Glamour Women of the Year 2002: Oral Lee Brown
To celebrate the thirtieth anniversary of Glamour's Women of the Year awards, we are delving back into our archives to highlight some of the incredible women we have honored over the last three decades.
In January we've cast the spotlight on activism—and the incredible Oral Lee Brown. Today, when you think about activism, you might conjure up Greta Thunberg, a WOTY recipient in 2019, for example, or the #womensmarch or the powerful Black Lives Matter movement. But sometimes the actions of one person alone, even in the smallest of communities, can also leave an indelible mark.
In 1987, Brown met an eight-year-old girl on the street in Oakland, California. The girl asked for a quarter. Brown responded with the question: Why aren't you in school? The little girl shrugged.
Unable to shake her encounter, the real estate agent made up her mind to help Oakland's at-risk children. That year she adopted an entire first-grade class at Brookfield Elementary School, promising to pay for their college education if they graduated high school.
Maria Shriver's Women's Conference 2010 - Day 3
She saved $10,000 a year from a $45,000 a year salary and, through careful investments and local fund-raising events, managed to grow her pot for the kids to over $1 million. Nineteen of the 23 children graduated. Brown came through on her promise and sent them to college.
That was in 2002. Since then, she established the Oral Lee Brown Foundation, which has, to date, supported 136 students from low-income families. She offers mentoring, tutoring, and financial bursaries and in 2005 established a Saturday school, where they could take children from all grades, rather than just first.
Oral Lee Brown At Glamour Magazine's Women Of The Year 2002
There have now been eight phases of her official first-graders' program. Phase 5 kids graduated high school in 2017 and are now attending colleges, while the children in Phase 6, 7, and 8 are in high school, middle school, and elementary school respectively.
The actions of one woman sparked a movement that has continued to have an enormous impact on the long-term futures of some of the most at-risk children in Oakland.
www.oralleebrownfoundation.org
Originally Appeared on Glamour
