MacArthur ‘Genius’ Winners Include Nonprofit Leaders in Art, Science, and Advocacy

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Becca Heller, a human-rights lawyer and co-founder of the International Refugee Assistance Project, is among this year’s crop of MacArthur Foundation “genius” fellows with strong connections to the nonprofit world.

The group also features a pastor, a violinist, an HIV activist-turned-researcher, and a man who got into art to impress a woman.

Heller’s group saw its profile rise nationally after President Trump’s executive order last year that left immigrants detained at airports. She was a key organizer who helped lead a “pro bono brigade” that brought lawyers to airports to push back against the travel ban.

Heller’s organization, originally the Iraqi Refugee Assistance Project, started in 2008 while she was a student at Yale Law School. An internship sparked her interest in Iraqi refugees displaced in Jordan, and an impromptu call from a representative at the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees persuaded her that the services of smart young lawyers could be enormously helpful.

“This person said, ‘Hey, we have all these cases that we refer to the U.S. for settlement, and the U.S. rejects them. We think they’re being rejected illegally.’ "

She was hesitant to get involved at first.

“I was incredibly flattered, like, ‘Oh my gosh, the U.N. is calling me to ask for my help,’ " she said. “On the other hand, I was appalled that they didn’t have anyone else to call. That was the moment where I said we needed to move this thing forward because there was a need that wasn’t being filled.”

Wide Range of ‘Genius’

Heller and 24 others make up this year’s class of MacArthur Fellows. Each will receive a $625,000 stipend paid out over five years with no strings attached, meaning the grant money can be used for any purpose.

Other nonprofit leaders and social-justice advocates on the list include:

William Barber II, a pastor in North Carolina who created “Moral Monday” civil-disobedience rallies, transcending race, class, gender, sexual orientation, and religion, to protest racial gerrymandering and challenge legislation that makes voting difficult.

Gregg Gonsalves, an epidemiologist and global health advocate who became an HIV/AIDS activist in the 1980s and ’90s.

Vijay Gupta, a violinist and social-justice advocate in Los Angeles who uses music to connect with people who are homeless or incarcerated or are otherwise in need.

Raj Jayadev, a community organizer who leads a collective focused on giving individuals and families an active role in their defense against incarceration.

Titus Kaphar, an artist who works across disciplines and genres and often retools and repurposes Western artistic styles to tell stories about slavery, punishment, and protest in the United States.

Community Organizer

Raj Jayadev co-founded Silicon Valley De-Bug, in 2001, which began as a magazine that highlighted issues affecting low-wage manufacturing workers and has since evolved into a platform for other forms of advocacy through storytelling. He shifted toward criminal-justice issues when a friend’s father died after being shot in the back by a California Bureau of Narcotic Enforcement agent in 2004.

One of his primary interests has been “participatory defense,” which brings community organizers, families, and public defenders together to see that people accused of a crime are more than just a case file or rap sheet.

One tactic includes having loved ones humanize defendants by creating documentaries and other materials. The group also encourages family and community members to appear in court to help show judges that the accused people have support systems in place to make sure they appear for trial after making bail.

The organization also helps family members understand the role of public defenders, who are sometimes misperceived as just another enemy in the criminal-justice system. “When your loved one is facing 25 to life, or they can take 15 [years] and there’s no good outcome, they see the public defender as Goliath, and they yell at them,” Jayadev said.

In his view, though, the true Goliaths are the problems baked into the system, and passionate community members and public defenders can help both guilty and innocent people get a fair trial.

Finding Purpose

William Barber II, a former president of the North Carolina chapter of the NAACP, recently expanded two new projects based in the state alongside “Moral Monday” — the Poor People’s Campaign and Repairers of the Breach, a national leadership-development organization.

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Just last month he held a news conference to demand that the state legislature and governor offer lasting assistance to North Carolina residents affected by Hurricane Florence.

“There was a storm before the storm hit North Carolina,” he said. “There were 1 million North Carolinians that were uninsured before Florence. There were 4.7 million poor and low-wealth people in North Carolina before Florence.”

To recast the Poor People’s Campaign for the 21st century, which was originally spearheaded by Martin Luther King Jr. and many others, Barber helped conduct an audit of systemic racism, poverty, ecological devastation, and the war economy in the United States.

