Beaver Reflections:
My Beaver relationships were really foundational for me. And one of the things that was most formative for me was this encouragement and compulsion and way-paving for being involved in your community. I was on yearbook, I did plays, and each of those experiences was encouraged by either friends or teachers. I had an English teacher, her name was Miss Idelits, who, after I was in a couple of classes with her was like,” Is there some reason you’re not running for School President?” And I was like, “I don’t know, who cares about School President?” She said, “You need to run for School President.” And I was President my senior year. That kind of encouragement, that expectation of participation in your community, really was formative for me, especially when it combined with my parents’ own feelings about that. In a very fundamental way, it guided me to the things that I’ve done with my life, the kind of company that I started, and the kind of philanthropic work that I do now.

What is #happeningnow in your life:
When I was growing up, I had summer internships and they were all terrible experiences. Some combination of “I don’t want to work for anyone,” and “I have to make the world a better place” led me into trying to find some technological way to assist nonprofit organizations as they help people who need help. I wanted to bring new technologies to nonprofit human services and see if I could assist them in increasing their operational efficiency and effectiveness. The first couple years that we started our company, Foothold Technology, were just brutal. Then it became great. In the middle of 2018, I sold the company and moved from CEO to Chief Product Officer. It was a move I wanted to make. In addition to trying to reflect the actual lived experience of a counselor helping a person find a home, find a job, or live independently, I need to pull out the data I need to make the software elegant and easy to use. That’s a daily challenge I really enjoy.

“Beaver’s encouragement to be involved in the world around you still sticks with me to this day”

– Marlowe Greenberg ’89

Advice to Beaver students:
Every opportunity you get to break the cliques in high school, you should take, and there’s no better place to do that than Beaver because everybody is pre-screened to be interesting. You’re never going to meet people you’re not glad you met. And I would encourage current students to diversify their extracurriculars as much as possible because it’s fascinating.