Editor’s Note: On Thursday, Nov. 6, The Belmont Voice will host its first community event, welcoming Linda Mason, in conversation with GBH News Senior Editor Stephanie Leydon, and Rick Doblin, in conversation with Media Consultant Greg Stone, to the First Church on Concord Avenue.
By Mary Byrne, Belmont Voice staff
Belmont resident Linda Mason was a business student at Yale School of Management when Vietnam invaded Cambodia, resulting in hundreds of thousands of Cambodian refugees fleeing to the border of Thailand.
Moved by the events and wanting to help, Mason and her now-husband, Roger Brown, traveled to the Thai border. There, they directed a large feeding program for malnourished children in refugee camps, first through CARE, an international humanitarian organization, and then through UNICEF.
“That was a big turning point in my life,” said Mason, 71. “I hadn’t really planned on doing a career in that domain, but I loved the work and was very moved by it.”
Mason and Brown returned to the United States. After a few years back home, they were hired by Save the Children to serve as co-country directors of Save the Children’s emergency program in Sudan during the African famine in the mid-1980s.
“Save the Children had no program on the ground, so it turned out to be a very entrepreneurial endeavor, where we traveled the country to see where there were gaps in aid,” she recalled.
The program that resulted from their efforts grew rapidly. It had to, she said, as the “crisis was so extreme.”
Eventually, the couple returned home, burned out from their work but officially bitten by the “entrepreneurial bug.”
“We started looking into the children’s field,” Mason said. “This was now the mid to late 80s. It became pretty clear we were seeing a major socio-economic shift, with the entrance of mothers entering the workforce.”
Noticing the demand was increasing but the supply of available day care was not, Mason and her husband came up with the concept for on-site, employer-supported child care, available to employees on a sliding pay scale basis. Ready to turn the idea into something real, they hired a few employees and transformed their tiny Cambridgeport home into a workspace. Down the street, a small pizza parlor became the unofficial “conference center” for meetings involving more than three people, recalled Mason.
Mason served as the company’s president, and Brown served as chief executive officer.
From those modest beginnings, that company, now known globally as Bright Horizons Family Solutions, is one of the largest providers of workplace child care, early education, and education advising. The company employs 35,000 people and serves more than 120,000 families. Together with her husband, Mason ran the company for 17 years before stepping down to make way for new leadership
In some ways, the company’s success came as no surprise to Mason.
“We were very young and idealistic,” she said. “We felt like the majority of our nation’s children are now in child care, and much of their child care was suboptimal, which we thought was a national tragedy. We were very idealistic and audacious and felt like we needed to change our nation’s child care system.”
The experience didn’t come without outside doubt or pushback, though. Starting in the midst of a recession didn’t help, either.
“It didn’t become successful for many years. It was a new idea,” she said. “Companies would look at us like, are you crazy?”
With the eventual backing of the Prudential Center in Boston, publicity grew. Today, there are roughly 50 centers in Massachusetts, about 40 of which are in the Boston area. Mason also co-founded Horizons for Homeless Children, a Boston-based organization that operates a large child care center for the homeless in Roxbury, serving 175 children and their parents.
After Bright Horizons, Mason returned to her first passion: humanitarian work. She joined Mercy Corps, from which she recently retired, and became its chair. For 12 years, she traveled the world with a non-governmental humanitarian aid organization that specializes in conflict-affected areas.
“I felt very pulled to work in the places where the needs were greatest,” she said. “We couldn’t solve a conflict, but we could work with communities to recover from conflict. We did a lot of economic development as communities were recovering from conflict.”
Today, Linda Mason and Roger Brown live in Belmont, which they’ve called home since 1989. Moving from Cambridge, they chose the town for its schools, she said. Together, they have three grown children. She’s retired now, but still dedicates some of her time to the boards of the Museum of Fine Arts in Boston, Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art in North Adams, and Embrace Boston, a nonprofit focused on Black culture and advocacy. She’s also a classically trained pianist who still plays for her own enjoyment.
Mason credits both her parents for the path she chose in life. Her father, who was a doctor in rural central New York, was a “very idealistic man.” He had an extensive medical practice serving a poor area of small-scale dairy farmers. Every few years, he would volunteer in Central America and Africa.
“I wasn’t there with him, but he would come back with stories,” she said. “And after a stint in the Congo, he brought back with him a male Congolese nurse who lived with us for a year … and did some training in my father’s hospital. I think that seed was planted in my youth of broadening your horizons beyond your own community.”
Her mother, too, had a significant influence on her, she said. She was committed to her community — so much so, she served as mayor of the family’s small village, overseeing a major revitalization project.
“Both of them were very inspired people who contributed in whatever way they could, whether in a smaller community or in the world at large,” she said.
Still, Mason said if she’d been told in college she’d one day pursue a career in global humanitarian work and build a child care center, she wouldn’t have believed it. And that’s what she tells young people who approach her for advice on starting their careers.
“I think it’s finding what really moves you and what your passion is,” she said. “You can’t really do that, just sitting and thinking about it. You have to get out in the world and try different things.”
The speaker event is on Thursday, Nov. 6, from 7 to 9 p.m. Tickets are free, but we do ask that you RSVP at tinyurl.com/BelmontSpeakerSeries.
