In the autumn of 1727, a 21-year-old printer named Benjamin Franklin gathered a dozen young tradesmen in a Philadelphia tavern and asked them to make a promise to one another. They would meet every Friday night, read, argue, and improve themselves, and every week, each would answer questions Franklin had written, including what good they might do for their neighbors, their city, and one another.
He called it the Junto. None of its members was rich or famous. Yet out of that small circle of ambitious, service-minded young people grew America’s first subscription library, the city’s first volunteer fire company, the American Philosophical Society, the academy that became the University of Pennsylvania, and, with Dr. Thomas Bond, the nation’s first hospital.
Here’s the takeaway: Philadelphia did not become the most important city in the colonies because it had the most money. Philadelphia became great because it had a network of young people who believed their own advancement and their city’s were the same project.
I became aware of the Junto in 2010 while I was thinking seriously about what Philadelphia has lost in our modern era and what we must rebuild.
Why our best leave
I concluded in 2010 that Philadelphia does not suffer from a shortage of talent. What we do suffer from is a failure of gravity. We have an abundant supply of brilliant young people, but we let the best among them drift away at the moment they become most valuable.
Between 2020 and 2024, according to Pew, 16,000 more 18-to-29-year-olds moved into the city than left each year. After around age 30, the flow reverses, with roughly 1.3 people leaving for every one who arrives. Young people like it here. They come for college, stay through their twenties, but many leave when their careers demand a next step the city cannot offer.
Why? The first reason is the thinness of opportunity at the top in the most futuristic industries. Among Penn’s College of Arts and Sciences Class of 2025, 304 graduates went to work in New York and 89 in Philadelphia. The most popular Penn employers that year were Boston Consulting Group, Goldman Sachs, McKinsey and Morgan Stanley. When Pew convened young Philadelphians last fall, they said the city offers fewer career paths outside healthcare and higher education, and pays less than other East Coast cities. One bioengineer described her likely path in words every civic leader should remember: “leave for the next step and then come back.”
The second reason is networks. The same young Philadelphians told Pew that networking and connections are the surest path to good jobs in the city. Philadelphia is a city that tilts in favor of who you know over what you know. In a place where opportunity flows mainly through relationships and politics, a talented young person without ties to the people who decide has little reason to stay.
The third reason, also the deepest, explains the other two. Philadelphia keeps producing discoveries and letting the decisions move elsewhere. Take Penn’s mRNA science that reached the world through Moderna in Cambridge and BioNTech in Mainz. It earned Penn at least $2 billion from the Pfizer-BioNTech vaccine through 2023, but the headquarters, executive suites, and thousands of senior jobs took root elsewhere. Or, Carl June’s CAR-T therapy, another Penn miracle, that was brought to market by Novartis in Basel. Or, Spark Therapeutics, born at CHOP and Penn, that was sold to Roche. After Roche wrote off nearly all of the $4.8 billion it paid, Spark laid off 337 employees, more than half its workforce.
These are not isolated disappointments. They are one cycle, repeating. When companies are commercialized or acquired elsewhere, the senior jobs leave. When the senior jobs leave, so do the mentors and the networks. When the mentors leave, the next generation follows. And when the next generation leaves, there are fewer founders to build the next company here. The cycle is brutal.
Now consider the capital markets. In the first half of 2026, megadeals of $100 million or more captured 87.5% of the $412.7 billion deployed, and AI took 86% of all venture dollars. Philadelphia’s share was thin: $1.26 billion across 152 deals in Q2 2026, and the region’s top deal, a $300 million raise by Decart, went to a startup whose actual headquarters is in San Francisco. So, here’s the problem: we will not outbid Silicon Valley for capital. But here’s the potential solution: capital follows founders, and founders follow roots. The scarcest asset in any city is not money, but rooted leadership.
In Philadelphia, brain drain is not a leak we can plug with a better job fair. Our city’s brain drain results from the absence of a force strong enough to hold people through the decisive decade of their thirties. As a result, we created the Germination Project in 2014 to become a potential force that retains our best talent.
Proof that we still lead
If the brain drain diagnosis ended without a solution, this essay would be a eulogy. It does not, because Philadelphia already contains the proof that our city can lead the world. That proof is Penn Medicine, and it is the reason why the Germination Project chose Penn Medicine as its partner.
