09-29-2026IMPACT COUNCIL

What business owes the next generation

Business leaders play a role in creating opportunities for young people.

[Photo: Getty Images]

The Fast Company Impact Council is an invitation-only membership community of top leaders and experts who pay dues for access to peer learning, thought leadership, and more.

When my father was a child in upstate New York, he contracted polio. So did three of his younger siblings. It was devastating to the family. It was also, in a way none of them could have anticipated, a door that opened onto something extraordinary.

The White children became part of Jonas Salk’s research, a small but real contribution to the science that would eventually defeat the dreaded disease. That experience lit something in my father that never went out, motivating him to become an epidemiologist. He played a role in the global eradication of smallpox, an improbable collaboration that, at the height of the Cold War, required the United States and the Soviet Union to work together toward a common human goal. My parents moved us to West Africa, so that my dad could do his small part. He believed, with everything he had, that no problem was too large to solve.

What he also believed, and what I watched him practice throughout his life, is that while talent is everywhere, opportunity is not. Someone must open that door.

That conviction is the foundation of the Fellowship that bears his........

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