To shine a light on the transformative power of tuition assistance, Alumni Council member Ted Alcorn ’01 is telling the stories of alumni who were grateful recipients during their Academy years.
By Ted Alcorn ’01
The tide has gone out, stranding thousands of starfish on the shore, and a person walking along the beach is tossing them back into the water. “What are you doing?” asks a passerby, “You’re never going to make a difference.” The starfish thrower bends down to pick up another creature and replies, “It made a difference to that one.”
It’s a familiar parable, even in land-locked New Mexico where Mark Dimas ’98 grew up, and one of his mom’s favorite explanations of her commitment to helping others. She fostered and eventually adopted medically fragile children, and Mark’s stepdad helped people with physical and mental disabilities get jobs. But as a kid, Mark didn’t see himself as any kind of activist.
His family lived in the International District, and he credited his fifth-grade teacher at Hawthorne Elementary for encouraging him to apply to the Academy, even though full tuition was beyond his household’s means. Accepted and offered financial aid, he would often take the city bus to school, a solitary student crossing the length of the city on the trip up Wyoming Boulevard.
Academy students who had attended Manzano Day School together arrived with a circle of familiar faces, but no one, to Mark’s recollection, came from Hawthorne. “It took a little bit of time — but I don’t remember it being too difficult to make at least a couple friends.” The schoolwork was daunting, too. “Out of my entire academic career, I feel like sixth grade was probably my hardest year, in terms of the adjustment to the expectations that were there.”
His interests proliferated. He joined the wrestling team, played clarinet and bass clarinet in band, and built sets for school plays. He got close with his German teacher Jim Carrell, who he helped during free periods as part of a work-study program the school required of financial aid recipients at that time. And he thrived in Don Smith’s advanced calculus classes, eventually matriculating at Stanford with aspirations to study math.
But the Bay Area in the late 1990s was a hotbed of computer science and, after taking a couple courses, he switched majors. At a campus job fair his sophomore year, the dot-com boom was apparent, as companies offered summer interns free housing, cars, and other crazy perks. By his graduation, however, the bubble had burst. He landed a job at a software company, but within a few years was tiring of it when his college classmate Ben Rattray came to him with an idea for “harnessing social activism and the internet in a way to enable people to make change.”
They split the work, Ben developing the business and Mark building the website, which allowed users to create and promote petitions to advance social causes. The company, Change.org, had its ups and downs, but Mark knew it was gathering traction when, still in the depths of the financial crisis, a 22-year-old started a petition to denounce a new fee Bank of America was imposing on customers with debit cards. By the time the petition drew 300,000 co-signers, the bank had reversed the decision. Those little signatures, like the starfish Dimas’s mom spoke about, were adding up.
Today the website has 500 million users across 196 countries, and has been instrumental in nearly every social movement you can think of, raising awareness and focusing attention on decision makers.
Names on a page only go so far, Mark acknowledged, particularly with politics as polarized as they are today. But conversations that seem impossible at the national level are often easier when shrunken to a local concern — saving a senior center from closure, helping a nearby school, or even protecting a community member from deportation. As divisive as the immigration debate can be, “when people say, ‘this is my neighbor who’s going to get kicked out; we know their family and their kids go to school with our kids,’ other people are much more supportive.”
