Rebecca Richards-Kortum

Rebecca Richards-Kortum is Professor of Bioengineering at Rice University.  She is the co-founder of Beyond Traditional Borders (BTB), a program which challenges undergraduate students to create affordable technologies for use primarily in Third World countries.  Together with her colleague Maria Oden, she was last year awarded the prestigious Lemelson-MIT Prize and they donated the $100,000 check to the hospital in Africa which inspired the BTB program.  She lives in Houston with her husband, Philip, and their six children.

What’s your story, Rebecca?

I'm on the faculty of Bioengineering at Rice University and I focus primarily on two areas. I work on creating technologies for low-resource settings, primarily with a focus on pediatrics, improving child health and improving maternal health.  I also have other projects which focus on early cancer screening and diagnosis focusing mainly on cervical cancer, head and neck cancer and esophageal cancer. I've been doing cancer imaging reading my whole career, but it was really in the last seven years that I've come to focus on cancer screening in low-resource settings in developing countries.

That means really thinking about how you reduce the cost of screening so that it is affordable for the vast majority of the world at risk from the kind of cancers we deal with so that people can have access to early screening, not just to palliative care when they develop stage four cancer.

I originally studied medical physics and then switched to engineering when I got my first faculty job, but they are similar in many ways, math and science, with a design-oriented focus.  Biomedical engineering does tend to have more women than, say, mechanical or electrical engineer.  When I started teaching electrical engineering, maybe 10% of the students in my cost were women, but now I’m in biomedical engineering, it's closer to 50-50.  In Global Health it’s closer to 90% women which on the one hand is wonderful but on the other hand, it pisses me off!  Is it really just our problem to deal with poverty and social injustice and making the world a better place? I think we need more balance on both sides.

Why do you do what you do?
In 2005, I went to Malawi and met a really unbelievable pediatrician, Dr Elizabeth Molyneux, who has been in Malawi her whole career. She was the one who really inspired me to think about how we could get undergraduate students to look at new at ways to address needs in the hospital nursery, especially for premature babies.

From that meeting, my partner Maria Oden and I created Beyond Traditional Borders, which is a minor in Global Health Technologies where we bring students from all over campus – humanities and social sciences as well as engineering and science – and we give them real design challenges. They start with an introductory eight-week design project and then a one-semester project and then a whole year. After each of those projects they have the opportunity to apply for a summer internship where they take the thing that they have created to the place which had originally proposed the challenge for them to solve. During these internships, they get wonderful feedback and although most of the time it's “You need to change this many things before it's useful to us”, for the students it's incredibly motivating.  They get to go and experience first-hand the real challenges that they've only learned about it in a classroom setting.  When they come back, they are so motivated they will often do independent study work to further their technology to get it to the point where it actually can be used clinically.

For example, premature babies often have breathing difficulties.  Here in Houston, it would easily be treated with technology called CPAP – continuous positive air pressure.  It’s very simple, if you think of a baby's lungs as a balloon. In our lungs we have surfactant which helps the balloon of our lungs stay inflated but with premature babies they lack surfactant so when they breathe the lungs collapse. Every breath for them is like that first puff into a balloon and they get exhausted just by breathing. With CPAP, you just put little silicone rubber prongs into the baby’s nose and the machine blows in a mix of air and oxygen so that when the baby breathes, instead of the balloon collapsing, it stays open and the hard work of breathing is greatly reduced.  For most premature babies, if they are on CPAP for a week or two they develop surfactant and are fine, but if they don't have access to a CPAP machine, the mortality rate is as high as 75%.

The challenge that Dr Molyneux gave us was to develop an affordable CPAP machine. Here in the US, the cheapest CPAP machine will cost you around $6,000 which might well have been $6 million for her in Malawi because it was just not affordable. In response to this problem, our 2010 team of students developed a prototype which delivered airflow and pressure comparable to the one they use at Texas Children's Hospital. But our machine was made with fish aquarium pumps and cost only $150!  Since then we have been able to prove that it does improve survival.  Mortality rates went from 75% down to 35%, which is comparable to the rates in the United States when CPAP was first introduced.

Now we are working to roll it out across the whole country and I am working to put together a complementary package of technologies that will do all the things that babies need – keeping them warm and hydrated, keeping their glucose levels where they need to be and, if they have jaundice, treating them with phototherapy.

When we have a project we think will be successful, we make the first few prototypes in our lab so it can be taken for clinical evaluation.  We work with colleagues at a wonderful industrial design firm called 3rd Stone Design who have helped us find appropriate manufacturing partners to bring the CPAP device to market.  We are also in very early conversations with some multinational corporations that have the capability to undertake the international distribution we would really need. So we are not there yet, but I feel that we are on a really positive path to get to the point where it could be more widely available. We also just received from grant from Glaxo Smith Kline and Save the Children which will allow us to expand to Tanzania, Zambia and South Africa, so we are super excited by that.

