CMC's Social EnterpriseInitiative Wins $5,000 Grant

The Social Enterprise Initiative, a CMC organization that strives to alleviate global poverty through social entrepreneurship and microfinance, has won a $5,000 Student Leadership grant for their efforts from the Jenzabar Foundation.
The grant is presented annually to student-run campus groups that are focused on effecting change in social arenas. The Jenzabar Foundation recognizes that such change can begin at the college-level and has previously funded projects related to education, healthcare, the environment and humanitarian assistance.
Gabriela Andrade '12 and Van-Anh Su '13 lead the Social Enterprise Initiative at CMC and traveled to New York City to accept the grant award at the Millennium Campus Network Conference at Columbia University. As guests of the Jenzabar Foundation, the students also attended a VIP dinner for award recipients and conference speakers where they had the opportunity to meet the chairman of the foundation, its executive director and other award winners and conference speakers. An audience of nearly 1000 people attended the grant award ceremony.
"Gaby and Van-Anh are terrific representatives of CMC: enthusiastic, knowledgeable and articulate," stated Lora Hess, associate director of foundation & corporate relations at CMC, who also attended the awards ceremony. "They detailed their plans for the Social Enterprise Initiative and were extremely gracious in their thanks to the Foundation. I really enjoyed traveling with them and hearing about their plans for the Initiative. They are remarkable young women with a bright and thoughtful future ahead."
According to P. Edward Haley, Keck Foundation Chair of International Studies and director of the Center for Human Rights Leadership at CMC, the $5,000 prize was awarded based on the stellar record of the Center's Microfinance Task Force and in recognition of Gaby and Van-Anh's plans to expand the task force's efforts throughout the five colleges via the Social Enterprise Initiative.
"Gaby and Van-Anh turned their Center-supported Microfinance Task Force into a remarkable engine for harnessing the empathy and economic know how of students at CMC and the five Claremont Colleges to solve problems of poverty and inequality," Haley says. "The range and number of Gaby's and Van-Anh's projects gives an idea of the wonderful imagination and ambition that they and all the students brought to the task force."
In their grant application, Gaby and Van-Anh highlighted the Initiative's accomplishments during the 2009-2010 year. During that time, the Initiative promoted a $10,000 alumni fundraising campaign for Fonkoze and Partners in Health, two international nonprofit groups; hosted Rafael Mazer, a microfinance analyst, for an Athenaeum lecture; and led a Claremont Colleges campaign for the Chiapas Project.
Accepting the grant at the conference at Columbia was, according to Gaby, a "nerve-wrecking, yet rewarding" experience.
"After we spoke, people came up to us to tell us what a great idea we had, how they could help us by getting involved," she says. "We made some great like-minded contacts from around the country."
As guests of the Jenzabar Foundation, one of the principal sponsors of the conference, Gaby and Van-Anh got to meet several of the invited speakers, including noted economist Dr. Jeffrey Sachs,director of the Earth Institute at Columbia University, and special advisor to United Secretary-General Ban Ki-moo.
"I was also able to speak to Bobby Bailey, director of the documentary Invisible Children, a documentary that ignited a grassroots movement in response to Uganda's child soldiers in the Lord's Resistance Army," Gaby says.
A highlight for Van-Anh was getting the opportunity to speak with Dr. Bernard Amadei, the founder of Engineers Without Borders USA!
With a plan to major in International Relations or Economics Van-Anh says she looks forward to developing the academic knowledge and quantitative and qualitative analytical skills necessary to pursue a career in the international development field.
"My family is from Vietnam and China," Van-Anh says, "and rapidly developing countries in Asia are striving right now to reconcile economic development and their domestic socioeconomic challenges."
She cites that although Vietnam's gross domestic product has experienced an average real growth rate of 7 percent since 2007, 50 percent of Vietnam's population still live on less than US $2 a day and remain vulnerable to poverty.
"I have been passionate about alleviating poverty since high school where I promoted awareness of and fundraised for campaigns that helped the world's poor access such basic needs as clean water," Van-Anh says. "After learning about microfinance during my senior year, I became very interested in social enterprise, a concept in which organizations use business models to pursue a mission based on addressing social challenges in their community."
Gaby is an economics-international relations dual major at CMC, with a focus on poverty alleviation and economic development and, like Van-Anh, hopes to pursue a career in international development after graduation.
After attending the 2009 Kravis Leadership Institute sponsored Conference on Social Entrepreneurship during her freshman year, Gaby became fascinated with the idea that socially conscious, profit-driven business can be used as a vehicle through which to address social challenges.
"I knew that nonprofits often faced budgetary constraints that limit their impact, so I saw this concept of social enterprise as a sustainable alternative," she says.
Gaby was born and lived in Honduras until she was about seven before moving to the San Francisco bay area, but most of her family still lives in Honduras.
"It's one of the poorest countries in the Western hemisphere, with high levels of rural poverty and an economy that has been devastated by hurricanes and flooding in the past two decades," she says. "Although I grew up in the San Francisco bay area, I know firsthand the devastating effects of poverty, and have been intrigued by finding new and innovative ways to address it. As President of my high school's Social Justice Club, I helped fundraise for and coordinate a micro-loan for a Bulgarian entrepreneur through the online peer-to-peer microfinance site Kiva.org."
Although both women were on track to make a difference in the world through social entrepreneurship, a fortuitous meeting at CMC led them to combine their talents.
"When I came to CMC," Van-Anh says, "I met Gaby and another student, Aisling Scott '12, at the Center for Human Rights Leadership. Both shared my passion for supporting international development solutions to poverty. Together, we started the Microfinance Task Force through the Director's Advisory Committee at the Center. We have since renamed our organization the Social Enterprise Initiative after becoming a 5-C club this year."
Currently, 19 students are involved in the Social Enterprise Initiative: sixteen from Claremont McKenna and three from Pitzer.
"We have students from all class years, ranging from freshman to seniors," Gaby says. "We're hoping to get some graduate students soon!"
Gaby and Van-Anh plan to use the Jenzabar grant to fund a social investment project and micro-loans through Kiva (www.kiva.org), host social entrepreneurs to visit The Claremont Colleges, sponsor student involvement in social enterprise conferences, and develop an on-campus micro-goods fair.
Both women hope that their participation in the Initiative will help them learn from and engage with other students and professionals who share the same passion for alleviating poverty around the world.
"Gaby and I look forward to connecting with students across the Claremont Colleges who are passionate about poverty alleviation through social business and entrepreneurship," says Van-Anh.