention to the composite of your interactions. You may also find an opportunity to use a new conversation muscle. Because no interaction is too small, you can be the one to sow new forms of civility.”

Turahn Dorsey ’89

Over his decades of leadership and coalition-building to bring about civic change, Rahn Dorsey ’89 has been motivated by curiosity. What new solutions can collaborative approaches to community development yield? How can we better communicate across differences?

As the president and chief executive officer of the Eastern Bank Foundation, Dorsey is driving its vision of building a thriving regional economy and more equitable and just communities in southern New England. With a mission focused on economic inclusion and mobility, the foundation works to improve early childhood education systems; integrate untapped talent in the workforce by lowering barriers to employment for immigrants, parents, and workers with disabilities; support small-business owners, particularly people of color and members of the LGBTQ+ community; and increase the supply of affordable housing. 

“If all those things take a generation to do, what should we be doing that cuts that time in half?” Dorsey asks. “Where can we accelerate and achieve what some of my colleagues and I have started to call ‘escape velocity’? What can create enough propulsion to help households break free from the gravitational pull of the conditions that entrench poverty?”

Dorsey is particularly interested in ideas that accelerate economic mobility. But as much urgency as he feels, he acknowledges that conversation is as indispensable as financial, political, and institutional capital—and that it only moves at the speed of trust.

“I’m very thankful that I was born in the Midwest,” says Dorsey, a proud native Detroiter. “For Michiganders, it’s not foreign to have long-standing relationships with people you don’t agree with ideologically, so you’re used to negotiating on a more human basis.” He says the agency, identity, and sense of belonging he developed thanks to his native city’s Black Power ethic and blue-collar culture have helped him negotiate boundaries of racial and class identity throughout his life. 

As a teen, Dorsey came to ������Ƶ through A Better Chance and Midwest Talent Search, organizations that place high-performing students of color in independent schools. He says growing up in Black-majority Detroit gave him a unique perspective. “I actually didn’t have deep experience with the effects of political and economic segregation, because Detroit was, and is, an innovative place,” he says. “I came to Concord with agency, so it didn’t overwhelm me. I loved being able to reach out across difference, and I loved the challenge. I loved the opportunity to go searching for who I wanted to be.”

At ������Ƶ, he leaned into music, formed lifelong friendships, and got a crash course in time management. “I was notorious for never sleeping and wore myself down every year, but it taught me a life lesson,” he says.

Long before he earned a bachelor’s degree in economics from the University of Michigan, an apprenticeship began shaping Dorsey’s career. At 16, he started working for a suburban Detroit firm owned by a family friend, who taught him to be a professional researcher and consultant. By 19, he was managing projects for the state of Michigan and the City of Detroit. In 1995, Dorsey moved to Boston to work at Abt Associates, a global strategy, consulting, and research firm founded by Clark Abt P’90 ’93, where for 13 years he conducted public policy research, covering 42 states and, he says, “learning a whole lot about community-based influence and what that has to do with systems change and public policy change.”

Dorsey went to work for the Barr Foundation in 2009 before joining the Boston mayoral campaign of his friend John Barros. When Barros entered the Marty Walsh administration in 2014, Dorsey did too. For four years, he served as Boston’s chief of education, leading, among other initiatives, the design of the city’s universal prekindergarten system. 

After joining the Eastern Bank Foundation as a Foundation Fellow in 2019, he became its president this summer. He says he believes the foundation has a critical role to play in helping to spur “a broader conversation about the civic purpose of wealth and to negotiate for the social contract we need to promote economic justice.”

Dorsey doesn’t make light of the obstacles to building consensus in these polarized times. “There’s almost a rapid spiral to the basest version of society right now,” he says. “This is not a moment for sitting on the sidelines. This moment needs every institution to think about its purpose, its relevance, and what it wants to contribute to a different world.”

In New Hampshire, Dorsey is part of a 10-member, Black-owned farm called Movement Family Farm. In their first year growing garlic, they bought seed from an older white farmer who seemed suspicious of them until he realized they needed to learn from him. When Dorsey’s wife mentioned to the farmer that she’s a pastor, they bonded over an unexpected connection: The farmer’s mother had also been a clergy member, at a time when very few women were. “It’s fascinating,” Dorsey says. “His background confuses the whole picture, because now if you want to put him in a box based on his political views, you can’t.” 

