Second Act: GSDM alumnus starts educational non-profit after retiring from endodontics
Bob Rosenberg ENDO 75 always knew that he wanted to teach. He even extended his time at the Boston University Henry M. Goldman School of Dental Medicine (GSDM) by a year to teach in the predoctoral program before moving to San Francisco, where he taught part-time at the University of California San Francisco School of Dentistry for several years.
“I loved teaching and being with students—imparting, hopefully, some knowledge and experience,” said Rosenberg, who still lives in the Bay Area.
But when neck problems led Rosenberg to retire early, he also left teaching.
“I felt that things were changing so rapidly—not being in the middle of it anymore I would be stale pretty quickly,” he said.
After a few years, Rosenberg started volunteering as a tutor at a local middle school, where many of the students were children of color or English language learners. He found a passion for helping young students learn.
“A lot of the time, I’m in math classes…I’ll have two or three kids and I’ll spend 15-20 minutes with them going over the problems, going over specific concepts,” Rosenberg said. “Very often, after 20 minutes we’ve gone around the table and we’ve done a problem three, four times, and all of a sudden, lightbulbs start going on and the kids get it. You see some smiles and that’s a reward you can’t quantify.”
He progressed to board chair of the Marin County School Volunteers, where he witnessed work being done by a handful of non-profits that public schools couldn’t perform.
“I was thinking about all of these organizations, which need sustainability and how I could make that happen,” said Rosenberg. After discovering an organization called One Percent for the Planet, which encourages businesses and individuals to donate 1 percent of their gross sale or annual salaries to environmental non-profits, Rosenberg thought this model would work well for educational non-profits.
With that as his inspiration, Rosenberg started One Percent for Education, which facilitates financial support for trusted, educationally-focused nonprofits working toward educational equity through partnerships with those groups. The goal was to get businesses, family foundations, donor-advised funds, and individuals who are not yet involved in philanthropy and the educational space—but who would do so, if given the opportunity—to agree to donate 1 percent of their respective revenue, funds, or earnings to the non-profit, which would use the donations to support approved educationally focused non-profit members.
Rosenberg received approval from the IRS in 2017 to start the non-profit. “Having just done root canals, there were a lot of holes in my resume about how you do all this stuff—but slowly, we’ve added a board of directors and started getting a little meat on our bones, organizationally,” he said.
One Percent for Education is currently focused on the Bay Area, but Rosenberg said that the goal is to expand nationally. They currently have 24 fully vetted non-profits with which they are working.
“Our ultimate goal is to assist more non-profits in helping more kids to achieve educationally,” said Rosenberg. “This last year we’ve certainly seen a lot and heard a lot about the inequality and the social injustices of systemic racism that has plagued our country since before its inception— we believe that if you can do one thing only to address the systemic racism it would be to enhance educational equity and so that’s what we’re about.”
While running a non-profit is certainly different from performing root canals, Rosenberg said that he still draws on his education at GSDM, under mentor Dr. Herbert Schilder.
“It enabled those of us who were fortunate to have that training to really be the best that we could be in our practices—the standards that were set at BU carried through our lives,” Rosenberg said.