“Something Really Big—and Good—in the World”
That was the headline for the story we ran following the announcement of the first round of winners of the President’s Engagement Prize [“Gazetteer,” May|Jun 2015]. I remember interviewing then-Penn president Amy Gutmann Hon’22, who had established the prize the year before, as she described sharing the news with the winners (“Never have I had five calls in a row that were so joyful”) and how she couldn’t “wait to bring them back to speak to other students and tell us what worked, and what didn’t work, and what kind of satisfaction they’ve gotten” from the experience.
In this issue’s cover story, “The Unexpected Entrepreneurs,” associate editor Dave Zeitlin C’03 sets out to answer those questions, from the perspective of a decade’s worth of prizewinners. Since supplemented by categories for innovation and sustainability, the President’s Prizes offer $100,000 in program support, plus a $50,000 stipend for each team member. That level of funding has been transformative in jumpstarting projects that otherwise might have taken years to get off the ground, but also has presented challenges for winners in managing time and resources and sustaining progress beyond the prize year.
Dave spoke with winners going back to that first round up through this year’s awardees—and whose projects range widely, from using improv to enhance kids’ presentation skills to a technology that measures the ripeness of fruit to reduce food waste—about what the prize has meant to them. He also highlights an initiative aimed at securing ongoing financial and mentoring support from alumni for prizewinners and their ideas, as well as facilitating the sharing of feedback and advice among prizewinners themselves.
One of the first issues of the Gazette published after I became editor featured a cover photograph by Harvey Finkle SW’61, accompanying a story on homelessness. “The Instrument Is Yourself,” with text by senior editor Trey Popp, offers a varied sampling of Finkle’s decades of photojournalism and portraiture, in which activism and artistry are richly intertwined. (The photographer’s archives are housed in Penn Libraries’ Kislak Center for Special Collections, Rare Books and Manuscripts.)
The immediate occasion for the story is an ongoing retrospective project between Finkle—who had to put his camera aside in 2020 because of macular degeneration—and local publisher Tursulowe Press. So far, that has yielded volumes featuring mothers, immigrant communities in Philadelphia, and readers in various settings. But Trey also traces Finkle’s biography and his career as a social worker and involvement in anti-poverty and disability rights activities, and how that has combined with his photographic work.
Also in this issue, frequent contributor JoAnn Greco discusses three recent faculty books, nominally addressed to business audiences, that offer useful advice for anyone in “Life Hacks.” Penn GSE’s Kandi Wiens GrEd’16 mixes a personal account of growing up poor and overachieving and succumbing to work-related stress with broad lessons on how to overcome it in Burnout Immunity. In Magic Words, Wharton’s Jonah Berger draws on language models to provide tips on “what to say to get your way,” while sociologist and globalization expert Mauro Guillén analyzes the coming “postgenerational” society in The Perennials.
—John Prendergast C’80
Editor
