Many thanks to our Scholars' Circle donors! For more information about Scholars' Circle, email kirsten@hsf.org
All Scholars' Circle and Leadership Circle donors will be invited to our appreciation event taking place on March 24, 2025.
Madeline Levine, Ph.D. is a psychologist with over 35 years of experience as a clinician, consultant, educator and author. Her New York Times bestseller, The Price of Privilege, explores the reasons why teenagers from affluent families are experiencing epidemic rates of emotional problems. Her follow up book, Teach Your Children Well, also a New York Times bestseller, tackles our current narrow definition of success – how it unnecessarily stresses academically talented kids and marginalizes many more whose talents and interests are less amenable to measurement. Her current book, Ready or Not, focuses on how to best prepare our children and ourselves for an uncertain and rapidly changing world. Her books have been translated into multiple languages.
Dr. Levine is also a co-founder of Challenge Success, a project at Stanford’s Graduate School of Education. Challenge Success believes that our increasingly competitive world has led to tremendous anxiety about our children’s futures and has resulted in a high pressure, myopic focus on grades, test scores and performance. This kind of pressure and narrow focus isn’t helping our kids become the resilient, capable, meaningful contributors we need in the 21st century. Challenge Success provides families and schools with the practical research-based tools they need to raise healthy, motivated kids, capable of reaching their full potential.
Dr. Levine graduated Phi Beta Kappa from the State University of New York at Buffalo with a B.A. in English and an M.A. in Education. She began her career as an elementary and junior high school teacher in the South Bronx of New York before moving to California and earning her M.A. and Ph.D. in psychology. She has had a large clinical practice with an emphasis on child and adolescent problems and parenting issues, and has taught Child Development classes to graduate students at the University of California San Francisco Medical Center. For many years, Dr. Levine has been a consultant to various schools, from preschool through high school, public as well as private, throughout the country. Dr. Levine is highly sought after as a lecturer and keynote speaker for parents, educators and business leaders both nationally and internationally. She is frequently the go-to person on issues of parenting for both print media and radio. Currently she spends most of her time speaking to parents, educators, students and business leaders as well as consulting with major corporations and high net worth individuals.
Dr. Levine and her husband of 40 years, Lee Schwartz, M.D., live in San Francisco are the incredibly proud parents of three adult sons and a newly minted granddaughter.
Jackie Speier represents District 1 on the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors. Deeply committed to public service, her current focus is on addressing the high cost of living in the county, eliminating child poverty, and working toward universal childcare.
Jackie has represented the residents of the San Mateo County for over 40 years on all levels of government, starting on the San Mateo County Board of Supervisors in 1981, followed by her service in the California Assembly and Senate for 18 years, and in the U.S. Congress for almost 15 years. During her career she has taken on some of the most difficult and controversial problems, and she has done so with tenacity and courage. She was named one of the 150 most fearless women in the world by Newsweek, one of the 50 most influential members in the U.S. House by Politico magazine for her work on the #MeTooCongress movement, and she received the UCSF medal for her 40-year commitment to public service. Her long list of legislative achievements includes laws on sexual assault prevention in the military and college campuses, suicide prevention, enforcement of child support orders, child abuse prevention, and financial privacy. Families have benefited from her work in areas such as pediatric cancer research, kids plate legislation, child safety laws, and the creation of the breast cancer postage stamp to fund breast cancer research. During her time in the legislature, Democratic and Republican Governors signed more than 300 of her bills into law. Jackie also created the Professional and Business Women's Conference (PBWC) 35 years ago and it has become one of the largest in the nation and has inspired and empowered tens of thousands of women.
Jackie is the mother of two children, proud grandmother of a granddaughter, and a best-selling author of two books. She resides in Hillsborough, California with her husband Barry and their dog Emma.