George Howell has been in the coffee business for more than 40 years, but the industry pioneer has news for those who think he should be settling down in his 70s: “We’ve just begun doing this.”
After moving from California in 1974, Howell discovered the coffee scene in Boston was “a real big zero.” He soon decided to open up his first shop, the Coffee Connection, in Harvard Square, displaying Huichol art on the walls and introducing local palates to single-origin coffee from farms in countries like Kenya, Guatemala and Costa Rica. After selling his two dozen Coffee Connection stores—and a little drink called the Frappuccino—to Starbucks in 1994, Howell made it his goal to get coffee farms more recognition for their beans. He worked for the U.N.’s Gourmet Project and, in 1999, co-founded the Cup of Excellence in Brazil, where Howell helped foster connections between coffee farmers and companies such as Stumptown, Intelligentsia and Peet’s.
“Third-wave was sort of born in that time,” Howell says. “They would then go from the Cup of Excellence and go out into the countryside meeting the winning farms and establishing relationships with them to buy their coffee.”
Howell started his own roasting operation, George Howell Coffee, in 2003 and has since opened a cafe in Newtonville, a stall in the Boston Public Market and a showcase cafe in the Godfrey Hotel, which offers a menu of single-estate and micro-lot coffee and specialty drinks along with tastings, classes and retail beans from farms in Yemen, Ethiopia and beyond. Howell plans to slowly expand with additional satellite cafes in the Boston Public Market mold as well as one or two more showcase cafes in Greater Boston.
“Where I want to focus is on the cafe because the cafe allows direct communication between us—the roaster and buyer of coffee—and the consumer. It is the direct intersection, and it’s only that way that I feel I can effect change,” Howell says. “The dream is that sometime from now into the distant future, consumers are looking for particular farms and are asking the roaster how they’re roasting it. And it’s going more in the direction of the wine industry.”
“Juan Negrín. I actually knew him when I lived in Mexico City as a teenager, going to the French high school in Mexico City. And then we went to Yale together as well. He was an artist first, of extraordinary brilliance. But then he gravitated toward working with the Huichol Indians as individual artists, and then through those artists entering into the culture itself and becoming a key connection for that culture with the Mexican government as a go-between and bringing support—cultural, artistic and practical—to them.… I exhibited that art for him in Coffee Connection and various art galleries from Los Angeles to New York. … Juan’s pursuit of the art and the authentic, and the quality he demanded, and his absolute focus on that throughout his life, was the example.”
The Leader Board
Who inspires Boston’s movers and shakers? Ten local talents making a mark in their fields tell us who influenced them along the way.
By Jacqueline Houton | Photo: Monika Bach Schroeder | Aug. 4, 2017
Ashleigh Gordon
Violist Ashleigh Gordon has performed around the world, from Hong Kong’s Lee Hysan Concert Hall to Paris’ Centre Pompidou. But she also enthralls audiences in elementary schools and the Roxbury YMCA. She’s the artistic director and co-founder of Castle of Our Skins, a local concert and educational series that celebrates black artistry through music. Named after the opening line of Nikki Giovanni’s “Poem (for Nina),” Castle of Our Skins is set to begin its fifth season of concerts featuring music by black composers, which will kick off with string quartet performances at the Museum of African American History on Aug. 25 as part of the Highland Street Foundation’s Free Fun Fridays. It also leads educational workshops, like one called Ella Scats the Little Lamb that encourages kindergarteners to make some noise of their own. “It uses a piece by Valerie Capers called Portraits in Jazz that riffs on ‘Mary Had a Little Lamb’ and teaches kids how to scat sing in homage to Ella Fitzgerald,” Gordon explains.
