Aspiring social entrepreneurs looking to tackle some of the world’s most pressing problems face challenges every step of the way—from developing an idea to sourcing funding and beyond. A new course at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business is helping the next generation of social enterprise leaders hone the skills they need to successfully overcome these challenges.
During the Global Social Entrepreneurship Lab, students work with founders of social ventures on mission-critical projects, while designing and developing their own ventures at the same time.
“The aim is for students to first understand what most makes them ‘come alive’—what they feel their deeper purpose is,” said Andrew Leon Hanna, adjunct assistant professor of management. “Then, as they learn from and accelerate the impact of their partner social ventures, that inspires ideas for their own social entrepreneurship journeys.”
Hanna, who also works closely with Booth’s Rustandy Center for Social Sector Innovation, kicked off the experiential learning course this spring with 37 Booth and Harris School of Public Policy students after receiving 86 applications. Students with family backgrounds spanning more than 20 nations signed up, hoping to have an impact on issues such as quelling the spread of malaria in Nigeria and advancing gender equality in India.
The course is a passion for Hanna, who’s also the author of 25 Million Sparks (Cambridge University Press, 2022), a Financial Times Best Book of the Year about refugee entrepreneurs, and the founder of Mona, a global social venture that provides small-business entrepreneurs with access to capital, distribution opportunities, product investment and more.
“Once we tap into our sense of purpose, become proximate to the problems we care about, and start cocreating with the communities we seek to empower, amazing things can happen,” he said.
Improving financial access
Booth student Laura Odette Garcia has long dreamed of starting her own social venture. Before Booth, she worked at Citibank in Mexico for six years, helping small and midsize businesses with loans.
“I saw 50-year-old businesses struggling to develop their financial statement or understand how their credit line worked,” she said. Some companies had previously fallen victim to predatory loans. Garcia also saw her entrepreneur mother struggle with finances for businesses she ran, including a coffee shop and gym. Garcia wanted to help these business owners succeed.
Hanna placed Garcia in the group working with Heather Ibrahim-Leathers and Global Fund for Widows, a New York–based nonprofit working to economically empower the world’s 350 million widows. Garcia and her teammates helped Ibrahim-Leathers fine-tune the launch of her organization’s new impact investment fund, created to help raise more capital to scale Global Fund for Widows’ microbanks around the world.
“Working with Heather showed me how one person can change the future of entire communities,” Garcia said. “It inspired me to pursue a path that I believed wasn’t possible and gave me the tools to understand how to scale a nonprofit to make it attractive for investors. After this project, I feel empowered to help underserved women in the United States improve their financial access.”
Garcia created the venture Pre$tanda, a digital platform that provides educational resources and microloans in the form of lending circles to Latin American women business owners. The platform is based on a “tanda,” a rotating savings and credit association model trusted among Latin American communities.
“Everyone pays in, and everyone gets a payout as a loan,” Garcia said. “It’s kind of like jump-starting these businesses in the loan world. I’ve had this idea for such a long time, but I didn’t know where to start. The course gave me a lot of structure.”
She hopes to run pilot programs in Chicago with minority-owned businesses over the next six months. Ultimately, Garcia envisions that businesses working with Pre$tanda will use the experience to get larger loans from banks.
Tackling discrimination in maternal care
Garcia’s classmate, Laurene Amoit, worked with Native Renewables, which installs off-grid solar and battery storage for Indigenous homes that have no access to electricity. Based in Flagstaff, Arizona, the social venture has powered nearly 80 Hopi and Navajo homes with solar to date.
Amoit and her teammates worked with Native Renewables founder Suzanne Singer to rethink and streamline the venture’s operations to deliver off-grid solar energy to Native families in the United States in a more cost-effective way.
Weekly course exercises as well as mentorship from Singer gave Amoit the tools she needed to create her own venture supporting underserved communities. Matricare is a platform that matches Black, American Indian and Alaska Native women with maternal healthcare professionals of color throughout their pregnancy. The goal is to reduce discrimination and ensure women’s voices are better heard by providers they trust.
Amoit grew up in Kenya, where approximately 7,700 women die each year from pregnancy-related complications, according to the Center for Global Health and Development. The problem is also significant in the U.S., where the CDC estimates Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women.
“The biggest thing is not being believed when you say: I’m experiencing pain,” said Amoit, who previously cofounded MamaTips, a Kenya-based maternal healthcare company. “Pregnancy is a very intimate thing, with ups and downs, and you want to feel like you’re very comfortable with your team.”
Course guest speaker Nasser Diallo, founder of Clinic+O—which brings primary-care services to low-income communities in Guinea—got Amoit thinking about how Matricare could translate to Africa. “He opened my eyes,” she says. “Entrepreneurship is not necessarily geographically bound.”
Amoit is continuing to work through the logistics of her own endeavor and researching medical privacy requirements. It’s work she’s better prepared for following lessons and guidance from Diallo, Singer, Hanna and her classmates.
“I highly recommend this course for anyone interested in social entrepreneurship,” Amoit said. “It’s a great chance for you to meet a lot of like-minded people who are interested in contributing to good in the world.”
—Adapted from a story that originally appeared on the Chicago Booth website.
—Sam Marsden
