Class Note 1988. In honor of the 50th anniversary of coeducation, we’ll start with two fabulous female ’88s.
While many of us fretted over points and penalties, Elizabeth Koldyke Boolbol worried through the 2026 World Cup about something very different: Much as with large-scale infrastructure projects, major sports events significantly escalate the risk of human trafficking, as tourism and rush contracting surge and temporary workers flood the zone. Boolbol has spent the last decade helping trafficking survivors. New York Times writer Nick Kristof’s work had raised her awareness of the vast global trade in human beings before she caught a glimpse of it herself on a 2015 trip to Asia. “It felt like a calling,” she says. “I knew what I needed to do.” In 2016 Connecticut-based Boolbol assembled a team and launched the nonprofit Partnership to End Human Trafficking (Global PEHT). In 2019 PEHT opened a drop-in center in Bridgeport for trafficking survivors. It then opened two residential homes and two retail shops, with profits supporting PEHT’s programming. PEHT has helped about 200 trafficking survivors restart their lives.
“We shape our buildings,” Winston Churchill famously opined in 1943. “And afterward, our buildings shape us.” That’s the sensibility Lee Asher Prince brings to design after four years in the United Kingdom, where more mindful production, purchase, and care of material goods changed how she views her second career. When she moved to London for her husband’s job, Prince expected to continue publishing the acclaimed design blog she had launched after a bout with cancer and a pivot from corporate life—but discovered her new home had much to teach: She studied and traveled widely. The British approach to material possessions became the export Prince wanted to bring home. She was particularly struck by how Britons prioritize repairing, repurposing, and retaining objects through time. Prince and her husband divide their time between Washington, D.C., and New Hampshire as she writes a book about how to design a home and life that are deliberate, sustainable, and meaningful. She plans to apply what she’s learned to help people move from transitional housing and shelters into longer-term lodging that meets specific needs.
Ed Sim has worked as an international trade lawyer for decades but didn’t expect to tap his advocacy skills as president of the Dartmouth Club of Singapore: In that role, he persuaded the former British colony that Dartmouth isn’t a college but a university, eligible to matriculate Singaporean students at government expense—which it has done ever since. Singapore students excel on campus, he says, because the tiny, hyper-globalized island state has already conditioned them to thrive amid cultural, ethnic, linguistic, and religious diversity. Sim came to Dartmouth from Ruston, Louisiana, later attending Michigan Law and spending 16 years in Singapore. He’s now a D.C.-based partner at the boutique firm Appleton Luff. In recent years he’s helped newly independent Timor-Leste join the Association of Southeast Asian Nations’ economic and security bloc, represented Ukraine’s steel industry, and drafted Cambodia’s anti-dumping law. Sim and his Singaporean wife have two young-adult sons.
—Sarah Jackson-Han, 6213 Winnebago Road, Bethesda, MD 20816; smjhan2@gmail.com;Bill Bundy, 442 Cedar Lane, New Canaan, CT 06840; bill.bundy@mac.com