Dorsey says that encounters such as these—conversations with individuals with whom, on paper, he might not have a lot in common—give him hope for accelerating “heart-to-heart work.”

He often reflects on the process of navigating impasses and finding points of agreement: “You aren’t going to discover the commonalities without having the conversation, so you’ve got to make some level of commitment. I have the great fortune—and I actually think about it as a source of wealth—that these conversations happen pretty regularly in my life. Now I have a deep curiosity that drives me to pursue them more actively.”

Eric Nguyen ’00

“It’s easy to affirm your values in the abstract, but hard to see that you’re not actually showing up the way you want to,” says Eric Nguyen ’00. As senior director of consulting and training at the nonprofit YW Boston, he works with corporations, organizations, and government agencies to help leaders and their teams understand their cultures and remove barriers to equity and belonging. 

Nguyen and his colleagues conduct organizational assessments, make customized recommendations, and offer trainings on identity and bias, dialogue across differences, and giving and receiving feedback. They also model a highly participatory process of creating more inclusive decision-making structures. “The challenge is bringing together a diverse set of stakeholders, who each have their own needs and priorities, to clarify their values and define a shared vision,” he says. “We’re able to help people see things more clearly and communicate with each other in ways that are candid and honest, but also compassionate.”

Clients eager for solutions might request a two-hour workshop on microaggressions, for example. “We can’t really get to that until we do deep identity work,” Nguyen says. “The better we understand our own identities, which is where bias comes from, the better able we are to engage in dialogue, which—unlike debating—requires vulnerability, grace, and patience for hearing others’ perspectives. If we’re just thinking about being right, we’re only deepening divisions.”

He’s concerned that cancel culture has left little room for repair and restoration. “When people are operating out of fear, not wanting to say the wrong thing, you never get to what you need to talk about,” he says. “If instead you value a growth mindset, if you say, ‘We’re a learning organization,’ then you can think about putting practices in place to support that kind of culture. Helping people develop new schemas for communication is super exciting—it’s radically reimagining what the workplace, educational settings, and our relationships can be.”

Born in Boston to parents who had emigrated from Vietnam, Nguyen grew up in Lowell, Mass., and he watched his parents struggle to assimilate into American culture. He spoke Vietnamese fluently until he was 6, when they began encouraging him to speak only English at home and at school. “It came from their own experience of discrimination, of having their intelligence questioned because of their accents,” he says. “They didn’t want that for me or for my brothers.” 

He regrets losing his first language and that deep connection to his cultural heritage, and he says it took a long time to unlearn the sense of superiority that accompanied his fluency in English.

When Nguyen transitioned from a racially diverse, working-class public school to ������Ƶ, he experienced culture shock. He did well academically and athletically, but socially, he was on the fringes. Though he says ������Ƶ was “ahead of its time” in having affinity groups, none existed for children of immigrants; being steered toward a group for Asian international students shaped his convictions about asking, not assuming, what community members need.

Still, with his advisor, Howie Bloom P’08 ’09 ’14, he found a second family. “Being seen, having adults I could go to, was powerful at such a vulnerable, pivotal time of life,” he says. “That relational piece of ������Ƶ is something I bring along, and even those moments where I felt like I didn’t belong have been really helpful for me.”

One Martin Luther King Jr. Day, Nguyen recalls, students wrote down identities that were important to them and wore them on lanyards to start conversations. “That was a moment when I got to define for others who I was,” he says. “And I got to see how other people defined themselves in less visible ways.”

After earning a degree in psychology from Amherst College, Nguyen taught at several New England independent schools. Over time, he began enjoying helping colleagues implement more equitable teaching practices. While teaching and working in admissions at Noble and Greenough School, he helped start Achieve, a program focused on closing the educational opportunity gap for students in Boston’s public schools through summer enrichment and academic-year tutoring.

