AGE: 36
POSITION: Executive director, City Year Rhode Island
RESIDENCE: Providence
LIFELONG AMBITION: To be a good husband and father even as I strive to change the world
FAVORITE BOOK: “The Mambo Kings Play Songs of Love,” by Oscar Hijuelos
GUILTY PLEASURE: Dancing
When Michael Goldstein was 15, he taught three algebra summer courses at San Francisco Summerbridge, a chapter of the Breakthrough Collaborative, a group that aims to help middle school-age students improve their prospects and encourage them to go into teaching.
“I loved it,” Goldstein wrote in his 40 Under Forty application. “That experience made me fall in love with teaching and set me on my current path.”
As a student at Brown University – where he would graduate magna cum laude – Goldstein co-founded Providence Summerbridge, which grew into an academic summer and year-round program for economically disadvantaged youth with 36 summer program teachers and 80 middle school students. He also raised $400,000, including a $100,000 endowment.
But Goldstein has also worked in business. In Prague, he ran a branch office of an advertising agency and also oversaw the launch of Stratton Group, the largest holding company in central Europe, in October 1995, which made the pages of Business Week and the Financial Times. Later, he returned to the United States to earn a master’s degree in public policy at Harvard University.
Since then, Goldstein has focused on the nonprofit sector. For more than 11 years, he has served as executive director of nonprofits and founded or co-founded five organizations to meet unmet needs in the community.
He returned to Rhode Island in 2004 to become executive director of City Year Rhode Island, and “I am thrilled to be back in Providence and to make an impact in the state,” he wrote.
At City Year, Goldstein has raised more than $1.2 million annually and increased revenue by 15 percent over the past year. He also launched the Social Entrepreneur Fellowship, which teaches corps members business skills and allow them to apply those skills to address critical needs in local schools and nonprofits. The fellowship is now a pilot program for the whole City Year organization.
“Why does City Year matter so much to me?” he wrote. “Because service transforms communities and the person doing the service. And the younger you involve someone in service, the more powerful the effect.”
