It’s 3:15 on a Saturday morning and I quietly close the door of my Cusco apartment behind me. By 3:50 I close the sliding door of an Ollantaytambo-bound combi, a cheap van heading almost 40 miles northwest to the heart of the Sacred Valley, to the same town that around Read more…
In May 2014, 30 students traveled to the Dominican Republic as part of the Social Enterprise Institute’s (SEI) Field Study program to work and learn as microfinance consultants. The students and the Northeastern staff arrived in the Dominican Republic bearing 1,500 pairs of reading glasses to be distributed across poor communities. Read more…
It is a cold day, October 10th, 2014, a typical Friday afternoon, as students wander back from their class or head to lunch. In the West Village Quad, there is slightly more movement than usual. One-by-one, a number of black cardboard boxes of all shapes and sizes are stacked on Read more…
For the 4th year in a row, Northeastern’s Social Enterprise Institute (SEI) is partnering with Citizen Schools. As a part of the 8th Grade Academy (8GA) Writing Coach Program, Northeastern students volunteer their time to serve as mentors to 8th graders from Orchard Gardens K-8 Public School in Roxbury. This Read more…
Earlier in the year, I had the pleasure of attending a dinner in Boston held by an organization called BuildOn. I sat with its founder and CEO, Jim Ziolkowski, and during the evening met numerous students from Boston’s inner city schools who were on their way to Malawi to build Read more…
“My experience in the Dominican Republic with Northeastern’s Social Enterprise Institute allowed me to interact with bottom of the pyramid microentrepreneurs and understand how their needs are being met by microfinance institutions.” That was me about nine months ago, interviewing for a co-op position at PlaNet Finance in Paris. I Read more…