Gordon also works with young people through Boston Youth Symphony Orchestra’s Intensive Community Program, which provides high-quality string instrumental instruction to students from communities often underrepresented in classical music. While only a few students have pursued careers in music, all graduates of the program have enrolled in college. “They have a small, close-knit class and a very strong community that takes them from youth through high school. The feeling of family and community and discipline is embedded from an early age, and it’s quite special to see,” Gordon says. It’s a program that’s left its mark on her as well. “So many parents whose students I didn’t even interact with came up to me and said that my sheer presence as a black woman teacher meant a great deal to them. That sort of jump-started my thinking on how I can use my position as a black woman violist to highlight diversity and promote representation within my field.”
Who influenced you?
“For my current mood, I would have to say Nina Simone. Shortly after the election, there was a lot of initiative within the arts community about ways of responding and how we can do what we do in solidarity, how we can do what we do in protest. I was just really struck by the call to action and sense of urgency that Nina Simone would speak on on behalf of artists. There is no better time than now to reflect your community and your society and be responsive. You have a duty as an artist, as a creative, to influence, take charge and be vocal.”
By Jacqueline Houton | Photo by Michael Piazza
Jon Feinman
InnerCity Weightlifting builds a lot more than muscle. “We have students who are taking vacations for the first time in their lives. They’re able to afford rent. They’re able to afford food. They’re able to look forward to tomorrow because they know it’s going to happen,” says executive director Jon Feinman, who launched the nonprofit in 2010 during his final semester of MBA studies at Babson, drawing on his own experience as a personal trainer and his time in AmeriCorps working with young men in the gang MS-13. Today, InnerCity Weightlifting targets young people at the greatest risk for street violence, training and employing them as personal trainers in its Kendall Square and Dorchester gyms. In the past two years, Feinman has seen the average monthly income for his top student trainers rise from $600 to $3,796. But the social capital students develop can be even more powerful than the paychecks.
“We actually just had one student, someone who’s had multiple gun charges, get placed in an internship with MIT in the civil engineering department,” Feinman says. “We have other students who are having dinner at the homes of our clients who are CEOs and partners at law firms and venture capital companies out in Lexington and Weston and Wellesley.” The impact on clients can be transformative too, and Feinman aims to reshape perceptions as much as physiques. “Our clients are overwhelmingly white and affluent and have never known anyone who’s gone to jail, never mind someone who’s been shot,” he explains. “I think what really makes our model work is that the same people who are supposed to be the most dangerous are some of the most caring people you’re ever going to meet.”
Who influenced you?
“Our students have absolutely been the biggest influence on who I am today and have really helped develop my views on the world—and how we have so much to benefit from connecting with each other rather than avoiding each other…. These are people I’ve been told to stay away from. When I first came to Boston, I was told, ‘Don’t cross Mass. Ave. on Tremont Street. Don’t go too far down West Newton Street.’ I was told to avoid these areas and fell into this system of segregation and isolation. And that wasn’t necessarily done with bad intentions. When these things are happening in certain communities, your instinct is to avoid—but that very avoidance creates the circumstances that ultimately lead to cutting the community off from resources, to lack of access to opportunity, to inequality, to the need for the street, which leads to more violence, more logical decisions to avoid a certain area. I certainly fell into that when I first moved to Boston. Now I live on the other side of Mass. Ave. There’s no one who can tell me to not go into a certain section or down a certain street. And the reason is I’ve met our students. I know who our students are as people, not just the stories in the news.”
By Alexandra Cavallo | Photo by Adam DeTour
Jonny Sun
Don’t try to pigeonhole Jonny Sun. The multi-hyphenate MIT doctoral student counts researcher, engineer, playwright, comedy writer, author and designer among the many roles on his ever-growing resume. “I don’t believe that sciences and creative arts lie on opposite ends of a spectrum, or that they are at odds with each other,” Sun says. “What I’ve found by getting to do work in both is that what I learn and the experiences I gain in one field feeds the other.” Recent achievements include the staging of his debut play Dead End in Toronto last fall, a summer internship with Microsoft’s AI and Research Group working on yet-to-be-announced projects involving machine learning and natural language processing, co-founding the Online Humor Conversation Series at MIT—a forum where internet comedians, academics and researchers explore humor’s influence on the web and culture as whole—and the creation of Twitter bot @tinycarebot, which tweets self-care reminders to nearly 100,000 followers every hour (“Please don’t forget to take some time to look up from Twitter,” for one).