Maria Oden (left) and Rebecca Richards-Kortum 

at Rice University's Oshman Engineering Design Kitchen in Houston

Image by Jeff Fitlow

Last year, Maria Oden and I were honored to receive the Lemelson-MIT Prize for our work with Beyond Traditional Boundaries.  Even more wonderful was that it came with the prize of $100,000 and we were able to donate that money to the Central Hospital in Malawi, the hospital which inspired our program and the CPAP project.   When you go to the ward, there aren't enough beds for the babies so it is not uncommon to find sixty babies in twenty beds.  There’s also not enough space for moms so they can't be with their babies all the time and that's not good for the moms or for the babies. We have been able to raise another $275,000 in additional donations which will allow them to expand the nursery which is very exciting.  We have the architectural plans and they will be breaking ground as soon as rainy season is done.  If everything goes according to schedule, it will be completed in December 2014. That's going to be a happy day - walking in see that!  And of course, the new nursery will have our CPAP machines and hopefully many other technologies which will be created through our program.

  

What is your Houston story?

I grew up in Nebraska and went to the University of Nebraska, and then I went to MIT for graduate school and from there I went to University of Texas in Austin where I was on the faculty of electrical-engineering and also biomedical engineering. I had been there about 16 years when I moved to Rice in Houston in 2005. 

The main reason to move was that there was no medical school in Austin, at least there wasn't then.  For people like me who do the kind of translational research in which you are doing clinical evaluations of technologies, it’s really difficult without a medical school so we would be driving to Houston every week.  When a job opened up at Rice, it seemed like an amazing opportunity.

At home I have six kids from aged twenty-two down to aged four.  I have three boys and three girls. Alex and Max are both at college, one at Rice and one at the University of Houston.  They're both studying engineering which is wonderful and makes me so happy!  Then Zach is in high school and he wants to do either architecture or civil engineering. Kate is in middle school, Elizabeth is in second grade and finally, Margaret is in pre-school.

                                           

We adopted Elizabeth and Margaret from Ethiopia. Margaret has been with us since 2010 when she was six months old and Elizabeth was about to turn seven when she came to us in 2012.

I love being a mom, it's just an amazing experience and when you travel in Africa you see a lot of kids that don't have parents and who are living in orphanages.  We felt that we had more room in our family so we looked at the various adoption programs and decided that at that time Ethiopia was really the only program in Africa that we felt was an ethical program. Maggie was only a baby and therefore had a very easy transition, but when Elizabeth arrived with us, she had perhaps only twenty words of English. She is so brave though and it's really amazing to think of all the uncertainty that she's been through. She was born in an area of Ethiopia where they speak Wollayta and when she came into care she was placed in an orphanage in Addis Ababa where they speak Amharic. She was only about four at that time and there was only one other little girl who spoke the same language as she did. Then she came home with us and had to learn yet another completely new language.

Adopting an older child is a very challenging but wonderful experience and it's very different from adopting an infant. I thought I knew that going in, but really I didn't really know it at all! Much as you try to be prepared, you can't really know how challenging, but also how great, it can be. I think Elizabeth is not yet fully settled but she has made so much progress. The difference for her between starting first grade and starting second grade was enormous. She's absorbing English day to day, but we have hired wonderful Rice student teachers who come and work with her on her homework every day after school.  They are just amazing with her and they have energy at that time of day that I definitely do not have!

Because of the work I do, I have to spend lot of time out in the field with the student interns, looking for new challenges and checking that they're doing the right thing as far as getting feedback on their implementation. So I usually have to do four trips abroad each year – to Africa to see them but also to meet with those in China involved in our cervical cancer project and in India with our esophageal cancer project.  So I do end up with too many frequent flyer miles – that's such a badge of shame, right?

So I’m lucky to have beside me my husband Philip, who is awesome.  He's also at Rice in the faculty of Psychology. We actually met living in the dorm in our freshman year in Nebraska. I lived on the second floor and he lived on the third floor so I've known him since I was 17.  As our careers progressed, Philip and I have made decisions together as much as possible. When we moved to Austin, he had the opportunity to go back and get his PhD which he really wanted to do and then he got his dream job in Austin so it worked out pretty well. Then when we came here, he moved from industry into the academic job at Rice.

Who or what has been the greatest influence on your life?

Definitely it's my kids. Because so much of what I do is focused on trying to help moms have the opportunity to bring their kids home, and anybody who has had a baby knows how much you worry, being a mom myself has definitely influenced the projects that I've chosen.

What advice would you give to someone new to your field?

I think the most important career advice is to think about where you find meaning. If you are going to work hard, you want to work hard at something that you find meaningful.  Worry less about what ladder you want to climb and just try to figure where something you find meaningful can intersect with career opportunities. 

How do you find, or seek to find, balance in your life?

That's the eternal challenge, no?  Well, we take it a day at the time. The hardest thing about having six kids is making sure that they get enough one-on-one time with you. Somebody is always having a crisis, so you have to make sure that you're not getting so absorbed in that crisis that other people are either being neglected or feeling neglected. Even with the two older boys at college, you know they never really leave you! That's a big myth, I think, but it's great that they still need you and want your help.

What time do I get for me? I get up early and that's my time. I like to run and so I do that in the morning. I can't stay up late but I can get up early.

What does Houston mean to you?

What really drew me to Houston professionally was the Medical Center and the opportunity to work with physicians that are providing patient care and are also trying to bring the next set of advances in patient care.

On a personal level, although Houston is the fourth largest city in the US, where we live feels much more like a small community. We really love it here.

Where is your happy place?

My happy place has to be looking at an empty email in-box.  Some days I think all I do is answer email.

What is your favorite restaurant?

