Why did Gene Blue, a prominent Phoenix civic leader who for the past 40 years has run an organization that offers comprehensive training to disadvantaged and under-skilled Americans, move to Phoenix in the first place? To break into show business, of course.

 

“I spent a good deal of my service time in Europe as part of a vocal group—originally Les Chimes, later La Chords—singing and touring for the Air Force,” says Blue, who was born and raised in Charlottesville, Va. “Afterwards, we were given an opportunity for a recording contract and the studio where we would record was in Phoenix.”

 

Using Phoenix as a base of operations, La Chords performed throughout the West. But even though the group had some success, it wasn’t enough to live on, so the members called it quits after five years. Blue, who eventually gave up show biz, landed an administrative job at Sperry Flight Systems.

 

Blue enrolled at Phoenix College (PC) mainly to further his career. The college was close to where he lived and offered a flexible schedule, particularly on evenings and weekends.

 

One memorable PC class was a business administration course.

 

“Each week, we had to collect 10 or so letters from various sources and decipher how people were using the English language,” says Blue. “I received letters from folks talking about expanding a sales area and used the term ‘adder,’ which is a snake. Those kinds of discoveries expanded our vocabulary and understanding of the English language.”

 

After graduating from PC in 1979, Blue earned a bachelor’s degree in business administration at Grand Canyon College (now Grand Canyon University), and from St. Stephens College he received an MBA. In 1980, he received an honorary doctorate in behavioral science.

 

Blue credits his wife for the decision that led to his nearly 40-year stint as president and CEO of the Arizona Opportunities Industrialization Center (OIC).

 

“The OIC operation had started in Philadelphia in 1964, with the Rev. Dr. Leon Sullivan providing employment and training for unemployed, underemployed, economically disadvantaged people,” says Blue. “My wife became aware of it and, as part of the ladies auxiliary, took in financial support, community support and human resources to get a similar program off the ground in Phoenix.”

 

While the Arizona OIC has over the years placed some 30,000 clients—mainly school dropouts, disabled people, ex-offenders, homeless and displaced homemakers—into meaningful jobs, Blue takes the greatest pride in a program called Reaching Out for Minority Personnel (ROMP), which recruits African Americans, other ethnic minorities and women for police and fire departments.

 

“For many folks, it was difficult because there wasn’t any lowering of physical and academic requirements or greasing of the skids,” says Blue. “We had to structure an outreach program at a time when being a member of a police department was not the most favorable job in the ethnic minority community. ROMP was a signature effort that I was directly involved in writing and securing the resources for.”

 

Among the various positions he holds at local and national organizations, Blue said he derives particular satisfaction from his decisions made as chair of the City of Phoenix Planning Commission.

 

Blue will never second-guess his choice of Phoenix College.

 

“A junior college gave me the foundation for advanced studies,” says Blue. “Community college lets you fulfill the requirements for your major those first two years while you get your head on straight figuring out what you want to do. It affords that kind of environment.”

Briggs went to ECC after spending his senior year of high school at the Lycée du Mont Blanc in rural southern France.

 

“I got that being-away-from-your-parents, away-from-the-state, away-from-the country thing out of my system,” says Briggs. “So I was fine to stay home for a couple years to save some money.”

 

ECC provided the scientific prerequisites Briggs needed to qualify for a pre-med program at Transylvania University in Lexington, Ky., before moving to the University of Kentucky College of Medicine for his medical degree.

 

Briggs decided to specialize in cardiothoracic surgery because the cardiothoracic surgeons he encountered during a general surgery residency at Brooke Army Medical Center in San Antonio were the “coolest docs around.”

 

“Sometimes on television you see people who are critically injured come into the emergency room, and everybody’s screaming and throwing things,” says Briggs. “But the cardiac surgery guys would come in and never raise their voices, get everybody calmed down. I always respected that a lot more than the people who came in screaming.”

 

After his residencies, Briggs joined the Jarvik Artificial Heart Transplantation Project in Louisville.

 

“At the time, we were the only place in the world that was using the artificial heart as a permanent implantable device,” says Briggs, whose long career as a cardiothoracic surgeon went on to include assistant professorships of surgery at three medical schools. (He is currently in private practice with the East Tennessee Cardiovascular Surgery Group in Knoxville.)

 

Some of Briggs’s most notable achievements took place during the interruptions to his civilian medical career for military service, highly decorated tours of duty that far exceeded his obligation to repay the Army for financing his medical degree. He served as chief of surgery with 121st Evacuation Hospital in Seoul, and as a surgeon with 807th MASH Unit during the Persian Gulf War. He served most recently, as staff cardiothoracic surgeon with the 10th Combat Support Hospital in Baghdad.