In 2018, Nguyen began managing a scholarship program at Northeastern University. He was struck by how many students from underrepresented groups faced structural barriers to belonging, which he worked to address. “With some of our most vulnerable students, if they couldn’t get housing, that was it—they couldn’t continue to be students,” he says. “It opened my eyes to the impact we can have if we operate at the systems level.”

After serving as the director for the Center for Inclusive Excellence at Framingham State University, he joined YW Boston in 2023. He recently worked with a nonprofit grappling with community tensions that hadn’t consciously considered its values in decades, and his assessment of a government agency uncovered rifts between leadership and staff regarding psychological safety, communication, and decision-making. To address such sensitive topics, Nguyen often uses a facilitated conversational framework, LARA (Listen, Affirm, Respond, and Add). “There are times it feels kind of forced, but it requires all the parties to agree to using shared language,” he says. “Why not remind ourselves that we want to listen to each other and affirm when we find moments of connection before we respond?”

But Nguyen stresses that there’s no single way to engage with others. In addition to social identities, he asks his workshop participants to explore various change-agent identities. “Some people are vocal about articulating needs,” he says. “But we also need people who can create coalitions and people who think about solutions. Too often, it’s the same person trying to wear all three hats, so you see a lot of burnout. That’s part of building community too—recognizing you have something to contribute and you don’t have to do it alone.”

Since 2022, he has served on the board of the Natick Organic Farm, in his community in Natick, Mass., where he helped staff establish a shared vision for inclusivity. The farm recently installed multilingual signs in English, Spanish, and Portuguese, hiring native speakers to translate the text. This fall, it purchased an all-terrain wheelchair for members of visiting school and corporate groups to use.

Nguyen says the conversations the board and staff had were as important as those visible changes: “We’re all stronger when we’re able to think more broadly about who our community is and how we can help people feel part of it.”

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Then-seniors Langelier and Sandler dressed for Formal in 1992.

Boston-area public high school teachers Michael Sandler ’92 and Sara Langelier ’92 have a “������Ƶ couple” story fit for a romantic comedy. Though they dated during their senior year, they’d been out of touch for more than a decade when, in 2003, they ran into each other on the street in Brookline, Mass. Three years after they renewed their friendship over a spontaneous lunch, they married. 

Sandler has taught at Arlington High School since 2008. “I lucked into teaching psychology,” he says. After working in web design, real estate, and restaurants, he finally listened to friends’ suggestions: He earned a master’s in teaching from his undergraduate alma mater, Tufts, then landed his position. In April 2025, he was recognized with a Charles T. Blair-Broeker Excellence in Teaching Award by the American Psychological Association’s Committee of Teachers of Psychology in Secondary Schools.

“������Ƶ fanned the flames of wanting to learn,” Sandler says. “We had great relationships with our teachers—amazing teachers who got me thinking in ways I never had before.” He recalls being nervous as a senior, anticipating even greater challenge in college, only to realize how well he’d been prepared.

“As an adolescent, you’re making core memories and figuring out your identity—and what an intimate, accepting place ������Ƶ was to do that,” he says. “I really felt like I could be myself.” 

It’s what he and Langelier hope to offer their students.

Langelier, who began teaching French at Wayland High School in 2001, says she’s particularly enjoying her current AP French class: “They’ve bonded and they’re really playful and fun, but they love French and they love learning.”

Though she wasn’t initially a great French student herself, she studied in Paris during her junior year at Connecticut College. “I wasn’t shy about talking to people, and that’s when it came alive for me,” she says. She went on to earn a master’s degree from the Harvard Graduate School of Education. When she first started teaching, she says, she was touched that her former ������Ƶ French teacher Nicole Fandel invited her over to share materials and advice. 

Langelier regularly leads student trips to France and French-speaking Canada, and she runs a student sewing club. “It’s a fantastic way to get to know kids on a different level,” she says. “With phones and technology, there are fewer opportunities for kids to interface with adults, and even to be in community with each other face to face. As educators, our jobs are more important than ever.”

