Philanthrocapitalism_ How Giving Can Save the World - Matthew Bishop [33]
I’ve visited Agassi Prep and talked to Andre several times about his passion for it. When I asked him how creating the school compared with winning a tennis tournament, he said, “Tennis was a stepping-stone for me. It gave me the chance to do this. Changing a child’s life is what I always wanted to do. Winning a tennis tournament doesn’t compare to the anticipation of what these kids will do with their lives.”
The Tiger Woods Learning Center is located on fourteen acres in Anaheim, California. Of course it has a beautifully landscaped golf driving range and practice grounds, but the real action goes on inside the 35,000-square-foot educational facility. After school and on weekends, young people have a chance to go beyond their normal classroom work with unique enrichment programs that include forensic science, engineering, aerospace, video production, and home design. In February 2006, on my tour of the facility, I observed students solving medical problems, operating robots they built themselves, and learning from model spaceships they were constructing. The mission of the Woods Center is to provide students a broader perspective of the world, an appreciation of their own skills, and the tools to achieve long-term success. The students I saw clearly understood what they were doing and were able to explain their experiments in a direct, concise manner.
Tiger Woods knows most kids can’t grow up to be the world’s greatest golfer, but they have big dreams, and he’s giving them a chance to follow them. His center relies on well-trained teachers and dedicated mentors. If you live in Southern California and have a background in one of the center’s areas of concentration, you might want to become a mentor. If you live somewhere else, you might want to join with others to find one or more benefactors to finance a similar operation, offer to volunteer, and give kids the same kinds of opportunities. It could open up a new world for the students and brighten the future of all Americans.
America is facing a shortage of young people going into math, science, and advanced technology. If young women and African-American and Hispanic men were to enter these fields at the same rate as Caucasian and Asian males, the shortage would be dramatically reduced or eliminated altogether. The Woods Center has demonstrated one way to help that happen. Its students are girls and boys, African American, Hispanic, and Caucasian, from East and South Asia and the Middle East.
Another citizen-led effort to address the shortage of engineers and engineering technicians deserves mention. In 2007, the National Academy Foundation is launching a four-year effort to establish 110 Academies of Engineering in urban school districts across the United States designed to produce 8,800 high school graduates a year who will go on to college and careers in engineering and engineering technology. The project will emphasize increased participation of women and underrepresented minorities, preparing them for post-secondary studies by ensuring their competence in required mathematics, science, and technical subjects.
Over the next decade, employment demand in all engineering fields is projected to increase by more than 13 percent, with demand for engineering technicians increasing by nearly 12 percent. In 2005 women made up almost half the U.S. workforce, but only 10 percent of all engineers were female. African Americans comprised 10.8 percent of the workforce but only 3 percent of the engineers. The comparable figures for Hispanics were 13 percent and 4 percent.
If any NGO can make a dent in this problem, it’s the National Academy Foundation. Founded in 1980 by Sandy Weill, chairman emeritus of Citigroup, NAF, in partnership with local business leaders, forms small, career-themed learning communities in large urban high schools. Its established academies in finance, information technology, and hospitality and tourism prepare students for college and introduce them to the world of work with