My favorite place to eat in Houston has to be the taco truck beside the Alabama Ice House – it has the best tacos in Houston! It might look a little sketchy but it's very good.

What is your Houston secret?

I think Houston's best kept secrets are the public schools. They are awesome. There are many very talented teachers, especially in the magnet schools and high schools. We have had two kids at DeBakey High School, and one at the High School for the Performing and Visual arts and both schools offer really great experiences. Mr. Smith, who was until this year the band director at Pershing Middle School, was an amazing resource and of course Mark Twain Elementary is really an extraordinary school.

If you could change one thing about Houston…

I would make it Austin – but without the cedar! I do miss the beauty of Austin. Houston is pretty in its own way, but it's not as pretty as Austin.

  

For more information about Rebecca’s work with Beyond Traditional Borders, visit the Rice 360º website

Deborah Markey

Deborah Markey became the Executive Director of the Houston Arboretum & Nature Center in 2005.  She guided the 155-acre nature sanctuary within Memorial Park through the dual devastation of Hurricane Ike and the subsequent drought.  She has succeeded in increasing not only the Arboretum’s financial capability, but also its impact on the Houston public through its work with both children and adults.  A Houston native, she has served for many years as a community leader in The Heights area of the city where she lives.  She has three children – Connor, Hunter and Madeline.

What’s your story, Debbie?

Going through two major natural disasters in three years was something that I would never have expected to be dealing with nine years ago when I joined the Houston Arboretum.

Hurricane Ike came along in 2008 and we know the hurricane then brought on the drought. The reason is a scientific phenomenon called El Niño and El Niña. El Niño is a period of time in the Gulf of Mexico when the water is really warm and causes a lot of precipitation to come off the Gulf across Texas.  During those years, Houston’s atmosphere dumps lots of water on us and it’s very humid. When I came to the Arboretum in 2005, that's how it was.  But Hurricane Ike cooled those waters and switched the oscillation patterns from El Niño to become La Niña, a very strong current which prevents any cold and wet weather coming from the north.  It means if you looked at a weather pattern, you would see cold fronts stopped as if at a barrier around Texas.  

Generally, Houston has about 55 inches of rain a year but in 2010 it was just 11 inches and in 2011 only 12 inches. Everyone in Houston felt the drought and knew that less rain was falling than usual each year, but it wasn't until 2012 that we all realized the enormous damage that the hurricane followed by the drought had really done.

During Hurricane Ike, we lost one thousand trees.  It was painful to see. These were live trees, big trees, every walking trail was deeply blocked and there was no power to the park.  We had shut down on Thursday night knowing the storm was coming, and when we came back to work on Monday, it was way more devastating than we had expected it to be.  To their credit, all my staff came ready to clear the park. I had to laugh with them that this was the line in their job descriptions which said “Will undertake other tasks as needed!”

Everyone joined in, even the office workers and me. I put all the guys on chainsaw duty and all the girls on brush clearing. Luckily my Conservation Director had made the decision on the Thursday to reserve a backhoe to come after the weekend, otherwise we would never have got one.  So the backhoe and operator arrived on Tuesday to clamp and haul stuff for us.  Of course, I could not depend on the City of Houston to help because they had so much else to do around the city, but we did have lots of people turn up to volunteer through the week, and even more on the weekends, so we found a way to do it.

We piled the stuff in the parking lot – huge tree trunks and underbrush – and I had three 40-foot containers being emptied three times a day! This was of course incurring huge haulage charges and I soon discovered that the insurance would pay for none of it.  The insurance covered damage to the building – of which, luckily, there was very little – but covered none of the forest.  That took a long time for us to recover from.

It wasn’t until that week that I ever thought of myself as a leader.  I suddenly realized that people were looking at me as if to say, “What should we do?”  I understood then that there is a difference between being a manager and being a leader.

That was such a painful time, but it was worse to watch the forest die over the following few years.   Memorial Park, of which the Arboretum is a part, is a population of trees planted 75 years ago all competing for the same water.  By August 2012, when you drove through the park and looked at the tree line, you thought, “Wow, it looks like fall in the park,” but then it hit you. That was not fall, that was death.

Then, of course, the wildfires at Bastrop happened. The Houston Fire Department and the Texas Forest Service called us all together to create a plan to be implemented in case of a forest fire in Memorial Park. We had to clear our driveway back a certain number of feet so that the fire department wouldn't get stuck if there was a fire in the park and we had to clear a lot of acreage.

We lost five thousand trees in the drought. There was a 50% mortality rate across Memorial Park.  But as one of the park’s stewards, I get to help fix the problem. It's not an overnight fix, of course, it's going to take millions of dollars and many years, but we will do it because we have to and we will use the knowledge we have now to make the park more sustainable.

Last year we went through a master-planning process to raise money to restore the land, and raised about $700,000. The restoration will cover the 155-acre forest sanctuary and also all of the building work that needs to be done. For example, we only have 91 parking spaces and that's not nearly enough. We're full every weekend and have to have parking attendants to handle it.