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For Corie Walsh ’12, social change has always meant rolling up her sleeves and getting to work. She organized protests to raise awareness of ethnic violence in Darfur as a 10-year-old, and in middle school she undertook her first hunger strike in solidarity with refugees facing food shortages. During her teenage years, she helped out at a transitional housing program each week. As a young adult, she moved to Uganda to establish community programs, then to Yemen to implement humanitarian programs.

With parents who were both community organizers, Walsh grew up amid activism in Cambridge, Mass., which is home to many Sudanese refugees. “All the way back in grade school, they were my friends and my fellow community members, not simply a distant cause that needed our help,” she says.

In 10th grade at ������Ƶ, Walsh was co-head of Students Promoting Empathy, Action, and Knowledge (SPEAK) and a member of the ������Ƶ Service Activists (������ƵSA). As a junior, she took an influential class that explored models of social justice, taught by Elizabeth Bedell, and as a senior, she did an independent project on comparative genocide studies. In addition to her parents, Walsh credits her ������Ƶ faculty advisor, Shep Shepard, with providing steady guidance and mentorship throughout those years.

At the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, Walsh majored in peace, war, and defense. “Attending a large state school where many people were very different from me shifted and expanded my worldview,” she says. Her senior thesis was on civilian behavior during the Rwandan genocide. 

“Among the questions that consumed me was that of how mass atrocities and genocide can happen,” she says. “War itself can have many causes: economic, geographic, political. But how do you get to the point where you are trying to eliminate an entire population? I knew the best way to find out was to build relationships with communities who were going through this.”

After college, an internship in Washington, D.C., led to a salaried position with the nonprofit Mercy Corps, for which Walsh moved to Sana’a, the capital of Yemen, in 2019. Due to increasing conflict, it was at the time undergoing one of the worst humanitarian crises in the world. There, her work involved developing programmatic strategy and evaluating performance.

“One of our largest barriers in Yemen was that most of our donors and funders had not been in the country since the war began, and yet they were still setting our agenda,” Walsh says. “I knew that what we really needed to be doing was capturing the voices and expertise of the Yemenis themselves. People closest to the problem, in any humanitarian situation, should have a say in what the solution looks like.”

Ensuring that the right voices are part of the conversation has been a throughline of Walsh’s approach to peacebuilding work. She returned to the U.S. with Mercy Corps in 2020, and in 2021 she began working for Humanity United, a private philanthropic foundation that awards grants to organizations trying to find peaceful solutions to conflict. Now a senior portfolio manager there, she manages strategy and influencing efforts aimed at transforming philanthropy as well as budget and decision-making processes for the peacebuilding team. “The central concern that drives us is how to support the creation of a system that shifts power and agency to peacebuilders on the frontlines,” she says.

But with the closure of the U.S. Agency for International Development in January 2025, among other large-scale funding cuts, everything changed. “The rug got pulled out from under us,” Walsh says. “USAID shut down, and funding for peacebuilding and human rights work around the world stopped suddenly.”

Walsh is currently working for Humanity United remotely from Paris while her husband completes graduate studies there, and she says the world is facing ever-increasing challenges: “We just completed a survey that looked at the global impact on peacebuilding organizations of the recent funding cuts. We learned that 55% of local organizations will soon be completely out of funding.”

Despite the political upheaval of our times, Walsh is not without hope. “Much as we might wish otherwise, we find ourselves in a profound moment of transformation,” she says. “We are compelled to think differently about how funding, decision-making, peacebuilding, and human rights resources should be organized, and we have an opportunity to build a more just way of operating.”

Observing so many people coming together to support neighbors in need, whether by donating, volunteering, or protesting, “helps to counter the negative social structures afoot right now,” she says. “The issues I have worked on around the globe are not so different from the challenges we now face at home. We need to keep sight of the fact that social change doesn’t happen in the voting booth every four years. It happens every day in our communities, and it comes from all of us.”

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Why would anyone choose to relive the most traumatic moments of their life, day after day, reenacting those horrific memories on stage in front of an audience of strangers?