However, Sun is likely best known for his Twitter alter ego Jomny Sun, an earnest alien who has come to Earth to learn about humans, only to be confused about their language and behavior at every turn. Jomny’s Twitter account has gained the humorist more than 480,000 followers, earned attention from The New York Times, Vice, BuzzFeed and Time (which named Sun one of the 25 most influential people on the internet in 2017) and inked him a book deal with Harper Perennial for the self-illustrated everyone’s a aliebn when ur a aliebn too, which hit shelves in June. “I have always felt like an outsider, and I had always felt that my perspective as a writer came out of being the outsider or the Other,” Sun explains. “I really enjoy observing and understanding norms, social structures and cultural rules so I can write about them and subvert them.”
Who influenced you?
“My high school drama teacher, who had always been supportive of my writing, told me: ‘If you can live and be happy without being a writer, then you should, because it’s a difficult life. But if you can’t, then you will know and it will find you.’ What she told me changed my life because it made me realize that it wasn’t necessarily my choice to make. That I could plan only so much and that I didn’t have to pick one or the other. That, to some degree, what you’re passionate about will find you no matter what.”
By Matt Martinelli | Photo: Susan Lapides
Diane Paulus
It’s no surprise that Tony winner Diane Paulus points to Waitress as a highlight of her directorial career. After premiering in Cambridge, the show debuted on Broadway last year as the first musical to have four different women in the four major creative roles. However, it’s a real-life tale of female empowerment from the show’s run that sticks out in Paulus’ mind. Before the curtain rose for the musical’s opening night on Broadway, the entire cast and creative team jammed onto the stage, and Paulus read a note that had been left in the lobby by a theatergoer who had recently seen the play.
“It said, ‘Thank you for saving my life. I got out of an abusive relationship thanks to this production,’ ” Paulus recalls. “There are many reasons we do it, but the idea that we could reach one person and give them the courage—through a musical even!”
The building blocks of musicals—dance and song—have always been interests for Paulus, who grew up playing the piano and dancing ballet a few blocks from Lincoln Center before entering Harvard with a desire to study politics. But Paulus caught the theater bug, eventually earning a master’s from Columbia in directing and taking over as the artistic director of Harvard’s American Repertory Theater. From The Gershwins’ Porgy and Bess to Pippin, she’s directed a number of Tony-winning musicals that have blazed a path from Cambridge to Broadway. Next she’ll direct two world premieres: February’s The White Card, penned by poet Claudia Rankine, and Jagged Little Pill, a Diablo Cody/Alanis Morissette collab slated for May. For Paulus, the prospect of working with two talented teams in back-to-back shows reaffirms why she was first drawn to theater decades ago.
“I loved being in a room and working in a group. I loved that feeling of being part of something that is larger than yourself,” she says. “I found that in the theater.”
Who influenced you?
“Eve Ensler. I’ve admired her from a distance in awe of her. … I always felt I was an activist in my heart, back to growing up in New York City and wanting to go into politics. And having this impulse that the world could be a better place, and how I wanted to do that through art. Meeting Eve was kind of the pivot point for me of how one can live and combine all those because she’s such an example of that. Getting to know her, getting in her orbit for philosophy, everything that she’s been through and what she stands for, and the kind of courage she has as a human being and as an artist—it’s been an enormous influence. We did In the Body of the World together last year. I read her memoir and said, ‘I want to commission it and adapt it.’ It was one of the most incredible collaborations I’ve had in my life, and we’re now collaborating on a new play with her to bring to A.R.T. in a couple of seasons.”