Although it does make parking harder, I am very proud of the work I have done to raise public awareness of the Arboretum in the nine years I've been here.  When I first arrived, business for the Arboretum totaled $600,000, but now the total gross revenue is $2.2 million. I’ve taken a small organization with a small footprint and have grown it. We have homeschool programs and preschool programs. Our Summer Camp which was half a day for six weeks and cost $85 a week is now all day for six weeks and brings in $295 a week from each child. We have Winter Camp, Spring Break Camp and we partner with lots of different folks to add a lot of other programs too. We know many adults who want to be here, but how do you get the others to come?  You serve them wine and cheese!  Just recently, we had a very successful Tapas on the Trail event with 250 people in the forest in the evening with gourmet food. We also have a family event called ArBOOretum in October and that’s very popular.

So though we've done a great job of encouraging people to come here, they don't necessarily see the devastation I see and they still love coming here.

What’s your Houston story?

I’m Houston born and bred, but because I went to college at Texas A&M in College Station, I was ready to come home afterwards.  But I've always thought that if I had going to UT in Austin, I probably would never have left. I love Austin.

I was married for a long time and lived in the Houston Heights and when I got divorced in 2002, I moved to the Woodlands Heights, close to my children's schools.  I had a website development business which was great because I could work from home so I could be there for the kids. I had a number of really great jobs including working for a management consultant who was a Harvard MBA and ten years working with her really helped me a lot. I was also very involved in the Houston Heights Association. I was on the board and in charge of many projects within the Heights including raising funds to renovate a neighborhood park called Donovan Park.

Although I didn't have any paid non-profit experience, I wrote up my résumé listing all my skills and asked people I knew to let me know if any suitable jobs came up. Then one day my son came home with the book from Writers in the Schools on the front of which was his picture of a turtle. I asked him where he had seen a turtle and, he said he’d seen it at the Arboretum. Though I hadn’t been there myself for a few years, he had gone there on a field trip.  Within a couple of months of that conversation, I was appointed Executive Director at the Arboretum. It was an amazing coincidence!

Who or what has been the greatest influence on your life?

My mom – I was the first from my family to go to college and I was a bit miserable for the first couple of years. I was not happy in my science-based course and I was struggling with my grades. I remember coming home and saying to my mom that I was going to drop out, but she wouldn’t let me.  She said I was too smart and I’d worked too many years to throw it away.  Instead, she arranged for me to take an aptitude test which found that I had an above-average business brain.  My mom suggested that I go back to school and change course to major in Business, so I did and it was like second nature to me.  It was really awesome.

What advice would you give to someone new to running a non-profit?

I'd say collaboration is the key to success and also being open. Houston Mayor, Anise Parker, said recently in one of her speeches that “collaboration is the new competition”.

I am so lucky to be within an organization which is part of the larger Houston picture, and to be one of the leaders working to make Houston an amazing internationally-known city in which to live and work. People think of us as having cowboy boots and pick-up trucks, with horses in the backyard.  They think we have no culture but it's really not like that. Houston's a very diverse city.

How do you find balance in your life?

I like to find balance. I'm an avid outdoors person and have to spend a lot of time outdoors to be happy.  Exercising and keeping in shape are important to me. Also my job is super fun so it's not like I don’t look forward to coming to work. I'm good at not taking work home, so while I work a lot here and I do work on the weekends if I need to, when I go home I have my own time in my house with my wonderful dog and the one child I have left at home. Living in my neighborhood is really awesome.  We have access to so many trails so I can bike up here at the weekend to check on things and then I ride back home which is a great experience for me.

Balance is important, but in the greater scheme of things, we are lucky that we are living in a time where we have so much that other people in the world do not have. I'm very aware of the fact that we are in the top 1% that has this amazing quality of life that other human beings don't have.

What does Houston mean to you?

Being part of a program called Leadership Houston has really made me realize how much I love the city. Mayor Parker recently came to the graduation ceremony of and said that when she was part of the Leadership Houston program, she had no idea she was ever going to be the mayor.  I have watched her throughout her career and she has done some amazing things in this city.  She said that she always makes time to come back for that event because any one of us could end up as mayor too.  This is such an inspiring program. Mayor Parker was a graduate from Class 12, I am in Class 30 and they are already recruiting Class 34.

Also, in Houston, the spirit of philanthropy runs very deep. So many men and women who have money because they made good in this town have then given back to the city. Look at Bill White and what he achieved during his time as mayor, for example.  He rallied his philanthropist friends and said, “I want to build a beautiful city park near the George R Brown Convention Center and I want to get it done before I leave office.” Few people realize how much collaborative work it took to transform a series of dusty parking lots and private spaces into Discovery Green, the most beautiful urban park space you've ever seen.  Now this huge effort has moved on to transform Buffalo Bayou Park as well.  In this city, there are so many people investing time, energy and money to create real quality-of-life experiences for the people who live there.

Where is your happy place in Houston?

I think my favorite place is Buffalo Bayou Park. I really enjoy spending time there, like this weekend when I took the trail from my house which connects to the Buffalo Bayou Trail right at Spaghetti Warehouse.  It’s great to see this renovated space and everyone on their own bikes or using the bike-share program.  There are skateboarders too and even groups on Segways. 

What is your favorite restaurant?

My favorite place is a neighborhood restaurant called The Glass Wall.  It’s right down the street from my house and has fond memories for me.  When the power went off thanks to Hurricane Ike, they accommodated half the neighborhood, so we have found a way to pay them back.  The bar is reserved for people who live in the neighborhood and when we go in there, it's like Cheers! where everybody knows your name.  They serve great local food and wine, and anywhere the bartender knows what you’ll have to drink before you even get to your table is really a great place.