It’s a question Annie Lareau ’86 has answered often, ever since the premiere of her three-person play at the Edinburgh Festival Fringe in summer 2025. Fuselage explores a horrible experience from her past: the bombing of Pan Am Flight 103 over Lockerbie, Scotland, in December 1988. Eight of Lareau’s closest friends from Syracuse University were on that flight, including her best friend, Theodora Cohen. Lareau and her classmates had just completed a semester in London; she had chosen to fly home a day later than her friends.

Lareau says she was always a theater kid. As a little girl growing up in Denver, she attended plays and concerts with her mother, Marten Ann Poole ’58. In middle school, she joined the drama club. Her love of the stage blossomed during her three years at ������Ƶ, where she performed in productions including The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie, After Magritte, and several musicals. In her senior year, she tried her hand at directing for the first time.

“I spent almost every hour of my life in the P.A.C. during those years,” she recalls. “Theater allowed me to learn about moving and speaking and storytelling in a way that I don’t think would have been possible elsewhere. I could feel the iambic pentameter when on stage doing Shakespeare. Had I just been handed the book in a classroom, I wouldn’t have had the same experience. ������Ƶ gave me those opportunities.”

As a junior at Syracuse earning her BFA in acting and directing, Lareau spent a semester in London through the university’s study abroad program for theater majors. “We studied with actors from the London Academy of Performing Arts and the Royal Academy of Dramatic Arts,” she remembers. “We took classes all day and attended professional performances in the evening. I was having the time of my life.” 

The morning of December 21, 1988, Lareau bid farewell to her five flatmates as they left for the airport. Alone in her London flat and packing for her own flight the next day, Lareau turned on the TV. With growing horror, she learned that the flight her friends had boarded that morning—Pan Am 103—had exploded into a ball of flames over Lockerbie. Among the passengers who perished were 35 Syracuse University students. “I knew all of them,” Lareau says.

Nearly incapacitated by grief, trauma, and survivor’s guilt, Lareau somehow made it back to campus for the spring semester and again for her senior year. Looking back at a time she now calls “The Great Unraveling,” she recalls a phase marked by bad relationship choices, unsatisfying attempts at therapy, and unrelenting attention from the media, who stalked and harassed Lareau and other bereaved Syracuse students because of the story’s lurid appeal.

Upon graduating, Lareau had just two wishes: to embark upon a career in the theater and to get as far away as possible from Syracuse and the tragedy it had come to represent for her. Moving to Seattle, she performed with a national improv troupe, taught classes at Seattle Children’s Theatre, and adapted classic works of literature for the stage. Her growing interest in the intersection of theater and education led her back east for a year to earn a master’s in education at Harvard, where she studied Carol Gilligan’s work on the ways in which girls’ voices are metaphorically suppressed. When she returned to Seattle, she founded a nonprofit for teen girls that combined outdoor adventure and wilderness skills with art and music. In the years that followed, she was named artistic director of ArtsWest and then of Seattle Public Theater. She married a fellow actor and raised a daughter, who is now herself a college student in London.

When the COVID-19 pandemic shut down public performances in 2020, Lareau began writing a long-postponed memoir about the 1988 plane crash and its aftermath, incorporating elements of the trauma that had never fully left her, the grief over losing so many friends, and the poignant experience of visiting the town of Lockerbie in 2019 to meet some of the villagers whose lives had been impacted by the crash. 

In 2022, Lareau left her full-time job with Seattle Public Theater to undergo treatment for breast cancer, then earned an MFA in creative writing. Empowered with more free time and the new degree, her thoughts turned to how she might adapt the yet-to-be-published memoir for the stage. The result was the 70-minute play that debuted at Edinburgh Fringe last summer. Over the course of a month, it ran for 25 performances, filling the 140-seat house each time. Lareau played the part of herself, and two other actors played all the other roles. 

“People ask me how I could bear to go through this experience on stage, day after day,” she says. “I always answer that yes, it’s very difficult to return to that time in my life, but in doing so, I relive the good parts of it as well: the joyful, funny, crazy moments that my friends and I had together in college and during our months in London. I get to spend time with the memory of those friends: Theo, Miriam, Nicole. After years of holding those memories in my mind as something horrible, now I can revisit that time as something that was also wonderful.”