 

A full colonel in the Medical Corps of the U.S. Army Reserve, Briggs’ war-zone service attracted the most attention in 2006 when he treated ABC’s World News Tonight co-anchor Bob Woodruff and his cameraman for critical head wounds.

 

Now Briggs has embarked on a new career: politics. Last year, he won a seat on the Knox County Commission, a position that permits him to keep tabs on a local institution—Pellissippi State Technical Community College—that he views as crucial to the local economy.

 

“In the past, if you were attempting to recruit business or industry to your community, you would offer tax breaks,” says Briggs. “The trend in last few years is to have the proper workforce. If you have a well-trained workforce, you don’t have to go out and look for industry—industry’s looking for you.”

William Green is more than just another successful community college graduate. He’s a true believer and tireless crusader for the community college cause.

 

The foundation he created at Accenture—the global management consulting, technology services and outsourcing company that he chairs—earmarks a scholarship fund for students who launch technology and engineering careers at two-year institutions.

 

Green also chairs the Business Roundtable’s Education and Workforce Task Force, a group of influential business leaders who promote community colleges nationwide.

 

And last year, in a guest column in Forbes magazine entitled “Why Not Community College?” he said that over the years he’s come to view community colleges and other two-year institutions as the Cinderella story of the U.S. education system—doing the hard work, quietly, without much fanfare.

 

“They provide a pathway to the American dream for millions of people, whether they enter the workforce immediately afterward or decide to continue their education,” he wrote.

 

Green’s personal Cinderella story began at Dean College (Massachusetts), which he attended after an undistinguished high school career. The son of a plumber who was offered a plumber’s union apprenticeship the same day Dean College accepted him, Green opted to follow his father’s advice: “My dad said, ‘You can always be a plumber. Why don’t you try college?’”

 

His experience at community college transformed his life.

 

“I went off and started at Dean and it was infectious because Dean does what I call educate, energize and inspire,” says Green, a business major who didn’t fully appreciate the community college experience until he moved on to four-year Babson College.

 

“At Dean, a chart on the professors’ doors had the days across the top and the hours down the side. The classes were Xed out, and all the other time the teachers are available to help you. At Babson, my economics professor had the same chart, but there were Xs indicating when he had office hours—one hour each on Tuesday and Thursday. Right there is the difference between the community college system and everything else.”

 

After graduating from Babson in 1977, Green joined Andersen Consulting, a division of the Big Five accounting firm that would later spin off as Accenture. He’s been there ever since, rising steadily in the ranks. Green became CEO in 2004 and was named board chair in 2006.

 

As leader of a company that employs 186,000 people worldwide, Green is understandably concerned about educating the workforce.

 

“Last year, we hired 50,000 people,” Green says. “We spend about $1 billion a year training people inside Accenture, but what we’re trying to get is good raw material that can be trained. That’s the focus of our foundation and also a program called Community Teach Program,” which places Accenture executives as teachers in community colleges.

 

Promoting community colleges is also one of the main roles of the Business Roundtable, the CEOs of 160 major U.S. companies who launch initiatives aimed at bolstering U.S. competitiveness. Much of their efforts involve upgrading the workforce.

 

“We focus on the community college’s role in skills for life—how one renews and retools oneself to be relevant,” he said.

 

Green still has close ties with Dean College. He recently donated $1 million to the institution—the largest gift ever by a living donor—and spoke at last year’s graduation ceremony. He even sent two of his children there.

For as far back as she can remember, Pat Guenther wanted to be a nurse.

 

“I had the report card that asked what you wanted to be when you grow up, and in my kindergarten handwriting it said ‘A nurse and a mother,’” Guenther says.

 

She eventually attained both goals, but the career path to nursing took the scenic route.

 

“Right after high school, instead of going straight to college, I got pregnant and had a family and ended up living in Australia and Indonesia with my ex-husband,” Guenther says.

 

After a divorce, she and her two children returned home to Glenwood Springs, Colo., where she entered a new nursing program at Colorado Mountain College (CMC). Along with the coursework, what Guenther appreciated most at CMC were the counselors.

 

“They kept directing me to where I could get resources to continue to go to school, whether it was childcare or help buying gas or a place to live,” Guenther says. “The counselors were really there as a conduit to show me all the resources that were available in the community.”

 

Guenther eventually obtained her registered nurse degree from Trinidad State Colorado Junior College (Colorado) and began working in the emergency rooms at two local hospitals. After her second husband suggested that she didn’t need to maintain a typically grueling full-time schedule anymore, she became a “per-diem nurse,” picking up odd shifts at various hospitals, and had a brainstorm for a nursing-related business.