There are so many good places to eat in Houston, it's hard to choose another one, but it would have to be The Grove on Discovery Green.  The food is fantastic and the atmosphere’s incredible. If you have the chance to sit on the porch outside overlooking all the people that are using the grassy green space, it's really lovely.

What is your Houston secret?

I would have to say that the Arboretum is the best kept secret in the city and I would love to keep it for myself, but I do realize that's probably not the best business model for an executive director to have! I’ve met many people who say their favorite place in the whole of Houston is the meadow pond, so it’s not only me that loves it here.

If you could change one thing about Houston…

Mass transit – it's terrible that we don't have it.  It is embarrassing that we have a city of this size and we are embracing the rubber tire model of getting around. I do realize that though lots of people are trying to stop that being the case, we're too far into it to make much change. I am disappointed that I have to take my car to work every day but even the buses are just not an option for me because the route would take me over ninety minutes each way.

To find out more about the Houston Arboretum and Nature Center, click here. 

For further information about Leadership Houston, click here.

Amy Weiss

Rabbi Amy Weiss is the founder and executive director of Undies for Everyone, a non-profit organization that distributes new underwear and socks to underprivileged students in Houston’s school districts.  She founded the Initiative for Jewish Women and serves on the Independent Police Oversight Board in Houston. She is the Director of Food and Nutrition for Houston Hillel, the campus organization for Jewish students, where her husband Rabbi Kenny Weiss is the executive director. She has two sons, Eli and Joshua.

What’s your story, Amy?

Ever since I was a child I wanted to have a house full of people.  As a rabbi, I meet so many people who are new to Houston – we called them strays – and we welcome them in.   That’s just so fulfilling to me. I became a rabbi to make Judaism more accessible, so it's not unusual for us to have fifty people for Passover in our house every year. I love making people happy and I love nurturing people. That's why I do all the cooking here at the Hillel. For example every Tuesday and Wednesday we do lunches here for the students.  A friend of mine and I bake cookies at the beginning of every semester and put them in the freezer so the kids have homemade cookies for every lunch, because they should feel comforted and nurtured.  I guess that I treat others like I would like to be treated.

Growing up in Dallas, I was very involved in my youth group and was a song leader, playing the guitar all over Texas and Oklahoma at conventions of hundreds of Jewish kids. After getting a degree in advertising from the University of Texas, my first job was selling advertising, but on the first day, literally the first day, I remember thinking this just isn't right for me.

Eventually I found myself involved with my synagogue again and the rabbi there took me under his wing.  He wanted me to become a rabbi and after getting my Masters in Jewish Education, I began the rabbinic program at Hebrew Union College in New York. On the last day of my first week, I met my husband Kenny who was there leading a teen trip. He came to my house for dinner and we've been together ever since. That was 1991. It seems like yesterday but at the same time it just seems like so far away.

In 1995, when we were living in Washington DC, our first son Aaron was born prematurely and died. Then, after having trouble getting pregnant again, we had Eli in 1997.  When Eli was eight months old we moved to Pennsylvania and since there nothing else to do I got pregnant again, but I lost that one. I got pregnant again and in 1999, we had Joshua.  Aaron, Eli and Joshua – you can tell we're rabbis, we're so biblical!

We moved to Houston in 2001 when Kenny got the chance to apply for the job at the Houston Hillel.  He just fell in love with it, so we moved here a year later.

Why do you do what you do?

Losing our first son, Aaron, really changed me. When Eli and Joshua were born, I figured if God is going to give me these children I’ve got to do something with them, I have to be there for them. I can't be a congregational rabbi and have two kids. Some people can do it but I can't.  So I started the Initiative for Jewish Women (IJW) and did that for seven years. I was programming for Jewish women, but the truth of the matter is that there's a zillion things for Jewish women to do and I after a while I found I couldn't differentiate myself.  

By 2008, I was also blogging for the Houston Chronicle’s religion section and around October time, when everyone was doing endless holiday toy drives for underprivileged children, a social worker said to me, “You know what these kids really need? Underwear and socks!”  So I blogged about it and people started dropping things off here.  I got a few hundred pairs and I talked to Waste Management to get boxes. I pulled together a committee and Undies for Everyone just sort of grew and grew from there.

Then last year, my dad died. So I stood back and re-evaluated my life, and I thought, “You know, the Jewish ladies don't need me as much as these kids need their tushies covered.” So I let the IJW go, and focused my energy on Undies for Everyone. I got some friends, filled out the paperwork and it is just unbelievable how fast it all developed.  In our fourth year, we gave out 10,000 pairs and this year we gave out somewhere between 33,000 and 38,000. We even had a donation from the man whose family owns the company which supplies Target with all the Disney and Marvel-type underwear.  They are Jewish so someone had given him our details and he sent us 43,000 pairs of underwear. Elyse, our board chair, and I flew to New York in October to meet him, so now we have a relationship with him and another company in New York. That's where we get the big stuff but also individual people or schools have underwear drives, where they ask everyone to bring one packet.

There are two parts to our organization. Obviously our first priority is about covering the kids who are disadvantaged, so there is the collection and distribution of mass quantities of underwear, but we also offer the opportunity to give to anyone who wants to do something for someone else.  Some people can write really large checks or even medium-size checks, and other people can go buy one packet of underwear.  Either way, they will know that they have changed someone's life and I think that changes their life too.
 

