Growing up I always had an underlying desire for service. My parents taught me the most important aspect of life is to help others. My most distant memories from my adolescence is doing service work through my church’s youth program. My mom was in charge of the kitchen for the homeless shelter at the church. For several years my mom converted our house into a foster home. We provided temporary care for children coming from struggling families. Then I attended a Jesuit high school where I was taught to be a “man for others.”
Inspired by my grandfather’s service in World War II, I decided that I should live a life of service through the military. During my senior year of high school, I applied for the Marine Corps’ Naval Reserve Officers Training Corps (NROTC) program at Fordham University. Fortunately, I did not receive the scholarship to participate in the program. As the months passed since I first applied, I began to second-guess my desires to join the Marines. I began to question who I would be serving, the United States or oil cartels. With my rejection from the Marines, I was left with no idea what I wanted to study or career to pursue, so I went to my dad for help.
He told me to study business. He explained that a business degree offers a well-rounded education and keeps doors open after graduation. At first I was hesitant. When I thought of business, I thought of wealth inequality, the destruction of our environment, and corporate injustices. “But I want to help people,” I said. He responded with, “Doing good and doing well do not have to be mutually exclusive.” This was my first lesson in social entrepreneurship.
Following my dad’s advice, I enrolled at Northeastern University pursing a degree in International Business. Soon after arriving on campus, a rugby teammate informed me of Professor Shaughnessy’s acclaimed social entrepreneurship classes. He told me it was a course that teaches you how to use business to help people. I had to take this course. After initially being put on the waiting list due to high demand, I enrolled in ENTR2206: Social Entrepreneurship.
I quickly became enthralled. I learned there is an eye hospital in India that supplies free eye care to millions (Aravind), without accepting a single donation; a recycling company in South Africa that employs homeless men to clean the streets of Cape Town (Trash Back); and a homeless shelter in Boston that generates income through a catering company (Pine Street Inn). Social entrepreneurship takes the best aspects of for-profit businesses such as innovation, profitability, and scalability and combines them with the morality of a non-profit charity. Through the Social Enterprise Institute, I have had opportunities to work with social businesses from the United States, Jamaica, and South Africa.
“Doing good and doing well” seems to be the best way to describe the intersection of business and social entrepreneurship. My early personal experiences, as well as my business education at Northeastern, have convinced me that business principles can be applied in a way that does more than help the rich get richer. It can be used to create dignified lives for billions of the world’s poorest citizens.
http://www.aravind.org/
http://trashback.org/
http://www.pinestreetinn.org/social_enterprise/icater
