Editing Alan Lightman (section)

==Nonprofit work==
In 2003, Lightman made his first trip to Southeast Asia, to Cambodia. There he met a Cambodian lawyer named [[Veasna Chea Leth]] who told him that when she had been going to university in Phnom Penh in the mid-1990s, she and a handful of female students lived underneath the university building, in the two-meter crawl space between the bottom of the building and the mud, because there was no housing for female university students.<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://www.harpswellfoundation.org/history/|title=Who We Are|website=Harpswell Foundation}}</ref><ref>{{Cite news|url=http://archive.boston.com/ae/media/articles/2007/11/19/lightmans_dream/|title=Lightman's dream|first=Tinker|last=Ready|newspaper=Boston.com|date=November 19, 2007|via=The Boston Globe}}</ref><ref>{{Cite web|url=https://www.insidehighered.com/news/2012/12/10/foundation-provides-educational-and-leadership-opportunities-women-cambodia|title=Foundation provides educational and leadership opportunities to women in Cambodia|website=www.insidehighered.com}}</ref> Lightman and Chea together conceived the idea of a dormitory for female university students in Phnom Penh. That first facility was completed in 2006, the first dormitory for college women in the country.

During this work, Lightman founded Harpswell,<ref name="harpswell" /> a nonprofit organization whose mission is to support emerging women leaders in Southeast Asia. Harpswell now operates two centers in Phnom Penh. In addition to providing housing, food, and medical care, the facility operates a program in leadership skills and critical thinking. The in-house program includes English instruction, computer literacy, debate, analytical writing, comparative genocide studies, strategies for civic engagement, leadership training, and discussion and analysis of national and international events.  As of fall 2023, the Cambodian program has about 250 graduates and about 76 current students.{{citation needed|date=January 2024}}

In 2017, Harpswell launched a new program in leadership for young professional women<ref>{{Cite web|url=http://harpswell-asean-kanita.weebly.com/|title=Harpswell ASEAN Women's Leadership Summit|website=HARPSWELL }}</ref> from all ten countries of Southeast Asia: Laos, Myanmar, Thailand, Vietnam, Cambodia, Malaysia, the Philippines, Indonesia, Singapore, and Brunei, plus Nepal.  The Harpswell-ASEAN Women's Leadership Summit consists of a ten-day summer program in Penang Malaysia, with lectures and workshops in critical thinking, civic engagement, Southeast Asian geography and society, technology and communication, and gender issues. The program has a total of 25 participants each year, who are flown to Penang from their respective countries.