The success of the film Lady Bird brought Sacramento into the national limelight and local leaders want to incorporate the creative community into its branding efforts. But artists and business leaders can be strange bedfellows. 

As the legend goes, Didar Singh Bains arrived in his new home of Yuba City in 1958 at age 18 with only $8 in his pocket, which was enough for him. A young immigrant from India with humble origins, he says he believed that in the U.S. “money could grow on trees.” In the course of his lifetime, that youthful optimism has proven true — at least figuratively.

In the Sacramento region, at least one major medical provider is already on the same page with the benefits of OpenNotes. Across the country, an estimated 13 million patients can now access their notes. This open-source movement, proponents say, represents a shift away from a paternalistic model of medical care and toward a model of fully-engaged and informed patients. And that, they argue, is better for everyone.

Now that millennials are older and starting to have kids, the economics of schools and space are driving many of them to the suburbs, just as it did their parents.

Tim Egkan was a man more fixated on the potential of things than their immediate utility. He had a bright vision for Stockton’s beleaguered central core. Now, the community he left behind has a mission to see it brought to life. 

Many of us are familiar with Woodroof’s plight — it was the subject of the critically acclaimed movie “The Dallas Buyers Club.” But while Hollywood took many liberties in telling his story, Woodroof’s real-life dilemma is one still being shared by many terminally ill people today. That struggle is also at the heart of a movement to allow those patients access to drugs the FDA has not authorized.

Focusing on four sectors — STEM, justice, development and investment — we rounded up some of the city’s key leaders: a district attorney, a med school dean, the head of an FBI office and enough CEOs to rival “Shark Tank,” to get their take on how women are perceived in their industries, how that perception has changed over time and what it will take to truly reach parity.

Forty percent of homeless youth are lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgendered, compared to just 10 percent for the larger population. Across the United States, there are somewhere around 320,000 to 400,000 homeless LGBT youth. There are roughly 4,000 shelter beds total. Enough to sleep just one percent.

Momentum is shifting in the Capital Region, and young professionals are leading the charge. General skepticism is being replaced with emerging optimism and a renewed energy that’s providing the catalyst for growth and innovation across our cities.  Here are the top ten young leaders we think you should be watching. They are driving the Capital Region’s evolution, and we anticipate you’ll see them at the forefront in 2015 and decades to come.

The narrative of Andrew Susac’s 2014 season did more than just further his promising baseball career. The Roseville native’s sudden ascent in late July from minor leaguer to eventual World Series champion opened up a breadth of new financial opportunities, too.

What more can your storage cabinets do for you? How can your placemats become conversation pieces? What if sitting down to read a magazine felt a little bit like being at the carnival?

Over half a million kids live in foster care in the U.S. as a result of abuse, neglect or abandonment. Because they can’t advocate for themselves, many become victims a second time, lost in an overburdened child welfare system that can’t pay close attention to each child. But one program is drastically improving outcomes for foster youth, despite the overwhelming odds.

On opening day of the 2014 baseball season, New York Mets second baseman Daniel Murphy was noticeably absent. He wasn’t benched. He didn’t have the flu. He simply took advantage of Major League Baseball’s paternity leave policy, which grants 72 hours off, to attend the birth of his son.

And all hell broke loose.

No agency is safe. No office off limits. Boardrooms will be infiltrated.   Communication barriers will crumble for the sake of collaboration. As the old guard inches toward that horizon called retirement, Sacramento’s young power players are taking center stage.

In today’s on-demand marketplace of real-time information delivered to mobile devices at lightening speeds, smart design is crucial for business success. And as the creative half of marketing firm Position Interactive, Phil Tretheway, 34, knows that without strategic and compelling design, consumers will pass his clients by.

“First off, I’m not an architect,” says Marvin Maldonado, a Sacramento-based building designer. He’s really more of a dreamer with a architecture degree.

But as we all know, dreams can get tricky.

Within three and a half years, 26-year-old Katrina Stumbos has transitioned from college graduate to business owner.

In her newly minted office on Fair Oaks Boulevard, Stumbos invites clients to brainstorm their dream spaces inside her treasure trove of fabrics, woods, wallpapers and tiles.

Sacramento has not been kind to Thomas Ramey, though he loves the city and hopes it will someday let him succeed. A Southern California transplant, he’s accustomed to clients who value his contemporary metal sculptures, modern architectural design elements and hand-fabricated furniture.

It’s been an extraordinary couple of years for Richard Hallmarq, the 41-year-old Sacramento native who last year made his fashion debut on national television and is now gearing up for New York Fashion Week from his design studio inside the Sacramento Art Complex on K Street.

Hospitals, law firms and state agencies involved in implementing the Affordable Care Act have seen a sizable bump in workload — and in some cases, staff sizes — as they prepare for the major overhaul mandated by the 2010 law and to adjust to other industry changes.

For many foster youth, establishing stability within in the foster care system is exceedingly difficult. But it’s after emancipation that the realities of financial independence become even more challenging.

Banning together 12 years ago, a group of local women sought out to help foster youth establish healthy lives after emancipation.

Michael and Susan Pope had witnessed enough of parenthood to give them second thoughts about having children of their own. After seeing friends vanish into an abyss of diaper bags, sleepless nights, stress, arguments and the apparent loss of every conceivable freedom, they had plenty of reasons to reconsider.