By Sarah Hagman
Sheila Marcelo
Armed with business and law degrees from Harvard, Sheila Lirio Marcelo had her hands full pursuing her career while raising two sons with her husband and taking care of her aging parents. In search of a solution, she first turned to the Yellow Pages, with little success. So in 2006, she founded Care.com, in part to support other mothers going after their professional ambitions. “The biggest factor for GDP growth globally has been women helping in the workplace,” Marcelo notes. “Yet the challenges for us in that economic imperative is that there’s a lack of care infrastructure; there’s a lack of developing the pipeline for women. There’s a bunch of different drivers.”
Now Care.com is the world’s largest resource for tracking down family caregivers—and the first public company to receive an investment from Google. It’s readying a rollout of new features for the app and website, but Marcelo’s got her hands full with plenty more, serving on the Boston Children’s Hospital board, working with public policy nonprofit Massachusetts Competitive Partnership on “women-omics” and mentoring fellow female entrepreneurs at another one of her ventures, WomenUp. And she’s not stopping there. “I’m realizing that speaking at more male-dominated conferences and venues is something that’s actually really important in the movement to improve female equality in the workplace,” Marcelo says. “And part of the reason for that is because there are so few women in the corner offices and on boards. We have to rely on men to make a difference here.”
Who influenced you?
“My parents, because they kind of role-modeled true gender parity. My mom was the main entrepreneur, doing the finance and the business. My dad was more nurturing— but they always worked together, so they didn’t fall into the stereotypes. And then George Bell. He was amazing as my boss at Upromise; he’s always been an incredible sponsor. I’ve always been fortunate in my career [to connect with] men who believed in me and helped guide me—Nick Beim, David Skok, Dado Banatao. And of course I also had a few women, like Joanie Nevins, who was a former CFO. But there were few, and that’s what I’m talking about. If we want to develop female leaders, we need to have more men, and time, to guide and sponsor women to grow.”
By Alexandra Cavallo | Photo: Hunter Levitan
Denise Korn
You can find Denise Korn’s touch all over town. Celebrating its 25th anniversary this year, Korn Design is a brand strategy and design firm focused on hospitality, lifestyle and culture projects in Boston and across the country. Locally, principal Korn and partner Javier Cortés have helped shaped the look of everything from the logo for Boston Ballet and posters for the Huntington Theatre Company to the Hotel Commonwealth’s recent renovations, the Eddy luxury apartments in Eastie and the Pru’s current repositioning and rebranding. One such project Korn was particularly excited about was opening the Envoy Hotel in the Seaport in spring of 2015. “I think because it’s kind of this convergence of huge demand for an independent, exciting hospitality product in the Boston market and this whole migration of creative industry and innovation moving down to the Seaport,” she explains. “We named it the Envoy very, very purposefully, because it’s a beacon of what lies ahead.”
As for what lies ahead for Korn Design, Korn says she’s excited about working on the residences at the forthcoming One Dalton, which is set to be the highest residential tower in New England. “The architecture is very respectful of the context, and it really just puts Boston on the map,” Korn says. “It’s going to be a huge marker and have a huge impact, in a beautiful way, on the skyline here.” She’s also made a major impact through her 14-year-old nonprofit, Youth Design, which provides urban teens with mentorships, training and paid summer jobs in design. “I don’t like to call it a nonprofit. I really think it’s a platform for change, and I really wish we could tap into these incredible points of view more, these visionaries who are unfettered by all the stuff we’re held back by,” Korn says. “I learn a lot from them and from the teachers who are leading these urban high schools. I find it to be very inspirational, and I take it with me into my day job.”
Who influenced you?
“My dad. He’s a first-generation immigrant from Eastern Europe. He taught me how to be scrappy, inventive and fearless. I think what they’d call him now is disruptive. [Laughs] … He’s a pretty well known orthodontist—he worked on Newbury Street for decades. He was this holistic guy who didn’t really believe in surgery; he was always thinking outside the box. But I always felt like he was a frustrated architect or something. When you’re an immigrant kid, and you’re a first-generation college-goer, you’re expected to become a doctor or a lawyer, so he did that. But he probably could have been an architect.”