 

“I got six of my girlfriends together and starting going out to the hospitals and saying there’s a group of six critical care nurses who are available on short notice when you need staffing,” says Guenther. “The company was called Colorado Stat Nursing, and the first year I took in $2.4 million. I didn’t make any money, of course, because I didn’t know anything about gross margins or net margins or cash flow.”

 

A serendipitous misunderstanding occurred after she renamed the firm Stat Nurses International (SNI).

 

“I was recruiting nurses from India, but I started getting calls from nurses who thought I was sending nurses from here internationally on humanitarian missions,” Guenther says. “All of a sudden, I go from begging nurses to work for 13 weeks in L.A. and promising to get them a rental car and housing, to getting calls from nurses saying they will go anywhere in the world and work for free.”

 

As a result, she left SNI and formed Nurses With Purpose (NWP), a nonprofit that delivers nursing services where needed throughout the world.

 

“Right now we have a team in Uganda providing a mobile clinic to 300 to 400 people a day,” Guenther says. NWP volunteers rotate in for two-week shifts “and we can’t send them out fast enough. Ultimately it would be best if they had a clinic environment, then they could rotate through a month at a time and doing some training with local people, too.”

 

To keep the coffers filled, Guenther also started the for-profit US Nurselink, which provides hospitals and other health care organizations custom software for managing nurse staffing resources. Guenther plans to donate 30 percent of US Nurselink profits to NWP.

 

Guenther, who has established a nursing scholarship at CMC and frequently visits nursing classes, credits CMC for the success she’s had in life.

 

“One afternoon a friend, a Holocaust survivor who lives in Aspen told me, ‘When they studied all the Holocaust survivors, the one common thing they saw in all their stories was that someone or something reached out and gave them a hand up.’ CMC did that for me. They reached out and gave me a hand up, and without that I would never have become a nurse.”

When Rudy Rodriguez was only four years old, his father—a successful banker in Bogota, Colombia—abandoned his family, leaving his mother and six children so penniless that they often had to sift through garbage in search of food.

 

When he turned seven, Rodriguez made a vow: “I promised God that whatever money or success I had, I would share with the less privileged, mainly those kids who are sick, who don’t have anybody, who are in need,” Rodriguez says.

 

Four decades later, living in Connecticut, Rodriguez fulfilled his pledge by founding Open Hearts, Open Doors, a nonprofit organization that provides support to poor children from more than 35 countries who suffer from life-threatening illnesses.

 

Acting as an intermediary, Rodriguez arranges for medical treatment in hospitals nationwide, negotiates with airlines for free or reduced fares and asks pharmaceutical companies to donate medicines. When necessary, he pays for treatment out of his own pocket and opens his home to recuperating children.

 

“The cases that I take are the cases that nobody wants,” Rodriguez says. “I never say no. I’m willing to help anybody.”

 

That includes Jesús, a 13-year-old Colombian boy born without arms and legs who Rodriguez brought to the Shriners Hospital for Children in Springfield, Mass., to be fitted with custom-made prosthetic limbs. Open Hearts, Open Doors also helped Maria, a three-year-old girl from Colombia who underwent numerous operations in New York hospitals because fluid had collected in her brain.

 

Rodriguez’s achievements have not gone unnoticed. In 2006, he received a Jefferson Award for Public Service, the so-called “Nobel Prize” for public and community service established in 1972 by Jacqueline Onassis and others.

 

Rodriguez’s long road from poverty to philanthropy made an important stop at community college. After graduating from the Escolombias School of Finance, Banking, and Commerce in Bogota, he immigrated to the U.S., settled in Stamford, Conn., and worked as a butler for a wealthy family who realized his potential.

 

“They saw in a way I had different abilities, so they gave me the opportunity,” Rodriguez says. “I was living in house and they let me go to Norwalk Community College (NCC) at night and on weekends.”

 

Rodriguez compiled more than 180 credits at NCC, in business law, economics, psychology, accounting and history, but he also received a one-to-one tutorial on public service.

 

“I had a teacher who was teaching both at Harvard and at NCC part-time, and I asked him why he was teaching here,” Rodriguez says. “He said, ‘Rudy, you have to give something back to the community, this is the way I can express my gratitude for all the blessings this country has provided.’”

 

After NCC, Rodriguez went through a number of jobs—landscaping, window installation, roofing, factory work—before starting a successful Greenwich-based limo business, Professional Cadillac Limousine Services. The limo business evolved into a transportation service company, which helps finance his philanthropic activities and others still on the drawing board.

 

Rodriguez firmly believes in success through education, especially the kind of education community colleges provide.

 

“Community colleges are the bridge to start your life or change your life,” he says. “To become successful, you have to make that first step, and community colleges are the first step in that long process.”