When the pain began, Kevin assumed it was indigestion. He would occasionally experience bowel irregularity but would return to work anyway, fixing hot rods at a body shop in Carmichael. The 53-year-old didn’t grow alarmed until after about eight months, when he noticed a protrusion emitting from the side of his groin like a blister.

Low testosterone. For men, these words have the same foul odor as “impotence,” “shrinkage” or “Justin Bieber.” The topic is taboo. Throughout civilization testosterone has been prized as the lifeblood of manhood, so a deficit would imply, by definition, that we are somehow less manly.

A few years ago, Troy Underwood noticed a problem with one of his accountants. The man’s work performance and personal appearance had deteriorated, he talked constantly on the phone with his children and agonized about his domestic life. 

Congratulations Sacramento. You finally got the economic recovery you’ve been asking for. 

It’s not as big or fast as you had wished for, but give it time. It should get stronger as we move toward 2014.

On a spring day in 2011, 60-year-old Russell Edgar checked himself into a 14-day Newstart residential program at the Weimar Center. In the Sierra Nevada foothills above Sacramento, the center promised to teach people with diabetes, obesity and cancer how to reverse their health problems through natural healing methods.

Like so many recent law school graduates, Seth Benkle searched vainly for a job after graduating from the University of the Pacific McGeorge School of Law in Sacramento in 2010, increasingly stressed about his $160,000 in student loans, interest accruing.

While browsing in a shop in 2009, 6-year-old Allison Prestwich saw a candle made by the Tyler Candle Co., and she wondered aloud if it was named after her younger brother.

Senior associate Tracy Steffens starts getting urgent emails from East Coast clients as early as 6 a.m., just around the time her two-year-old daughter raps on the shower door to expel mommy from her morning rinse.

The Federal Reserve calls it Operation Twist, named after the 1961 Chubby Checker hit that sparked gyrating hips in dance halls across America. That was also the first year the Fed embarked on a mission to purchase long-term Treasury notes in an effort to drive down interest rates on long-term loans.

Scott Silva got a job steering concrete-laden wheelbarrows at age 16 and started a local ready-mix company as a young man. He knew the concrete contracting business from the ground up.

Kevin Manzer gave up being a cop to clean carpets.

Since founding Sierra Energy Corp. in 2004, Mike Hart has led the charge to make it a force in the world of renewable energy. This year, with a working gasification system to demonstrate for new investors, Hart is stepping aside as CEO.

While institutions of higher learning across the state are reeling from budget cuts, tuition hikes, course reductions and faculty and student unrest, Chancellor Linda Katehi has calmly put together a business plan for expansion and prosperity at UC Davis.

It’s been said a down economy is a boon for Masters of Business Administration programs. The fact that the region has kept the healthy crop of MBA schools it had in 2007, before the economy turned, and even added one would suggest the maxim holds true. But it’s no free ride.

The state law requiring the use of electronic documents as evidence in civil lawsuits, also known as e-discovery, turns two next month, and local attorneys say its application is still in the developmental stages.

When California’s building industry began to crumble in 2008 — with 2009 producing the lowest number of homes built since 1954 — veteran contractors like Jim Bayless scrambled to reinvent themselves.

The last sound anyone wants to hear is a firetruck siren. But last fall, that unsettling sound rang in the middle of the night as a three-alarm fire leaped from an apartment building in midtown Sacramento to the roof of J Street Recorders, home of the multiplatinum blues metal band Tesla.

While small specialty businesses in the Sacramento area are closing their doors in droves these days, Jon Holloway’s family-operated travel store is still sailing along, albeit in choppier waters.

In a growing cluster of offices and labs south of downtown Davis, researchers at Novozymes Inc. are building better microbes.

Like zombies in a low-budget horror movie, commercial properties in the Capital Region are staggering along in the twilight between life and death.

Sometimes success is about seeing the potential of a hole in the ground. Well, it also takes a lot of meetings too; just ask the guys who turned the gravel pit on Power Inn Road into what is now Granite Regional Park.

California will need close to a million new medical assistants, lab techs, respiratory therapists and other skilled health workers in the next 20 years in addition to new doctors and nurses, a recent study estimates. But the state doesn’t have enough educational capacity to train them all.

San Joaquin County needed 3,000 more unemployed workers like it needed a hole in the head, but that’s what it got with the closing of the NUMMI auto plant in Fremont and the related layoffs at its major suppliers.

With conventional health care becoming more technologically advanced and increasingly expensive, Dr. Maxine Barish-Wreden sees the future of medicine embracing meditation, massage, yoga, tai chi, nutrition and other “softer therapies.”

Stop me if you’ve heard this one: A lawyer dies young and arrives at the Pearly Gates. 

“There must be some mistake!” he wails. “I’m only 31!”

St. Peter consults the records and disagrees. “Judging by the number of hours you’ve billed, you’re at least 73.”

For decades, the contours of the Capital Region economy seemed etched in stone. Government, manufacturing and construction employed the bulk of the population. After the boom and bust of the past decade, however, the job profile of the future could be almost unrecognizable.

Bruce Coolidge, programming director for Capital Athletic Club in downtown Sacramento, wears a Garmin Forerunner 305.