Our idea is also that we have to teach our kids how to give. A parent can use Undies for Everyone as an opportunity to take a kid to the store and say, “You have a whole drawer full of underwear and you take it for granted. But there are kids out there that don't have any underwear at all, and doesn’t most everyone deserve to have underwear?” Everyone can identify with that.  So let your kids pick a pack of underwear to give to someone else and that's the start of teaching those kids about being philanthropic and giving them the opportunity to repair the world.

Once we have all these undies, we distribute them in a number of ways. The City of Houston runs a Back-to-School event which pre-registers 25,000 kids in fifteen school districts. Each of them gets a wrist band which gets them a backpack and supplies, vaccinations, uniforms and even haircuts.  We, of course, give away underwear.  I think 15,000 pairs went there and another 10,000 pairs went to Houston Independent School District nurses, not only for the elementary schools where little kids have accidents but also to the middle school nurses who really love it because teenage girls are not regular yet in their cycles. We gave 3,000 to Fort Bend schools, 2,000 to Alief and to Waller and we will soon expand into charter schools and places like that.

For the future, we already have a trademark attorney and we are looking to go national within a few years. You know, it's God's work. This is not just about covering these kids’ privates, it is about dignity and self-esteem. It represents so much more for them, it’s about being like everyone else so they don’t have to worry about someone else finding out they aren’t wearing any.

Is there more to your story?

I don't blog for the Chronicle anymore but I do make mezuzahs out of Lego! And yes, that is extraordinary, but I am all about making Judaism accessible!  A mezuzah has a prayer in it and you put it on your door frame.  When I was growing up, people only put up one mezuzah, but in traditional Judaism, you're supposed to have one on every door in the house, except the bathroom and the laundry room. So for people who normally wouldn't put a mezuzah on their kid’s bedroom door, here's this really cool thing, and since everybody loves Lego, you're giving the kids an opportunity to connect. It's not scary, it's not old and it's not weird. It’s just really cool!

Who or what has been the greatest influence on your life?

It's really hard to say because there have been a lot of people who have influenced me, but I think my husband is really the greatest influence.  He allows me every opportunity to be successful. I worry a lot and it can be paralyzing and he just doesn't let that happen. He doesn't let difficulties or worry stop him. He will do anything to give me an opportunity to shine and he has just been the best thing that ever happened to me. He’s an awesome, awesome guy.

What advice would you give to someone who sees a need in the community and thinks they have something that can help fill that need?
Go talk to lots of people and make sure that need isn't being filled by someone else.  If you want to succeed and you want to make a difference, you have to know that you are doing something different from all the many other non-profits in Houston. Otherwise you are not going to get funded and you're not going to get people on board. The other thing I would say is take Rice University's Leadership Institute for Non-profit Executives course which has been phenomenal. It's a one year course and I have met some of the greatest people. I've just loved it.

How do you find, or seek to find, balance in your life?

You know I’ve given that a lot of thought and I don't think there really is balance. My family comes first and everything else comes after. There are always things to do, including this job, so that I can be there for the kids and for Kenny, because the home is the center of it. Everything else just fills in around it. I have also just accepted that I'm not going to be able to do everything fabulously.

What does Houston mean to you?

It is so clichéd, but I think Houston is the city of opportunity. It is a really diverse city, in thinking and believing, with lots of different religions, but ultimately so many people do so much work for Houston to make it a better place. It's just amazing.

Where is your happy place in Houston?

It’s the swing on our front lawn at home. It hangs from a tree and sometimes Kenny and I will sit there and just hang out, throwing a ball for the dog. But really, wherever I am, if I have my family and my friends near, I'm okay. As long as the food's good!

What is your favorite place to eat?

Our go-to place is India’s, on Richmond, which is really good. It's from the 80s or the 70s, it has commercial carpet but the food is great and the people are so nice. It’s so quiet, you can go on Saturday night with another couple and have a conversation and some really good food.

What is your Houston secret?

The Chocolate Cinnamon Shake at Goode Company Taqueria! It's not even a milkshake really, more like soft serve ice-cream. In fact, they don't even serve it with a straw. I don't know if it's actually a kids’ thing though because it has quite a cinnamon bite to it. It's awesome!

If you could change one thing about Houston…

The weather or the potholes! The weather because I'm not good at sweating. And the potholes? I think the tire people go out at night to dig them.

For more information about Amy’s work at Undies for Everyone, click here. 

To see Amy’s Lego mezuzahs, click here.  

For more information about the Rice University Leadership Institute for Nonprofit Executives, click here.

Anita Kruse

Anita Kruse trained as a classical pianist and composer before becoming a singer/songwriter and has performed her songs internationally.  In 2006, Anita founded Purple Songs Can Fly, the first ever recording studio housed within a pediatric oncology center and in it she helps children undergoing cancer treatment create their own songs.  Working within Texas Children’s Cancer and Hematology Centers, Anita has helped over six hundred young cancer patients and their siblings create, perform and record their own music.  Anita has also made sure that these Purple Songs Can Fly – literally.  The songs have travelled all over the world – and beyond - on The Rolling Stones’ world tour, to the top of Mount Everest and even into space.  Thanks to Anita Kruse, many very sick children have made their Purple Songs – and their hopes and dreams – truly fly.

