Jean Carroll Macdonald, world traveler and neighborhood activist, died Saturday morning July 14th, 2007. She fought for the rights and well-being of all those around her wherever she lived, and she fought for her health in recent months with the determination and optimistic spirit that characterized her life.

   Born in Pittsburgh, PA in 1923, the first child of Mary Jean Williams and Matthew Vincent Carroll, she grew up in Bronxville, NY and graduated from Bronxville School in 1941. Jean worked her own way through Simmons College, graduating in 1945. She met her husband Donald Macdonald at a dance in Boston for military personnel home on leave while she was still at Simmons. They were married in Carmel, CA in August, 1945, just before Donald was posted to the military provisional government in South Korea. When her husband returned from military duty, they established a successful secretarial business in Cambridge, MA which they sold when they joined the Foreign Service in 1947. Jean and Donald had three sons, one who died in infancy in Washington, DC in 1947, their second son, James Carroll Macdonald, born in Seoul, Korea in 1949, and their third son, Thomson Stone Macdonald, born in Istanbul, Turkey in 1951.

Jean embraced her role as a foreign service wife with great energy and dignity and became a true international ambassador. She developed deep bonds of friendship wherever she went, and loved learning to live and share with Koreans, Turks, and Swiss during her years as a diplomat. While stationed in the Washington, DC area, Jean worked at the Washington International Center, Meridian House, helping foreign visitors acclimate to a new environment. When her husband retired from the Foreign Service in 1969, Jean earned a Master's degree in elementary education from Shippensburg State College in Pennsylvania,  moved to Washington and began teaching in the District of Columbia Public Schools in 1971. Though she traveled to Korea on several several occasions with her husband for private consulting after his retirement, her passion was to teach the love of reading and writing to young students of the DC Public Schools, most recently at the Webb School. She earned a M.Ed. in Reading from Trinity College in Washington, and remained a devoted teacher well past her retirement, volunteering her services at the Webb School library.

Shortly after Donald and Jean established residence at the Harbour Square Cooperative in Southwest Washington in 1972, they both became deeply involved in the Southwest Neighborhood Assembly, and set up the neighborhood Youth Activities Task Force in 1982. Jean was Secretary of the Southwest Neighborhood Assembly (SWNA), acted as a volunteer with SWNA's nominations and elections committee, and authored several articles for the local newspaper, The Southwester. She occupied several positions of leadership in the YATF and was chairperson at the time of her death. She developed summer sailing and rowing programs for children of the Southwest community and was a successful fundraiser for YATF. Jean was especially proud of establishing the Tae Kwon Do program for neighborhood youngsters, and regularly brought them freshly baked cupcakes and newly laundered Tae Kwon Do suits. She inspired neighborhood recognition and usage of the King Greenleaf Recreation Center over the years, and is sometimes dubbed the "Mother and Grandmother" of the Center. Jean was also active in the Harbour Square Co-operative where she was a member of the Southwest Affairs Committee and of the Landscaping Committee. Throughout her Harbour Square residence, she loved to entertain and she warmly welcomed her neighbors to an annual open house as well as many other informal affairs.

  Wherever she went, Jean left a trail of friendship, curiosity, and a deep desire to help make things better for all with whom she came in contact.  A fund for the Tae Kwon Do program will be established in her honor.