A Different Kind Of Development
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It's half a world and millions of dollars away from the kind of development projects Jeremy Hubball is accustomed to, but the schoolrooms and water purification systems the former head of Northland Investments is now building in Catdang Village, Vietnam, are giving him the satisfaction of combining his great interest in education with his business know-how to help provide a better life for kids in that village.
Hubball, a New York native and Princeton University alum, has spent the better part of his life in Massachusetts, first as a school teacher, then as an early employee and, later, head of one of the state's most successful real estate investment corporations. He joined Northland in 1973, after several years teaching English to middle-school students and helped build the company from the ground up, even though he had no formal business training.
"It was all on-the-job training," Hubball said.
He and Bob Danziger, the then-head of the company whom Hubball regards as his mentor, expanded the company to include management and development, and Hubball became president in the early 1990s.
"The company grew and did very well," he said.
The work was rewarding, and Hubball enjoyed the challenges. But when he hit his early 50s - he is 59 now - he started to remember his roots as a teacher and his interest in children and education.
"I felt it had become É less satisfying," he said.
Hubball had also been volunteering as a member of the executive committee of Mother Caroline Academy and Education Center in Dorchester - a school that serves financially limited middle-school girls and provides courses for adults.
So he decided to resign from Northland Investments. He gave up his interest to his partners, and started volunteering more and doing some real estate consulting.
"I was doing a bunch of things you put off doing," he said.
After some time volunteering and consulting, however, he decided to go back into real estate full-time. In early 2001, he joined the firm Morris & Morse and started acquiring properties on behalf of clients. The next year, he won the Building Owners and Managers Association Industry Leadership Award.
It was a fun and worthwhile job, Hubball said, but last year some of his circumstances changed, and he decided it was time for something different. His wife, Joan, grew up in Kentucky, but went to Mount Holyoke College. She had not really expected to be living in the cold Massachusetts climate for so long, Hubball said.
A couple of years prior, his daughter and son-in-law moved to Florida and settled in Miami.
"The writing was on the wall when my daughter got pregnant with our first grandson," Hubball said.
So this past January, Joan Hubball, a nurse practitioner, got a job in Miami, and they put their Weston home on the market. In February, Hubball took a trip to Vietnam that would result in the creation of The Children's Initiative, a program he hopes will expand to help kids in villages and countries all over the world.
The project was the brainchild of Hubball and an old high-school friend, Charles Miller. In addition to his interest in education and business savvy, Hubball is a world traveler. He is a high-altitude mountaineer who climbed Mount Everest as part of an environmental cleanup expedition, and he got to know Vietnam in 2001, when he did a bike trip with seven other Americans from China to Vietnam.
"I got to know the country and fell in love with it and its people," he said.
Miller, meanwhile, was a teacher with a lot of international teaching experience. To supplement his schoolteacher's income, Miller had also started an import business.
Miller lived in Japan in the 1990s, and on a side trip to Vietnam encountered some lacquered bowls he was interested in exporting. He tracked them down to Catdang Village, a small town about 60 miles south of Hanoi. Miller met with village leaders and assured them that, if they allowed him to export the bowls, they would share in the profits. They were dubious - they had heard such promises before - but allowed the exportation.
A year later, Miller returned to the village and installed a water purification system. A year after that, he brought electricity to the village. Then he built a new classroom.
"He had great credibility in the village," Hubball said.
But when the two high-school classmates started talking about the possibility of The Children's Initiative, it had been years since Miller had been to the village. Even so, the two decided it would be an ideal place to start trying to make a difference.
The original plan was to build an orphanage. It was necessary in the village, and the concrete concept would have appealed to philanthropists in the United States. But after spending some time in the village, Hubball and Miller found the needs were different than they had anticipated.
"[We found] we could do more for more kids," Hubball said.
While the economy in much of Vietnam is growing, many improvements to daily life have bypassed villages like Catdang. Although there are basic health-care services in the village, the children are at least slightly malnourished and many have worms.
"There is some level of health care, but it falls really short," Hubball said.
So The Children's Initiative - which was just granted charitable status - is starting out by building more water purification systems, fixing some classrooms that were damaged by a typhoon that hit Catdang a year ago and working with the Red Cross to provide health care to children and expectant mothers. Every child in the village will get an exam - which costs $1.35 per child - and medicine, which costs $1.25, if they need it.
"A few dollars go a long, long way," Hubball said. "With very limited resources, we can do a lot."
Hubball and Miller expect to start asking friends and contacts to support the program soon, and they hope the program can be expanded to help children in other villages and countries.
For now, Hubball is working on the project and unpacking simultaneously. He arrived at he and his wife's new home in Key Biscayne, Fla., a few weeks ago, just in time for the birth of his second grandson. And soon he'll be looking for his next adventure. The Children's Initiative won't take up 100 percent of his time, he said, but he's not sure if real estate, education or some combination of the two will be his next calling.