Penn Medicine is not merely good. It is where the future keeps being invented. It gave the world the mRNA platform that earned Karikó and Weissman the 2023 Nobel Prize. It gave the world CAR-T, the first cell therapy approved by the FDA. And last year, a team from CHOP and Penn Medicine successfully treated a baby with a rare genetic disorder using a customized CRISPR gene-editing therapy, the first of its kind. They designed and manufactured that therapy within six months, delivered through lipid nanoparticles to correct a single faulty gene. Penn’s medical pioneers are building the future of medicine.
Penn Medicine also teaches a lesson about time. When I brought our first Germination Fellows there, I wanted them to see how an institution that was near bankruptcy in 1998 had come together around a common vision and become one of the great engines of biotechnology and medicine. Its breakthroughs were not overnight miracles, but long bets by people who stayed. Weissman and Karikó worked on modified mRNA for years before the world cared. June spent decades on the immune system before CAR-T reached a patient.
And now Penn Medicine itself is working to close the very gap that drains our city’s talent. Kevin Mahoney, whose contract as health system CEO was extended in June through 2031, has overseen the Penn Medicine Co-Investment Program, which supports turning academic research into companies. We have the invention engine in Philadelphia, but lack enough rooted leaders to make sure the next Moderna is headquartered on the Schuylkill rather than the Charles.
That is the gap the Germination Project exists to fill.
Why a fifty-year bet
Most retention efforts reach people at 22, when the market is already bidding for them. By then, loyalty is a line item competing with a signing bonus. My daughter, Madison, and I co-founded the Germination Project in 2014 on a different premise: that the force holding a leader to a city forms much earlier and must last much longer.
We started with the idea that no one plants a coconut palm expecting to drink from it that season. The palm takes years to bear fruit, and then it gives for generations. We planted the Germination Project on the same terms and called it “a fifty year bet on the future of Philadelphia.”
Since 2014, we have recruited the best and the brightest 10th graders in the region, regardless of socioeconomic circumstance, and invited them into a fellowship that lasts for life. The compact carries one condition: that Fellows must invest in the Philadelphia region through civic service. We do not tell them which causes to champion. Our objective is not to sow seeds of change but to cultivate a new class of farmers who will choose their own crops.
Over time, we stopped seeing our brightest leaving Philadelphia as an automatic failure. We understand that our brightest Fellows may study at Harvard and Oxford and work at CERN. We now associate brain drain with failure only when our best and brightest leave without a tether. The Junto worked because its members were bound to one another before they were bound to any employer. That is the bond we try to build, and we build it through partnerships with institutions that prove Philadelphia can still lead. For example, since 2016, Penn Medicine has hosted our annual Leadership Boot Camp and has become its permanent home, with its most eminent faculty giving their time to our incoming Fellows. Teenagers who spend a week with the scientists behind mRNA and CAR-T do not leave believing Philadelphia is a city of small ambitions. They leave believing it is a city where the impossible gets done, and that they are expected to do the next impossible thing here.
The leaders we collect
We are not simply collecting high achievers. Every city has those, and every city loses them. We look for a specific kind of leader: a young person for whom intelligence and service are the same instinct. That was the Junto’s quality, and it is the best predictor I know of who will build institutions rather than just occupy them. People who serve put down roots, because service is always local before it is anything else.
Something about Mary
Mary Cipperman is a good example of the type of young leaders we recruit. I met Mary in 2019, when she was sixteen, one of twenty Fellows chosen from hundreds of applicants. That same year, she won the Raju Foundation’s $10,000 essay contest with a piece on the bioethics of transhumanism, published in the Philadelphia Citizen. In the early weeks of the pandemic, she led our Foundation’s initiative to donate 100,000 masks to Philadelphia communities, quietly, while her peers were trying to survive remote school. She then became the first Fellow in our history to run the Penn Medicine Boot Camp for younger Fellows, and she has mentored others into that role ever since.
Then she built something entirely her own. Drawing on her research on Shelby County v. Holder, Mary founded the National Organization for Youth Activists, a nonpartisan network of teenagers across four states that built a voter-registration site, ran a national phone bank, and convened a three-day conference with ten partner organizations. Our Foundation adopted it as a standing youth initiative, not as a favor, but because the work was serious.
Today Mary is a Harvard physicist, summa cum laude, with a concurrent master’s degree, research at CERN, NIH-funded imaging work at Penn, and clinical AI research at the Mahmood Lab affiliated with Harvard Medical School, Mass General, and the Broad Institute.
