With Purpose Success, part 39

Unilever and other packaged goods companies. She later helped build a family business in leather goods and supervised the marketing and design of several product lines. But with the birth of her third child, and her husband's legal and investment career on track, she decided to stay at home full-time and now treasures the years she spent as a homemaker. 

Yet Ginsberg, forty, always knew that as her kids grew older she would want to do more with her life than spend countless hours at the mall or country club with her affluent friends and neighbors in the northern suburbs of New York City. She has the highest respect for mothers who build their lives around their children, husbands, schools, and communities. 

But it wasn't right for her. Just what was her calling? Once she started thinking about it, several years passed before she figured it out. 

Ginsberg knew a few things, for sure. Going back into advertising was out of the question, and she didn't want to do anything that would require resuming her long daily commute into the city. She contemplated trading stocks full-time. But for her that seemed like an emotionally empty pursuit. 

Gradually, the daily headlines in the newspaper started her thinking about some of the world's massive problems. This was post-9/11 and post-Enron. Global warming was starting to stir a lot of discussion, and the gap between the rich and poor was widening. "These problems seemed so massive," she says. "I just started really thinking about what it means to be a human being in the twenty-first century. What struck me was how our habits and perspectives are so skewed by our culture. You must be rich and successful. Being successful means you make a lot of money; that you are in the corporate world, or a doctor or a lawyer." This ingrained mind-set seemed so powerful in adults, she thought, that the only way to change it was to reach out to young students and try to get them to think differently on a daily basis. 

She still wasn't sure what she might do. But she began tilting toward environmental concerns, which were reinforced by conditions and events in her own home. Her youngest son, Gregory, and to a lesser extent his sister, Madeline, were both extremely sensitive to sunlight. Gregory also had an allergic reaction to sunscreens. "He's usually painted like a white ghost with zinc oxide," Ginsberg says. It dawned on her that this skin condition might be at least partly the result of some ecological imbalances. "I looked around on my street and the streets in our town and took note of all the little signs on lawns that warned 'do not enter: pesticide application.' 

We were using a service too, to spray the trees and lawn at our house and I started thinking maybe this stuff isn't so great for my kids. 

That's what made me start thinking about environmental health issues."