When Deborah Bial answered her phone in a rental car in Chicago, the unfamiliar voice on the other end asked the founder of a nonprofit for urban high school graduates if she were alone and sitting down. He then told her that she would be receiving a half-million dollar grant through the MacArthur Fellows Program.

“I started crying,” said Bial, founder of the New York-based Posse Foundation.

Bial, who received her MA in 1996 and an EdD in 2004 from Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, is one of three 2007 fellows to have graced the campus.

Dr. Jonathan Shay ’63 and Sven Haakanson, who received his MA and PhD from the university in 1996 and 2000, are the other two recipients.

The fellows receive the money over five years after being chosen by a small, confidential selection committee. The candidates must first be nominated anonymously, according to the MacArthur Fellows Web site.

Daniel J. Socolow, director of the MacArthur Fellows Program, said that the frequently applied term “genius grant,” is a misnomer that suggests a too-narrow definition of achievement. This year’s 24 fellows come from a wide range of fields and do vastly different things, but, Socolow said, “one thing they do have in common is this remarkable streak of creativity.”

Bial’s creativity was born of frustration while working in public schools in New York City, where she would see her students go off to college only to drop out six months later. A former student told Bial that he would have stayed in college if his posse were there with him.

“I thought, why not send a posse, a team of kids, to college to back each other up?” she said.

Since 1989 the Posse Foundation has formed groups of diverse students to undergo pre-college training and go on to top schools where they can support each other.

Jehuda Reinharz, president of Brandeis University—one of 28 university partners in Posse and where Bial went as an undergrad—said Bial has “created an organization that has the potential to really change American higher education.”

He cited the program’s high retention rate, 90 percent, as an indication of its success.

Michael L. Ainslie, chair of the Posse Foundation, agreed, calling Bial “one of the most visionary people I’ve ever known...she has really changed the way college admissions look at kids from inner cities.”

Former University President Derek C. Bok, who worked with Bial while she was a graduate student, noticed her ability to find students in inner cities and “somehow be able to see that they would be able to survive and do well.”

“It’s a great success story,” Bok said.

Another Harvard winner, Haakanson studied anthropology but was bothered that so many artifacts were moved out of their original locations, robbing local communities of their heritage.

Now the director of the Alutiiq Museum in Kodiak, Alaska, his goal is to return artifacts to their communities.

“It’s taking the information and putting it back into a living context,” he said.

Haakanson plans to use part of his fellowship to work on a book.

Shay, who moved on from his days at Harvard to become staff psychiatrist in the Department of Veteran Affairs Outpatient Clinic of Boston, has found compelling similarities between ancient epic heroes and modern veterans suffering from post-traumatic stress disorder. Shay has worked with the military and promotes reforms dealing with veterans’ psychological health.

Shay could not be reached for comment yesterday.