Newsmaker

Every Friday, we choose an alum who has been making headlines—for better or for worse.
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Laura Arnold ’00JD:
Head Start, unstopped

"Even though we think we're pretty smart, we know that we're not as smart as we'll be tomorrow," Laura Arnold ’00JD says in explaining why she and her husband shifted their professional focus to full-time philanthropy while still in their 30s. "Some of these issues . . . have very long time horizons. And we get a head start."

They also give to Head Start: on October 7, the National Head Start Association announced that Laura and John Arnold had donated $10 million so the pre-K program could continue serving low-income kids during the federal shutdown.

Laura Muñoz Arnold, a former corporate lawyer, and John Arnold, an Enron trader turned hedge fund manager, are cofounders and cochairs of the Houston-based Laura and John Arnold Foundation. But the donation to Head Start—the program conceived by Yale psychology professor Ed Zigler in 1964, before the Arnolds were conceived—comes from their personal fortune.

"We believe that it is especially unfair that young children from underprivileged communities and working families pay the price for the legislature’s collective failures," the couple said in a statement. "We sincerely hope that our government gets back to work in short order, as private dollars cannot in the long term replace government commitments.”

Filed under philanthropy, Laura Arnold, Head Start
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