What her transcript cannot tell you is that nearly every one of her credentials and various awards from Harvard were earned while she was undergoing chemotherapy. Mary was diagnosed with acute leukemia at nineteen, in the middle of her sophomore year. She did not take the break most of us would have needed. She finished her physics degree with the highest GPA in seven semesters, and from her hospital bed she created a peer-to-peer mentorship program for fellow blood cancer patients. She still volunteers every week with a hospice patient, and more recently with young patients at Boston Children’s Hospital. Today, Mary is cancer-free. Yet in all these years, I have never once heard her describe cancer as a hardship she overcame. She describes it as the moment her academic work found its subject.
That subject is now her life’s work. Mary argues that oncology has learned to eradicate disease but not yet to preserve the whole human being while doing it. The gap is widest for adolescents and young adults, who fall between pediatric and adult medicine and are underrepresented in the trials and imaging systems built to treat them. She has built the technical case through radiobiology research at Mass General and a prize-winning senior thesis on adolescent-specific bias in frontier AI models. She is building a field that, as she has pointed out to me, barely exists, because few people have lived the problem from the inside the way she has.
By any market logic, Mary belongs to Boston now, or to London, or to whichever city bids highest. She is the bioengineer from Pew’s focus groups, leaving for the next step. The difference is that she leaves with a promise, a decade of relationships at Penn Medicine, and a community of Fellows who expect her back. Philadelphia is the city that gave the world CAR-T and mRNA. It should also be the city where a young woman who lived through cancer treatment builds the discipline that makes that treatment humane. When she returns, she will return not as an employee but as a builder. That is what a lifetime fellowship means: we are not recruiting a résumé for four years, but recruiting a citizen for fifty.
Three legs, three answers
The three reasons our best leave are thin opportunity, missing networks, and decisions made elsewhere. The Germination Project answers them with three legs, each built to counter one force.
The lifetime Fellowship builds loyalty before the market bids, finding leaders like Mary at fifteen, forming them inside a culture of long bets, and binding them to a community for life. This summer, the 23 Fellows of the Class of 2026 spent a week at the Penn Medicine Boot Camp in July, each presenting ten acts of service completed since Selection Day in March.
Vision 20/20 builds the networks. If connections are the surest path to opportunity in Philadelphia, those connections should not be rationed by accident of birth. Vision 20/20 convenes 20 influential Philadelphia leaders for a year to deliver 20 concrete solutions, big or small, to one chronic challenge facing the city. It is a modern Junto across generations. It puts emerging leaders, like our Fellows, in the same rooms as the people who hold the keys, and it holds those leaders accountable for outcomes, not panels.
Germination Shares changes what the city honors. Part of what pulls young people away is status: the prestige of the Goldman offer, the consulting badge. We cannot outbid those firms on salary, but we can compete on meaning, if we make service visible. Nationally, more than 75.7 million Americans formally volunteered in 2023, giving over 4.99 billion hours of service worth $167.2 billion. That is an economy with no ledger and almost no prestige. Germination Shares scores every act of service on Impact (40%), Scalability (35%) and Complexity (25%). For example, volunteering by visiting with an elderly neighbor cross the street earns a Share; teaching her AI literacy so she can teach others earns many more. We are now expanding Germination Shares to Philadelphia high schools and the corporate community through the Civic Cup, with a public Registry and an Annual Gala honoring the city’s top shareholders. In time, the data will let us estimate something no American city has measured: a Service GDP. Forbes has lists for accumulation. We are creating one for contribution.
Together, the three legs form a flywheel. The Fellowship forms leaders, Vision 20/20 connects them to power and to the city’s hardest problems, and Germination Shares makes their service a source of standing, which draws in the next generation.
Friday nights
Franklin was 21 when he started the Junto. His friends were printers, surveyors, and shoemakers. No one in that tavern could have known they were founding a university, a library, and a hospital that would still be healing people three centuries later. They simply promised one another to keep asking what good they could do, and to do it here.
The Germination Project is twelve years into a fifty-year bet, and we are asking our Fellows for the same promise. I will not live long enough to sit in the full shade of what they build. But I have seen sprouts and the first harvest. Mary is only one of 200-plus Fellows with similar stories, asking novel questions society has not yet learned to ask.
The world will compete for Mary and for those like her. Right now, the world usually wins. But Philadelphia will once again become a city that thinks big enough to win them back. We will not live on remittances from those who have moved elsewhere. We are raising a new Junto, and giving it every reason to meet here, every Friday night, for the next fifty years.