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10 of TIME's 100 'most influential'

What does it mean to be influential today? TIME Magazine may not have a scientific answer, but they identified scores of people in their 2012 “100 Most Influential People in the World” list, released this week. Here is a sampling of 10 people from around the world who made the cut.

Dulce Matuz, immigration advocate

  • By Whitney Eulich Staff Writer

Co-founder and president of The Arizona Dream Act Coalition, Dulce Matuz is fighting for generations of young immigrants to have a path toward US citizenship. Ms. Matuz’s family brought her to the United States when she was a child, and she stepped out as an advocate for immigrant rights when Arizona’s proposition 300 began requiring undocumented youth to pay out-of-state tuition for college. (Her tuition in Arizona – what she calls “the Ground Zero for Immigration” – jumped from $2,500 per semester to $8,500 making the completion of her engineering degree impossible.)

“Dulce promotes a path to citizenship for undocumented immigrants who, like her, were brought to the U.S. before they were 16, attend college or serve in the military, and are of good moral character,” said actress Eva Longoria who wrote Matuz’s entry in TIME. “Dulce takes on powerful opponents with grace and conviction, saying, ‘We are Americans, and Americans don't give up.’”

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Mark Sappenfield
Editor

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

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