Ann Higdon and ISUS were featured in the Wall Street Journal

To Believe in Someone

Ann Higdon runs a nonprofit that helps high-school dropouts earn their diplomas and train for jobs. She understands how easy it is to start down the wrong path in life.

ISUS President and Founder Ann Higdon with her Students

Ann Higdon runs a nonprofit that helps provide job skills.

"I know what it's like to make bad choices…because I made many myself," says Ms. Higdon, who, as a child, lived in a one-room tenement in Harlem with a violent father, often went hungry and several times was homeless. "But I also know it's possible to rise above the odds."

Ms. Higdon, 70, is president and "resident visionary" of Improved Solutions for Urban Systems in Dayton, Ohio. She founded the organization, which today has 55 employees and runs three trade-focused charter schools. In one project, students are helping to build houses in dilapidated neighborhoods. The young people learn construction skills and help revitalize communities at the same time.
Though she started but never finished college, Ms. Higdon led a varied career working at several private research groups, where she managed health-care, education and social-service programs funded by the federal government. (She also worked second jobs as a camp counselor, cosmetics saleswoman and waitress to support her four children.) She found she had a knack for overseeing what at first seemed like insurmountable, large-scale public projects. On her own initiative in the late 1980s, Ms. Higdon launched the first card-based federal food-stamp system—selling her home and depleting her savings to get the project up and running.

When that effort was completed, Ms. Higdon, then 53, began looking for a new challenge.

"I was a difficult girl, a lazy student with a big mouth, but when I was 15, one teacher encouraged me to create a future for myself," says Ms. Higdon, who didn't have many friends growing up, because she was afraid they would find out how poor she was. "I wanted to spend my later years giving kids a sense of hope, because having someone believe in you makes all the difference in life."

In 1992, she started ISUS with her own money and a $100,000 bank loan. Most people thought she was "out of her mind" to try to help dropouts, but she was undeterred and started by working with a group of 15 kids. Today, the group helps prepare more than 300 kids a year for careers in health care, computers and construction.

Ms. Higdon is working 60 hours a week—and has no plans to slow down. She wants to bring the ISUS concept to other cities and is also extending programs in Dayton to encompass environmentally friendly design, solar-panel installation and other fields in the burgeoning green-construction industry.
"ISUS isn't just my vocation, it's my avocation," she says.
 

Second Acts looks at the varied paths people are taking in their 50s and beyond. The profiles are by Kristi Essick, a writer in California. You can reach her, and let us know how you're starting over in later life, at encore@wsj.com.
Printed in The Wall Street Journal, page R5, Copyright 2009 Dow Jones & Company, Inc. All Rights Reserved