Lareau is currently planning for productions of Fuselage in Seattle and Syracuse and exploring possibilities for performances in New York City and London during the 2026–27 theater season. While she continues to work consistently as an actor and director across the country, she is also focusing on her writing, having recently published essays in HuffPost and the Brussels Review, among others. In addition, Lareau is working on a lighthearted novel set in the 1980s in Key West, Fla., a place she visited frequently as a girl. 

“My background in theater has given me skills in my writing around scene building and dialogue that some people struggle with,” she says. “Going all the way back to my time at ������Ƶ, I’m a kinesthetic learner. As a director, I’m used to moving bodies around in space. And that has fed my writing in a lovely way.”

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What began as a casual conversation at the class of 1973’s 50th reunion evolved into a trip of a lifetime. In summer 2023, much of the class gathered at ������Ƶ to mark their five decades since graduation. For Stephanie Lugg ’73, the milestone reunion carried special weight. It was the first reunion she had ever attended, and it sparked an idea that would soon take her classmates far beyond ������Ƶ’s campus.

Lugg, who has lived in the Scottish Borders for nearly a decade, noticed a recurring theme in her reunion conversations. When classmates learned where she lived, their reactions were immediate and enthusiastic: They shared stories of past trips, long-held travel dreams, or places still lingering on bucket lists. After the reunion, she followed up with a handful of classmates to test a question that felt both bold and inviting: What if the class traveled to Scotland together? 

The response was overwhelmingly positive. Within weeks, an email went out to the entire class, and interest quickly grew. Though the trip was planned nearly two years prior and participation shifted as schedules and circumstances evolved, 14 travelers—10 alums and four spouses—ultimately made the journey to the Scottish Highlands in summer 2025, many of them traveling from the United States.

In addition to Lugg, the adventure-seekers included Susie Helme ’73, Cynthia McCallister ’73, Sue McDonald ’73, Wendy Persson Monk ’73, Elizabeth Campbell Peters ’73 and Howie Saxner, Emily Simonoff ’73 and Hugh Collins, Andrea Williams ’73, Sarah Witte ’73 and Drew Cheney, and Cathy Wolf ’73 and Fred McMane.

“I think it was quite remarkable,” Lugg says. “There were multiple comments from those of us who didn’t know each other particularly well during school about how much we bonded and enjoyed each other’s company. We were able to talk openly and easily about the past 50-plus years.”

The group gathered in Argyll, a region known for its dramatic landscapes, coastal waters, and deep archaeological history. The fourteen travellers stayed at two different places near Kilmartin Glen and Kilmartin village, six at Kilmartin Castle, and eight in two cottages on the Ederline Estate. 

Rather than following a rigid itinerary, the trip balanced structured group experiences with time for smaller adventures. The class carpooled to their destinations, creating an easy rhythm of togetherness and independence. 

Highlights included multiple group meals—ranging from a casual pub dinner to a private chef experience—as well as a full day of exploring Kilmartin Glen, an expansive valley home to hundreds of Neolithic carvings, standing stones, and burial cairns dating back more than 4,000 years. The group also enjoyed a private tour of a historic castle and a voyage aboard a private boat charter, where many of them spent the day sailing around the Inner Hebridean islands.

Though the travelers came from a wide range of professional backgrounds—as artists, writers, doctors, educators, designers, filmmakers, and business leaders—they found common ground in their shared curiosity and willingness to explore. 

Their ������Ƶ spirit revealed itself in a spontaneous rendition of “Jerusalem” during the group’s final dinner. “Out of nowhere, everyone sang on pitch without making any mistakes in the words at all,” Lugg says. “It wasn’t planned, it just happened. That was pretty special.”

The trip was also a shared celebration of turning 70, a milestone the group toasted with non-alcoholic champagne and plenty of laughter. The experience reaffirmed the value of an alum relationship long after graduation. 

Reflecting on the trip, Witte shares, “I’m finding it hard to explain to other people how it all came to pass, and how magical and wonderful our time was. What we shared was our intention to be open-hearted and a lot of friendly curiosity. A good plan for any day, any gathering.” 