                                                 

What’s your story, Anita?

I was born in Riverside, California. My father was a pilot in the Air Force so we moved many times as I was growing up. It meant that I had a very interesting childhood. I was fortunate to see other countries of the world, learning about other people and other ways of living. 

My mother was a pianist. She was amazing because, though she was a trained pianist, she could play anything that she heard by ear. That always impressed me because though I was naturally musical, it wasn’t my particular gift. So I was around music a lot and of course because of my mother, I wanted to play the piano too.  Wherever we moved, she always found the best teachers for me, but she was herself a great musical influence on me.  It was only much later in life that I discovered that my father was also musical too, but he didn’t talk about it very much.  He’d played the cornet in his high school and college bands, and I learned recently that he played in the inaugural parade when Eisenhower became President.

I got my degree in piano performance from the University of Connecticut and then I went to the University of Michigan for graduate school. I studied with the incredible pianist, Theodore Lettvin, and he was a great influence on me too.  There’s a famous book called The Great Pianists and he was one of them. I feel very fortunate that I got to spend time with him, to watch his hands and learn from his wisdom.  It was during that time, when I was in my second year of my Master’s degree, that I also decided to study composition.  There was a composer named Nicholas Thorne visiting the university on a year’s fellowship. The first thing I wrote was for piano and saxophone and when I took it into my composition lesson, Nick Thorne said, “Wow, Anita! I think you should keep doing this!”  So I didn't stop!  It just felt like I was just meant to do it.  I had never felt anything as powerful as the feeling of creating my own music and hearing it come to fruition.

At first, my composing was very classical, mainly art songs for piano and voice. I worked with a soprano because I didn't think of myself as a singer.  I was always very shy and very inward.  I was happy to play the piano in front of other people, but the idea of standing up to sing?  No, I just couldn't do it!   But I carried on writing songs which I would sing only in my own little bubble until one day a friend heard me and said, “Anita, you need to sing your own songs.”  That was many years ago and since then I've become more comfortable and less afraid, but I truly understand when children are shy and not ready to sing out.  That’s why I have made the Purple Songs Can Fly studio very intimate and secure for them.  There’s no big audience and they can create something that doesn't hold the same feeling of fear as live performance.

What is the story behind Purple Songs?

For several years I came up to the Cancer Center here at Texas Children’s Hospital (TCH) as a visiting artist.  I performed piano and flute duets with a wonderful flutist and friend, Jennifer Keeney.  The music was on the mellow side, and we used to setup in the central waiting area where the music could be heard throughout the Cancer Center. The patients and staff seemed to enjoy our music, so we were invited back to play every couple of months.

During that time, I was developing my own small studio at home and I was also teaching piano and composition.  I started taking my students into my studio to record what they had written. One of my composition students wanted me to help her write songs so she came in one day and I helped her write a song during her lesson. So within that hour we wrote a song, recorded it, and I handed it to her on the CD.  Thinking about that and also about my work at Texas Children’s, I suddenly saw an image of myself with my own studio in the Cancer Center.  I called Carol Herron, the Director of the Arts in Medicine program at Texas Children's and I told her about my idea. Carol already ran an incredibly extensive arts in medicine program with many artists coming in to work with patients – visual artists, creative writers, sculptors and musicians, but all the musicians were there to perform music, not to write music. Carol didn’t think that anyone had ever created a recording studio in a cancer center before, so I put a proposal together, we met the director of the Cancer Center, Dr David Poplack, and between us, we made it happen.

At first, we didn't have a designated space. I created a portable studio on a little computer desk with wheels that I could take in-patient. It had a keyboard, a microphone and a laptop and I attached monitors on Velcro. I even had a chair on it.  I was just like the Beverly Hillbillies with everything hanging off my cart!

Then I noticed that right behind the waiting area there were three little phone booths that had been built years ago.  Of course nobody used phone booths anymore because they had cell phones so it had become an unused space.  But those three little rooms were perfect for me, so I raised money to renovate them into a studio and we painted them purple. I have been obsessed with purple my whole life so I knew, as soon as I started this, everything had to be purple.

The Purple Songs Can Fly studio at Texas Children's Hospital

More recently, when they renovated the Cancer Center they gave us a different, roomier space and anyone can come and take part or just visit.  Like everything else in the Arts in Medicine program at TCH, it is completely open to any child who wants to take part. We include information about Purple Songs in every new patient handbook, the children might also hear about the studio from other patients, from the nurses or see our flyer in the reception area.  They can come and see the studio, and I ask them if they want to write a song.  I’m here every weekday morning, but we can arrange a time in the afternoons as well.

Some children want to create an instrumental but in general I start with the lyrics. Houston’s creative writing organization, Writers in the Schools, has been involved in Texas Children's Cancer Center for many years and its writers are amazing.  In fact, the very first Purple Song was a Writers in the Schools collaboration.  I help the children create words, a beat, and we choose the sounds that they like. Some children, once they have words and an underlying harmony, will start hearing a melody. Some children hear a melody right away and I will ask them to sing it to me and I will accompany it. It's different for every child, but even if they only sing a fragment or have just a couple of words, I can hear where their voice would naturally go.