By Matt Martinelli
George Howell
George Howell has been in the coffee business for more than 40 years, but the industry pioneer has news for those who think he should be settling down in his 70s: “We’ve just begun doing this.”
After moving from California in 1974, Howell discovered the coffee scene in Boston was “a real big zero.” He soon decided to open up his first shop, the Coffee Connection, in Harvard Square, displaying Huichol art on the walls and introducing local palates to single-origin coffee from farms in countries like Kenya, Guatemala and Costa Rica. After selling his two dozen Coffee Connection stores—and a little drink called the Frappuccino—to Starbucks in 1994, Howell made it his goal to get coffee farms more recognition for their beans. He worked for the U.N.’s Gourmet Project and, in 1999, co-founded the Cup of Excellence in Brazil, where Howell helped foster connections between coffee farmers and companies such as Stumptown, Intelligentsia and Peet’s.
“Third-wave was sort of born in that time,” Howell says. “They would then go from the Cup of Excellence and go out into the countryside meeting the winning farms and establishing relationships with them to buy their coffee.”
Howell started his own roasting operation, George Howell Coffee, in 2003 and has since opened a cafe in Newtonville, a stall in the Boston Public Market and a showcase cafe in the Godfrey Hotel, which offers a menu of single-estate and micro-lot coffee and specialty drinks along with tastings, classes and retail beans from farms in Yemen, Ethiopia and beyond. Howell plans to slowly expand with additional satellite cafes in the Boston Public Market mold as well as one or two more showcase cafes in Greater Boston.
“Where I want to focus is on the cafe because the cafe allows direct communication between us—the roaster and buyer of coffee—and the consumer. It is the direct intersection, and it’s only that way that I feel I can effect change,” Howell says. “The dream is that sometime from now into the distant future, consumers are looking for particular farms and are asking the roaster how they’re roasting it. And it’s going more in the direction of the wine industry.”
Who influenced you?
“Juan Negrín. I actually knew him when I lived in Mexico City as a teenager, going to the French high school in Mexico City. And then we went to Yale together as well. He was an artist first, of extraordinary brilliance. But then he gravitated toward working with the Huichol Indians as individual artists, and then through those artists entering into the culture itself and becoming a key connection for that culture with the Mexican government as a go-between and bringing support—cultural, artistic and practical—to them.… I exhibited that art for him in Coffee Connection and various art galleries from Los Angeles to New York. … Juan’s pursuit of the art and the authentic, and the quality he demanded, and his absolute focus on that throughout his life, was the example.”
By Alexandra Cavallo | Photo Credit: Ken Rivard
Jody Adams
A James Beard Award winner and mentor to many, Jody Adams has been a fixture on Boston’s culinary scene for decades, but stasis isn’t her style. Having opened her second restaurant, glittery Greenway hotspot Trade, in 2011, the chef/restaurateur departed her beloved fine-dining flagship Rialto in 2016 after a 22-year run to open Back Bay Mediterranean eatery Porto and casual Greek sandwich shop Saloniki, which now boasts buzzing locations in both Fenway and Cambridge. The latter fastcasual venture might initially seem like a surprising move to diners who savored Rialto’s signature slowroasted duck, but she’s brought similarly thoughtful sourcing and depth of flavor to a counter-service context at very palatable price points. And don’t expect her to slow down. In addition to lending her time to causes like Partners in Health, speaking at industry happenings like Boston’s inaugural Food Tank Summit and presiding over a summer pop-up at the Chatham Bars Inn, Adams has been scouting neighborhoods for future Saloniki outposts. “Be on the lookout for some new locations in 2018!”
Who influenced you?
“Julia Child. I first met her when I was in college. She was doing a demo as a fundraiser for Planned Parenthood, and I volunteered. Years later, I met her again and she directed me to apply for a job with Lydia Shire [another influence]. I learned to do what Julia told me to do. At a time when there weren’t many women with a public presence in the food world, Julia stood out as an example of what and who I could be. … She taught me the importance of treating all people with attentiveness, respect and generosity— to love what you do, to have fun and to not let anything get in your way.”
