Lately, he’s been repaying his good fortune by helping poor New York kids attend high-quality private schools. Last month Student Sponsor Partners, a nonprofit group that pays private school tuition and provides mentoring for 450 disadvantaged students, honored Dunn, who has run San Diegobased Idanta Partners since 1971, with its Founder’s Award. Dunn himself sponsors 100 students and has recruited scores of mentors for the program, which boasts a graduation rate of 79 percent, significantly higher than the rate for New York City’s public schools.
Dunn attributes his own success to a lucky break he got as a young man, when the Marines put him in a program that sent a small number of enlisted men to the country’s service academies. From the U.S. Naval Academy, he went on to Harvard Business School and the financial world. “We’re losing too many bright, capable people in the grade school through high school levels,” says Dunn. “Education is something we ought to have a national sense of urgency about, and I look at a program like this as a place where you get the maximum bang for the buck.”
