Tillie O’Neal-Kyles

Tillie O’Neal-Kyles

In her early 20s, Tillie O’Neal-Kyles began a career with AT&T in Kansas City that ended up lasting 36 years. A single mother with three children, O’Neal-Kyles knew first-hand the challenges of balancing family and work. As she neared the end of her career at...
Pauline Nagle Olsen

Pauline Nagle Olsen

Over the years, physician Pauline Nagle Olsen felt called to volunteer on medical missions in South Korea. But after leaving her private practice in 2005, she wanted to help people closer to home, in Hartford, Conn. A year later she co-founded the Malta House of Care...
Richard Mabion

Richard Mabion

In 2006, Kansas City, Kan., resident Richard Mabion started presenting an energy efficiency program to leaders of neighborhood groups at Livable Neighborhoods, a city-run organization created to consolidate and coordinate neighborhood services and address pressing...
Marjorie Laird

Marjorie Laird

In 2002, Colorado family therapist Marjorie Laird learned that four teens at the high school next door to her church had committed suicide in just nine months of each other. Their deaths reflected a grim reality: Suicide is the second leading cause of death among...
Shana Swiss

Shana Swiss

In the late 1980s at a Boston hospital, physician Shana Swiss treated a refugee woman with 19 stab wounds. The brutality made Swiss realize she wanted to do more for this patient than sew up her horrific wounds. “I had to do something to stop violence against women,”...