By Matt Martinelli
Karl Iagnemma
Self-driving cars are the future—and that future is fast approaching in part thanks to nuTonomy CEO Karl Iagnemma. One of the few companies building self-driving software, the Cambridge-based nuTonomy started test-driving autonomous vehicles in the Seaport’s Flynn Marine Park earlier this year, and its recent partnership with Lyft could mean some Bostonians will be able to hail a self-driving vehicle by the end of 2017.
“NuTonomy in some sense is really an outgrowth of my life’s work,” says Iagnemma, who established a mobile robotics research lab at MIT after getting his doctorate there in 2001. “All of the technology in driverless cars is robotics technology, so the research I was doing at my lab at MIT, and the research a handful of us were doing worldwide at different universities, has become the core technology for today’s driverless cars.”
Iagnemma has already helped get nuTonomy’s software on the road in Singapore, where public trials have allowed locals to hail rides in autonomous electric cars (which arrive with a nuTonomy engineer who observes performance and can take the wheel if needed). Data from those trials and testing in Boston—where vehicles may encounter very different driving conditions, including dense traffic and harsh weather—will help guide what’s likely to be a game-changing technology.
“There’s the economic opportunity of being able to offer a mode of transportation that’s cheaper than today’s available modes,” Iagnemma says. “And then there’s the potential social impact of improving the technology that today leads to a million-plus deaths worldwide—people getting behind the wheels of their cars.”
Who influenced you?
“At MIT, I had the great good fortune to work alongside professor Woodie Flowers, a legend of MIT’s mechanical engineering department. Woodie showed me how a brilliant, humble and ethical engineer comports himself on a daily basis. I consider myself lucky to have been influenced by him.”
By Sarah Hagman | Photo by David Silverman
Jessica Gelman
Jessica Gelman knows a thing or two about winning. As a point guard at Harvard, she was a member of the first Crimson squad to go to the NCAA tourney, winning back-to-back Ivy League titles before a stint as a professional basketball player. She’s since spent the past decade and a half working with another powerhouse—the Kraft family—in a role that she says is not too far off from her time as an athlete. “My job was to set people up to succeed on the court… I think the same is true today,” says the CEO of the Kraft Analytics Group. The new division grew out of an internal department that analyzed ticket sales, Pro Shop purchases and other numbers to find ways to increase engagement and customer satisfaction among New England Patriots and Revolution fans. Now, KAGR is tasked with leveraging that sort of data on fan behavior for other organizations. Since branching out last year, its staff of 25 has taken on clients in four out of five major U.S. sports leagues, and they’re making headway in the college arena too.
Meanwhile, Gelman has seen another one of her undertakings, the MIT Sloan Sports Analytics Conference, grow considerably since she and Houston Rockets GM Daryl Morey founded it 11 years ago as “an excuse to talk and make fun of each other.” Today, the annual gathering draws thousands of guests to hear from numbers gurus like Nate Silver. “I think we’ve helped drive analytics to become mainstream in the sports industry because we’re providing a place for really brilliant folks to share what they’re doing.” And if you’re not one of those brilliant number crunchers, well, that’s where KAGR comes in. “I think a lot of times people hear what’s happening at Sloan, but then they don’t know how to actually take it to become a driven organization,” Gelman says. “Analytics is scary to a lot of people, and that’s OK… That’s part of why I gravitate toward what we’re doing, because it’s making sense of the information and trying to tell a story.”
Who influenced you?
“The Krafts. They’re tremendous leaders, very entrepreneurial, innovative; they’re hardworking. And they’re just really good people too, and that’s really inspiring. I feel just so fortunate to have wanted to continue to be learning from them, and I think the biggest thing that I learned early on from them was to think bigger, and differently, and not to set limits.”
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