“I know without a doubt how lucky I am to have shared our week exploring Argyll,” McDonald adds. “I’m thankful for the group’s thoughtfulness, kindnesses, adventurousness, positive energy, good humor, and remarkably complementary interests and skill sets!”

Plans are already taking shape for a class trip to Provence, France, and interest is growing, including from classmates who were unable to join the Scotland trip but hope to participate in future adventures. 

Since returning home, the group has also made a point of staying connected. A recent hybrid class lunch in Cambridge, Mass., brought together those who had made the Scotland trip as well as other classmates, both in person and on Zoom. Their continued classwide invitations have reinforced that these journeys are not exclusive but an open continuation of shared class life. 

More than 50 years after graduation, the class of ’73 discovered that reunion doesn’t have to end when the weekend does—and sometimes the best way to revisit the past is to set off together toward somewhere entirely new. 

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������Ƶ named Ramirez this year’s Hall Fellow to honor his thoughtful, purpose-driven storytelling about the human experience, focused on marginalized communities. An Emmy and duPont award-winning producer, he has combined investigative journalism and cinematic techniques to explore complex causes of conflict and uplift stories of compassion, resilience, and recovery. For two decades, he worked as a network news and documentary producer for Dateline NBC, NBC News, and CBS News, and he helped launch the cable channel Fusion, a joint venture between ABC News and Univision. In 2016, he and Amber Payne, his wife and business partner, co-founded the production company . Its mission is to create documentary films with depth and integrity that can change perspectives.

Though others entrust him with their stories every day, when he spoke at ������Ƶ, Ramirez said telling his own was “kind of uncomfortable.” Perhaps that’s why he began talking about his childhood by establishing historical context: The Immigration and Nationality Act of 1965 opened the U.S. for the first time to non-European immigrants—people from Asian, African, and Latin American countries—including his family, who came from the Philippines. His uncle emigrated first, then his mother, who worked in New York for two years before she could arrange for Ramirez and his sister to join her. At 10, having previously attended a strict Catholic school in Manila, he found New York City’s streets and his public school chaotic. In junior high, he began to get into some trouble.

“If it weren’t for this one teacher who believed in my potential, I wouldn’t be here,” he said. That teacher connected him with A Better Chance, a scholarship program that helps prepare and place students from underserved communities in independent schools. 

“I was amazed and impressed by this place,” Ramirez said. Right away at ������Ƶ, he got into the visual arts, photography, and filmmaking, which spurred his interest in visual storytelling. One of his first classes was an animation course; he made a film about a glove missing its match—its “one true glove.” Later, he made several narrative Super 8 films before trying his hand at documentary filmmaking his senior year.

One of his final projects for a film class was a documentary about the U.S. Immigration Reform and Control Act of 1986, which granted asylum to 3 million people. He interviewed migrants who had come to Boston to work and were pursuing citizenship. “It was a terrible, terrible production,” Ramirez said, “but it opened up my mind to being a teller of other people’s stories.”

He also said ������Ƶ’s “culture of learning” expanded his sense of possibility. Designing an independent study to learn about the history of the Philippines, he said, “showed me that I could actually be the activator of my own learning and my own education.”

After graduating, during a gap year in New Mexico, he read an article in the New York Times about Pagsanjan, a village in the Philippines where Apocalypse Now had been filmed. He knew the place: His grandmother had grown up nearby. 

“It was told in this sort of orientalist point of view, and that article just bothered me,” he said. “I thought I could tell the story from a different perspective.” He raised a small amount of money, including $300 from ������Ƶ—enough to get him into preproduction and hire local crews to film in the Philippines for three days. A year later, he returned to ������Ƶ to present the film.

After graduating from Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts at the New School, Ramirez worked as a carpenter while making independent documentaries, before earning his graduate degree in journalism at Columbia University. He went straight into a job at NBC News. “I had this academic pedigree, a very pretentious film pedigree, and I was reading the New York Times and the Economist—I had not watched TV news in years,” he said. “My North Star in being at the networks was to make sure that underrepresented people’s stories were on the air.”

