Mr. Himes was born in Lima, Peru, where his father worked for the Ford Foundation, and spent his early childhood there and in Bogotá, Colombia. When his parents divorced, he and his two sisters moved to New Jersey with their mother, who worked as an administrator for nonprofit groups like the Aspen Institute and for the State Board of Higher Education.

Being engaged in the world was not a matter of choice for Mr. Himes, said David Earling, a childhood friend: “That dinner table was where, as a 10-year-old, you’d better have a view of what’s going on and what the headlines were.”

Mr. Carlson, who wrote Mr. Himes’s recommendation for the Rhodes Scholarship, called him “a remarkably reflective guy.” When Mr. Himes proposed writing a college paper on homelessness, Mr. Carlson invited him to spend a night at a shelter where he worked. “But he went out and spent the night on the street with the homeless, and wrote a beautiful and poetic paper that shared their perspectives.”

After his Rhodes scholar experience at Oxford, where he earned a degree in Latin American studies, Mr. Himes said he pursued jobs at the State Department and on Capitol Hill before Goldman lured him to join its new Latin America group. He soon wound up crunching numbers and traveling the world selling investors on the landmark privatization of Telmex, the Mexican telephone company.

Goldman disbanded the group after the 1994 Mexican peso crisis. Mr. Himes later worked in mergers and acquisitions and in a technology group. But when the dot-com boom went bust, Mr. Himes, already rattled by 9/11, did not like his options at the firm. “Between that, and a newborn and 3-year-old I never saw,” he said, “I’d had enough.”

In Mexico, he had become interested in ways of fighting poverty with business-oriented solutions. With that in mind, he found his way to the Enterprise Foundation, a nonprofit financer of low-income housing, which commissioned him to study personal finances and predatory financial services in the Bronx.

“It was a real eye-opener to spend time with people you don’t often meet at 85 Broad Street,” he said, referring to Goldman’s headquarters.