A Purple Songs CD signed
by Mick Jagger

Most of the songs are simply about things that the children want to share – things that make them happy or things they are thinking about, and they are often unrelated to their treatment. Many children have written songs to give to someone, perhaps to their mother or caregiver to say thank you. There have been many beautiful thank-you songs. One girl wrote a song to thank her karate teacher for giving her strength called 'Strong Heart, Strong Mind'.  There have been a lot of songs about faith and about God and about angels, and for some reason, lots of songs about butterflies. One little girl wrote a song with the idea that her wishes attach themselves to butterflies and the butterflies then carry her wishes to God.  We’ve had so many really beautiful ideas like that.

There was a wonderful boy, Jonathan, who was about seven years old and wrote a song called, ‘I Hate Shots’.  He also really loved to make origami and wanted to make cranes for me, so I got him some purple origami paper and he made the cranes that I included in all of the framed CDs.

It’s wonderful to record the children singing because most have never heard their voice recorded before. They take their song home on a purple CD to share with family and friends, though I keep all the songs in an archive too.  To date, we’ve written and recorded over 600 songs and a selection of them can be heard on our website.

Once we have them captured, we let the Purple Songs fly.  People tell us where they are going in the world and I give them a CD or all of the songs on a fly-drive and purple lanyard to take with them.  Then they send us pictures from famous places and I share the photos on our website. The Rolling Stones took our CDs on their world tour and Dr Poplack recently took them with him on a trip to Africa.  For several years, Purple Songs flew on the in-flight playlist on Continental Airlines and then United, which was amazing. 

They even went up into space on a Space Shuttle mission in 2007 with astronaut Scott Parazynski.  Scott then came back to the clinic to meet with the children and share a film of his mission. He’s been back to see us several times because after he retired from NASA he fulfilled his lifelong dream to climb Mount Everest.  He took our CDs with him and came back to the clinic to share his adventure.  In 2008, another astronaut, Heidi Stefanyshyn-Piper, took Purple Songs up to the International Space Station.  When she came to meet with the children at TCH, she brought incredible pictures of the CDs floating in zero gravity.

I am often amazed to see how Purple Songs Can Fly brings many elements together which lead to further connections.  For example, I got permission to use Roger Payne’s famous recordings of the songs of humpback whales, so I mixed them with a Purple Song called, “That's Why I Don't Eat Fish”, written by a boy who wanted to be a marine biologist.  The song ended up being played underwater at the NOAA deep-water research facility. We set up two monitors in the Cancer Center and the children were able to interact with the undersea researchers via a live video feed.  Dancers from Hope Stone Dance Company also performed a specially choreographed piece to go with the song and performed it as a part of the event.  So many amazing connections have happened through Purple Songs, with people coming together to offer support and ideas, all of them understanding the importance of music and how songs can affect our lives.

Purple Songs Can Fly in zero gravity in the International Space Station

Who or what has been the greatest influence on your life?

I have had so many incredible influences on my life, so many people, including the children I work with here. But actually, I have a sibling who is severely mentally ill and I think that he has been the greatest influence on my life. Seeing the fragility of life, the fragility of the mind and seeing that it could just as easily have been me, has motivated me to use my own gifts in ways that can hopefully help others.

What advice would you give to someone who, like you, wants to use their gift to help others?

I think it’s important to find inspiration, to strive to learn from other people and other ideas. I love to see people use the influences around them, filter them through their own particular way of doing and seeing and being, and then create something that has never been created before.

How do you find, or seek to find, balance in your life?

I would say that is my biggest life challenge. I haven't found it yet but I do seek it. I know how much of an introvert I am and I do need quiet time by myself. It is interesting that I am all about sound and yet I really crave quiet and I need it daily. I am at the moment fantasizing about a silent retreat. I've never done that but I really think that would be good for me.

What does Houston mean to you?

I love Houston. It’s a great city, with an incredible arts community and an incredibly high level of arts involvement. There are so many artists here working in all different fields and from so many cultures too. I lived in so many places growing up, so I didn't ever have a place that was my home but after I came to Houston to visit a few times, I kept feeling a really strong connection, but I didn’t know why. Then I read a beautiful article about the Native American traditions of why we are connected to a place. It is said that if you have had an ancestor who passes in a place, that is where you will find your roots. My grandmother actually passed in Houston, in a car accident, though it wasn't the place she lived. So in my mind I have had an ancestor who has passed in Houston and that is as good as an explanation as any as to why I feel this connection to this city.

Where is your happy place in Houston?

My happy place is right in here in this purple studio.

What is your favorite restaurant?

I love to eat Japanese food and there are a lot of Japanese restaurants here, so I love anywhere where I can get really good sushi.

What is your Houston secret?

I lived in Japan when I was a little girl, so I have this strong connection to all things Japanese and there is a beautiful Japanese garden in Hermann Park.  Every time I go, it is quiet, peaceful and beautiful.

If you could change one thing about Houston…

My parents live near Seattle, so a long way away from Houston.  If I could change one thing, it would be to have them closer.

Anita was nominated as one of the many Inspiring Houston Women by Trish Morille. 

For more information about Purple Songs Can Fly and to listen to some of the songs Anita has helped the children write, visit the website here.

Purple Songs Can Fly has its own internet radio show on Voice America Kids, hosted by Zachary and Emily who are patients at Texas Children’s Cancer and Hematology Centers and wrote Purple Songs with Anita.  To listen to the show, visit the website here.