Alumni Profiles

In 1995, Janice Gleason traveled to Rwanda to visit Rosamund Carr, a friend of Dian Fossey, the American researcher who, until her death in 1985, had brought worldwide attention to the plight of endangered mountain gorillas in Rwanda, Zaire and Uganda. Gleason’s visit came shortly after the genocide in this small central African country during which more than a million people had been killed and more than 300,000 children orphaned.

Fifty of those orphans were being cared for by Carr in a burned-out sugar mill on her plantation. “These were children who had the weight of the world on their shoulders,” Gleason says. “I fell in love with them. That’s how it all started.”

Gleason returned to the U.S., rounded up shoes, jackets, games, books and whatever else she could collect, and delivered them two months later to Carr’s plantation.

Today she helps support three orphanages with 550 children and serves on the board of a non-profit organization called Wildlife Concern International. While the foundation’s primary mission is animal preservation, it also set up a program called “For the Children” to funnel money and supplies to orphanages.

How Gleason got to Africa in the first place begins back in the 1980s.

A Fla.-based consultant specializing in direct mail marketing, she had decided to broaden her business skills by attending the Wharton Executive MBA program. In the class behind her was John Ruggieri, WEMBA’86, a New Jersey-based pharmaceutical executive. The two met at Wharton, married in 1987, had a son (now 11 and in school in England) and commuted between Florida and New Jersey until 1990, when Ruggieri sold his business and Gleason scaled back her consulting work. That year they began a trip around the world.

One of their stops was Kenya. “We became very interested in Africa and in the preservation of wildlife,” says Gleason, who is on the board of directors of the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund International. Between 1990 and 1995 she and her husband visited Africa 25 times. In 1996 they bought a 50,000-acre spread in Kenya that is both a cattle ranch and a refuge for wild animals. “The ranch employs 120 people,” Gleason says. “It’s a huge business and we want to get it to a break even point. Right now it’s a labor of love.”

The couple divides their time between Africa and Florida, where Ruggieri recently enrolled in a doctoral program in wildlife ecology at the University of Florida.

Gleason’s work with orphans has taken many forms. She has pledged to pay the high school and college expenses of the children on Rosamund Carr’s plantation, although she admits that “it will be a miracle if 10 of them go on to college.” And she has supported grassroots efforts to provide tin roofs for homes where children are cared for by community volunteers. “I try to work with local people who are trying to help themselves,” she says. “We don’t need to come in and tell them what to do. With assistance, they can reach their own goals.”