“Every morning, it’s not an alarm clock that wakes me up. It’s purpose,” he said. “When folks are denied health care, I have to bury the people that die from that. When I visit homeless camps and see people who fought for our country being forced to live as homeless, it moves you in a deep place.”

The Violinist

Vijay Gupta, at age 31, is one of the younger members of this year’s MacArthur Fellows class, but, he jokes, he is not fond of the title “prodigy.”

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Gupta is a classically trained violinist who started college at 15. Gupta’s undergraduate degree from Marist College is in pre-med, and he was involved in several research projects related to neurobiology, with research-assistant positions at the City University of New York’s Hunter College and the Ann Romney Center for Neurologic Diseases at Brigham and Women’s Hospital, where he studied the biochemical pathology of Parkinson’s disease.

Gupta rose in music circles after science professors helped persuade him that music, which had been a part of his life from a very young age, was his true calling. He had auditioned when he was 7 years old for the Juilliard School’s precollege program, performed professionally in Tel Aviv for the Israel Philharmonic Orchestra at age 11, and in 2007, at age 19, joined the Los Angeles Philharmonic.

Gupta’s star-studded path, like other MacArthur Fellows, is centered on a critical moment. He met Nathaniel Ayers, a Juilliard-trained musician whose schizophrenia led to his homelessness. Gupta was introduced to Ayers after Steve Lopez, the Los Angeles Times columnist, wrote about Ayers for the newspaper ahead of his book that later became the inspiration for The Soloist, a 2009 film starring Jamie Foxx and Robert Downey Jr., as Ayers and Lopez, respectively.

Ayers requested Gupta, through Lopez, to be his violin teacher. Gupta’s subsequent work with Ayers inspired him to think of ways to help other homeless people on Skid Row. Now Street Symphony brings in professional musicians and also has members of needy communities perform and headline events for the nonprofit.

Activist Turned Scientist

Gregg Gonsalves, after dropping out of college, joined the AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power (ACT UP) and the AIDS and Rights Alliance for Southern Africa in the 1980s and ’90s. He found out in 1996 that he was HIV positive, and he has watched friends and family members suffer and die from the virus.

But Gonsalves did more than protest. He went back to college, received his bachelor’s degree and Ph.D. from Yale University in 2011 and 2017, and later co-founded the Global Health Justice Partnership at Yale through the schools of law and public health to advance human rights and social-justice work.

Among his most prominent projects was research that found that the HIV outbreak in Indiana from 2011 to 2015 could have been prevented if the state’s top health and elected officials had acted sooner on warnings. Another report used a set of algorithms — originally designed to see how to find the “hottest” slot machines in a casino — to find places where the greatest number of people are HIV positive but haven’t been tested.

“I’ve always had the idea that science had a role in improving people’s lives, that it wasn’t just ivory-tower work,” he said.

He’s now working to get drugs to the populations that need them.

The Global Health Justice Partnership also is working with organizations in Brazil to investigate the role of the war on drugs and high incarceration rates on the incidence of tuberculosis, and on advocacy for wider availability of hepatitis C treatment in U.S. prisons.

Can Art Amend History?

Titus Kaphar’s interest in art blossomed when he was in his 20s. He did not grow up going to museums.

“If you really want to know the truth, the only reason I got into art is because of a woman,” Kaphar said, in reference to his now wife. He said he wanted to impress her and show that he was worthy of her time.

John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation

Art-history classes at a junior college followed. He fell in love with the subject academically and started discovering ways to make his own art unique for a modern context.

Today, his work features paintings and sculptures of African-Americans in reimagined spaces, paired with classic Western artistic tropes. An example of his work depicts popular American figures, such as Thomas Jefferson and Thaddeus Stevens juxtaposed with African-American women who have been overlooked in history.

Kaphar is a co-founder of NXTHVN, an arts center set to open later next year in New Haven, Conn., to help people find art at a younger age than Kaphar did.

“I feel really strongly that if I can do anything to help other young folks who come from the kinds of communities I come from discover their passion and discover the thing that motivates them, I will be a happy man.”

For more information about the other MacArthur Fellows, visit the foundation’s page.