His first pitch was about the Filipino veterans who had fought alongside U.S. soldiers during World War II and had never received the benefits they’d been promised. “I had lined up everybody,” Ramirez said. “I was really excited. I was going to get the story on air, and they were like, ‘No, sorry. It’s not big enough.’”

Ramirez weathered many more disappointing responses from the networks, and he worried he had sold out, working for a corporate media conglomerate. “But it never stopped me,” he said. “I just kept pitching and pitching.” 

He also made the most of opportunities that came his way. In his first assignment for Dateline NBC, over the course of a summer, he followed a family of migrant berry pickers (U.S. citizens) from their home in the Rio Grande Valley, in Texas, to Michigan. Recalling that their van regularly broke down along the way, Ramirez said, “The hardest part was being an observer, standing back and filming the whole time. It was really difficult for me to do, but it showed me the resiliency of the children.” He kept in touch with them; several years later, he did a follow-up story about the kids who had traveled and picked berries alongside their parents, after many of them had graduated from high school and college.

For 20 years, Ramirez produced stories about immigration, terrorism, health care, climate change, drug wars, human rights, and natural disasters. But he found the networks confining. “Broadcast news is very limited in terms of storytelling,” he said. “It’s often binary. There’s always good versus evil. You have to find the bad guys in the stories, and it’s not like that. It’s always much more complicated than that.” He took a leap to become an independent producer so that he could tell stories the way he wanted, “from a perspective of asset-framing, not deficit-framing,” he said. 

The first documentary Tilt Shift Media produced was about the Harlem Children’s Zone, which interwove interviews with video shot by kids in Harlem in the 1980s and ’90s. “They had been sitting on this for decades because they wanted to tell their own story,” Ramirez said. “For years, Harlem had been depicted by the press very negatively, while people there were working to change and transform these communities. We wanted to tell stories about people of color.”

The project gave Ramirez a chance to look back at the New York he had grown up in during the ’80s, to tell its story from the perspective of communities coming together. “I beat the odds, right, coming from New York City, from an immigrant background,” he said. “Their concept was changing the odds for this community, rather than beating the odds for individuals.”

For Ramirez, it was a paradigm shift. “These stories of people making transformative change in their communities, it’s infectious, it’s inspiring,” he said. “You want to do it—you want to make a change. That opened up our whole world.”

He said that one of the great privileges of his work is listening to people: “There’s a lot of division—we’re all living in different silos—but I think we all want the same thing for ourselves, for our kids. We all want to feel good about doing something for our community, for others. Some people may disagree about what that action is, but you want to feel good about yourself. I think deep listening to understand is one of the hardest things we can do, especially these days, but we could use a lot more of it.”

Ramirez said responsible storytelling means not being arrogant when entering a community, being open to “even the craziest pitches,” and getting the facts right. “The journalism industry is under attack, and we need to be as factual and as truthful as possible,” he said. “Fact-checking is key right now to gain back trust in the process.” 

He reflected on the rise of social media and the decline of trust in traditional news sources as disinformation, artificial intelligence, and algorithms have complicated how we stay informed. Ramirez said he’d like to see kids being taught media literacy at a younger age and journalism considered a skilled trade rather than a lofty endeavor. He also highlighted opportunities for young people “to use their phones in a positive way” to learn the skills of fact-based storytelling. “And you guys have a full-fledged studio here in the C.A.C. now,” he said. “It’s really impressive. You should use it.”

Noting the numerous writers and filmmakers in ������Ƶ’s alum community, he advised students to tap into the ������Ƶ network. “And read Working,” he added. “It’s just one of those great books that leaves a mark on you and sends you on a trajectory, even if you’re not sure where to start.”

The ������Ƶ Board of Trustees established the Elizabeth B. Hall Fellowship in 1963 to honor the legacy of former headmistress Betty Hall. For more than 60 years, this endowed lectureship has brought distinguished individuals to speak on campus, many of them ������Ƶ alums, including recent Hall Fellows Adam Geer ’99 and Caitlin FitzGerald ’02.

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