“I grew up in a family whose value system – whose goals – were the ‘complete life,’” says Daniel Rose, Chairman of real estate development and management company Rose Associates. For Rose, that meant balancing family, a professional career, and public service.

In business, Rose is the real estate titan noted for such significant properties as the Pentagon City complex in Arlington, Virginia and the One Financial Center in Boston. The same “out-of-the-box” thinking that led to these developments has also led to Rose’s philanthropic successes across a range of causes, most prominently in education.

Having gotten his start in education as a board member of the Bronx YMCA in his twenties, Rose set out to improve student outcomes at the New York City public school with the worst reading scores. Within just three years, Rose had already seen huge improvements through the after-school program he started, and was ready to expand. He founded the Harlem Educational Activities Fund, a mentoring program that guides inner city children to become college graduates, and currently boasts a 100% high school graduation rate for Central Harlem children going to public schools. Rose’s success is anchored in his unique approach – a focus on inculcating values and on student learning rather than on the quality of teaching.

Rose has applied his unique touches to other areas of his philanthropy as well, including creating an alliance between his alma mater Yale University and Technion, the Israel Institute of Technology, and his leadership of the Baltic-American Enterprise Fund, an innovative U.S. government initiative to restore the economies of countries in Eastern Europe. For Rose, these philanthropic initiatives are his response to the “moral obligation to play as constructive a role as [he] can in whatever way.”