Growing up in Columbia, South Carolina, Sylvia Watts McKinney saw how so-called urban renewal displaced low-income families. “I would see communities—parents and their children, the elderly—relocated to poverty-stricken areas,” she says. “They didn’t understand what was happening. Personally, I didn’t feel these Americans had voices.” Today McKinney helps thousands of Philadelphia middle- and high-school students find their own voices through entrepreneurship.
McKinney studied political science at the University of South Carolina and was shopping for a grad school when she visited 77 Mass. Ave. She remembers “the feeling of the doors, these larger-than-God-doors, and the presence of power.” She sat in on a class taught by architecture and city planning professor Tunney Lee, participating in a discussion about including residents in the design process for low-income housing. “At that time, Columbia was not a multicultural, ethnically diverse community,” she recalls. “Here was this Asian professor. I looked around. People looked like me, people didn’t look like me, and we’re having this dialogue. Now I’m in this global community. I thought, ‘This is where I belong.’” She immediately applied to MIT and was accepted.
“My moral core came from Larry Susskind and Frank Jones,” McKinney says of her city-planning professors. “Working with them helped me develop my sense of caring, my sense of passion, and my need to continue to learn.”
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