In the fall of 1963, a man with a bullhorn showed up at Sather Gate and changed Maureen Orth’s (B.A. Political Science ‘64) life.
He was recruiting for the newly minted Peace Corps, and Orth—a self-described news junkie who had studied six years of French and not a word of Spanish—had just one condition: “Have you got programs for urban people?”
They did. A few months after graduating, she was on a plane to a city she had never heard of, Medellín, Colombia, with no idea that decision would define the next six decades of her life.
More than 60 years later, she has brought that journey full circle through a formal partnership with the UC Berkeley School of Education (BSE): the Marina Orth Foundation (MOF) Scholars Program Endowment, designed to send Berkeley undergraduates each summer to work alongside MOF in Medellín, where Orth’s foundation develops and produces international robotic champions, English teachers, and computer systems engineers.
Orth arrived at Berkeley just a few days after her 17th birthday, having graduated early from Alameda High School. She found it “overwhelming but fascinating,” throwing herself into campus life, pledging Kappa Kappa Gamma, studying political science, and absorbing what she described as “the vibrancy and the breadth and depth of all that was going on there.”
The call to service
She was on campus the Friday afternoon in November 1963 when President John F. Kennedy was assassinated, and it was Kennedy’s call to service, embodied in the Peace Corps, that pulled her toward something larger than herself.
She landed in Medellín in June 1964, assigned to a poor barrio on the city’s outskirts. There was no hot water, five-inch cockroaches, one payphone for 2,500 people, and a creek you had to ford by bus just to get into the city. She loved it.
Orth’s lasting legacy in the community came about through a Sunday visit that became legend. A posse of five men on horseback rode up to her door, leading an extra horse, and asked her to ride three miles up the mountain to a community called Aguas Frías, where the population of subsistence-level farming families desperately wanted a school. She said yes, and spent the next year working with the community, making their dream of having a school a reality through sheer persistence, weekend workdays, and creative coalition-building with the local neighborhood councils, coffee growers, and local government.
“You simply cannot take no for an answer,” she said. “You say yes to the challenge, and you just keep chipping away, chipping away, chipping away.”
A little over a year after that first Sunday ride, the school was dedicated on Dec. 8, 1965. To her surprise, the community had named it the Escuela Marina Orth.
The deeper lessons, Orth said, came not from the construction project but from the people. Living shoulder to shoulder with families across the full spectrum of Medellín society gave her an education no classroom could have provided.
“God does not discriminate when he gives out brains and talent and beauty,” she said. “It is opportunity that is restricted.” It’s a line she has carried with her ever since, one that became the philosophical backbone of everything she would later build.
From building a school to investigative journalism
Those years also, unexpectedly, trained her for the award-winning journalism career that followed.
“I had no idea I was going to be a journalist at the time,” she said, “but so much of how I learned to absorb my environment, to tune in and to listen and to try to feel where people are coming from—that's all extremely helpful in investigative journalism.”
She went on to become one of the first female writers at Newsweek, a special correspondent for Vanity Fair—profiling everyone from Madonna to Margaret Thatcher to Vladimir Putin—and the author of the bestselling Vulgar Favors, which became the basis for the Emmy-winning FX series American Crime Story: The Assassination of Gianni Versace. Colombia was always in the background—and in 2005, at the request of Medellín's Secretary of Education, she returned to found the Marina Orth Foundation, which today works with more than 17,000 students across 56 urban and rural public schools in 10 municipalities, emphasizing STEM, robotics, English, and leadership.
When passions converge
Bringing Berkeley formally into that work has been, for Orth, a long-awaited convergence. She rejoined the university’s orbit around 2000, joining the advisory board of the College of Letters and Science, becoming a trustee of the UC Berkeley Foundation board in 2010, and found herself reinvigorated by the campus's energy.
“I've always wanted to meld the two,” she said of Berkeley and Colombia—”two things I deeply care about and that have been very meaningful in my life.” After years of work, she said, “now we have it, and I'm very, very happy.”
The Orth Scholars program—which launched its pilot in summer 2025 and has now been formalized with the establishment of a permanent endowment—is, in her view, a step in the right direction. It will fund two to four students per year, selected for intermediate or advanced Spanish and a background in STEM or youth education, to spend four weeks in Medellín working alongside MOF staff.
“This program will place students in real educational settings in Colombia, where they can learn through practice and engage with the innovative work of the Maureen Orth Foundation,” BSE Director of Undergraduate Programs and Adjunct Professor Erin Murphy Graham said. “In that process, they’re developing as educators, gaining professional experience, and working in a different linguistic and cultural context.”
What has made the program possible is not just vision, but a carefully built interdisciplinary partnership between the BSE, MOF, and the Social Sciences Career Readiness Internship Program (SSCRIP) in the Division of Social Sciences. Together, they’ve created something that mirrors Orth’s own path—grounded in preparation, but transformed through experience. Students are chosen and trained at Berkeley, then travel to Medellín to work side by side with MOF educators in classrooms and camps, teaching, learning, and adapting in real time.
Around that core experience, SSCRIP provides the scaffolding that makes it all viable: helping students navigate everything from travel logistics to professional expectations, while surrounding them with a cohort and structure that extends well beyond the summer. The result is a program that feels less like a traditional internship and more like a continuation of the journey Orth began decades ago—one that connects Berkeley students to Colombia not just through service, but through sustained, supported engagement.
“SSCRIP is delighted to partner with the BSE to help students who are going to Medellín prepare for their experiences,” Associate Director of the Interdisciplinary Social Sciences Program Dr. Alan Karras said. “We look forward to having them fully participate in the program over the coming years.”
The constancy of Berkeley, Orth said, has always been excitement: for the next idea, the next frontier, the next student who might ride up a mountain and discover what she did. “People here are much more open to innovation and to trying different new things,” she reflected. “The kind of mentality that says, ‘Hey, let's go for it. Why not?’ “
For Orth, it’s the same answer she gave to a man with a bullhorn 60 years ago.