development fi rm, JBG, has had a hand in owning, managing and developing more than 20,000,000 square feet of offi ce space, 4,000,000 square feet of retail space, 4,000 residential units and fi ve of the top hotel properties in the area. In the last two years, it bought the District’s largest hotel, The Marriott Wardman Park, developed luxury condominiums as far as Reston and Rockville and even managed to put up a few buildings downtown. Though in recent years Brown and Gildenhorn to the side (Gildenhorn served as U.S. ambassador to Switzerland and campaigned for W.’s two elections) Jacobs still has a steady hand in operations. Brown, Gildenhorn and Jacobs are equally as known for their philanthropic endeavors. Each serves on numerous civic and public policy boards at Georgetown University, University of Maryland, American University, Arena Stage and the Woodrow Wilson Center. ANDREA AND LAVINIA CURRIER The Currier sisters are heirs to a Mellon family oil and banking fortune and come from a long line of philanthropists and patrons of the arts – their grandmother, Ailsa Mellon Bruce, helped build the National Gallery of Art. To help preserve land in the Bull Run area, the two siblings gave (or lent) more than $2 million to the Virginia Outdoors Foundation. Both serve on the Friends of Bull Run board. Lavinia is also a film-maker; in 1998 she directed and wrote the screenplay for

“Passion in the Desert,” a feature fi lm based on a Balzac short story. TIM DONAHUE From 1996 to 2006, Donahue’s role in the telecommunications boom was a pivotal one; as head of Sprint Nextel, he was playing with the big boys: Verizon, AT&T, Cingular, et al. While in the saddle, he rustled up the $35 billion merger that created the nation’s third largest wireless carrier. He left a legacy of fi nancial boom; during the P. WESLEY FOSTER Chairman and CEO of McLeanbased Long and Foster, the largest real estate fi rm in America. In December, 2006, Realtor Magazine named him “one of the 25 most influential people in real estate.” Despite 2005 being a bad year for the sector, it proved to be L&F’s best year, with $68 billion in sales, a 17 percent increase over the previous year. Foster personally pledged $200,000 to Hurricane Katrina relief and challenged his 15,500 employees to donate as well. THE ABRAMSONS ARE so invested in green – and we’re not talking about their signifi cant monetary assets – that they created a program to educate residents on environmentally friendly building. ten years he was at the helm, Nextel experienced record setting fi nancial results and a spot on the Fortune 200 list, with nine straight quarters of positive net income. He’s still cheering from the sidelines, Donahue promises, but spending time with friends and family is what it’s all about. Sounds like a telephone commercial. JEONG H. KIM A convenience store clerk until he won a scholarship to Johns Hopkins, Kim joined the Navy, vowing to return to the business world in seven years’ time. Noticing a common technological problem in communications while working at the Naval Research Lab, he unobtrusively engineered a solution; then, borrowing against his house, he started Yurie Systems, which he sold in 1998 to Lucent Technologies for $1.1

billion. Kim, who regularly gives back, is heavily involved in the University of Maryland as a faculty member, a building donor (the Jeong H. Kim Applied Sciences Building) and $5 million backer of the A. James Clark School of Engineering. PHILLIP MERRICK He founded webMethods in 1996 with the “goal of developing an integration platform that would automate the world’s economy,” and he saw it grow from a threeperson team to more than 850 employees worldwide, with annual revenues of over $200 million and more than 900 customers. Recently struggling, it was sold to a German company for $546 million. Merrick, who has a B.S. in computer science from the University of Melbourne, Australia, established the webMethods Foundation, a non-profi t organization dedicated to helping communities build critical infrastructures for healthcare, housing and education. JOSEPH E. ROBERT JR. Robert oversees his eponymous fi ve-division company that includes private equity and structured fi nance in commercial real estate and mortgages. J. E. Robert Co. has made more than $20 billion in investments in 14 countries since its founding in 1981. Robert is the founder of Fight For Children, Inc., which focuses on helping the most underserved childrens