CHICAGO — A woman who helps students go to college with their “posse,” a psychiatrist who treats combat veterans and a museum director on Alaska’s Kodiak Island are among the 24 winners of this year’s MacArthur Foundation “genius grants.”
The $500,000 fellowships were announced today by the Chicago-based John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation. Recipients can use the money however they wish.
“It’s an incredible gift,” said Deborah Bial, 42, founder and president of the Posse Foundation, which helps form social networks that college students can turn to for support. “It will change my life and I hope it will change Posse’s life.”
Bial was working with New York City public school students in a leadership program when one of the program’s alumni tried to explain to her why he struggled after high school. “He said, ‘I never would have dropped out of college if I had my posse with me,’ ” she said.
The conversation inspired Bial, then 23, to create the program that identifies promising teenagers from urban environments and gets them pre-collegiate training in small groups with other students — their “posse” — destined for the same school.
Since then, the New York-based foundation has placed nearly 2,000 students from six cities at 28 colleges. They graduate at a rate of more than 90 percent.
“I feel like the luckiest person in the world because I love what I do,” Bial said. “It was serendipity — I was in the right place at the right time with a kid who had a good idea.”
Other winners of this year’s fellowships include a blues musician, a painter, a playwright, an inventor, a medieval historian, a forensic anthropologist, a biomedical scientist and a spider silk biologist.
Jonathan Fanton, president of the MacArthur Foundation, said he loves calling the new fellows to tell them of their new fellowships.
“The basic decency that I hear, the humility, the idealism, just reminds you that for all the bad in the world you read about, there are these great people who have worked hard to make this a more humane, just, fair, peaceful world,” Fanton said.
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