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UNM students now have the chance to make a difference in the economies of countries throughout Latin America and Africa.
UNM is the first university in the Southwest to join a social enterprise group consisting of 11 universities nationwide, including Notre Dame, Georgetown and the University of Connecticut.
On Monday afternoon, UNM was inducted into the Social Entrepreneur Corps. The group offers students internships in countries such as Guatemala, Nicaragua, Peru and South Africa where they jumpstart economies at the micro level. They do this by providing several services, including business plans, startup investment and local artisan support.
“The internships are for all majors and interested students, not just business students,” said Felipe Acosta, president of International Business Students Global, the UNM organization that sponsored the induction. “It’s for whoever wants to get actively involved with the development of these countries’ communities.”
Manuel Montoya, the faculty adviser for IBSG, said the students’ experiences in those countries can directly benefit New Mexico.
“It’s important to have a series of programs that allow students to go all around the world and do social business programs in other countries and bring that back here,” Montoya said.
Montoya also said that the Social Entrepreneur Corps is a good fit for what he called UNM’s “hungry” business students.
“It takes a certain type of student to go to Kenya and to want to take a man selling seeds from a wheelbarrow and turn that into a 5-million-dollar business,” he said.
Provost Chaouki Abdallah, Anderson School of Management Dean Doug Brown, Social Entrepreneur Corps co-founder Greg Van Kirk and Acosta signed a memorandum of understanding to solidify the partnership between IBSG and the Social Entrepreneur Corps and to formally induct UNM into the organization.
Afterward, Van Kirk spoke about his personal experiences with social entrepreneurship.
In the early 2000s, Van Kirk spent five years in a small village in Guatemala with the Peace Corps, where he helped establish a rural Internet center and provided small loans to local borrowers with no credit. Van Kirk said he became interested in social entrepreneurship when he created a local business, grew it, then gave it back to the locals and used the proceeds to fund local development programs.
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“I decided to start up a restaurant in the village, even though I knew nothing about restaurants,” Van Kirk said. “The restaurant would eventually be turned over to local leadership, and profits would be donated to local projects.”
Van Kirk went on to pioneer the MicroConsignment Model in which an outside investor, such as the Social Entrepreneur Corps, assumes the initial financial risk to help a local entrepreneur set up a business in a relatively uncertain market.
“It’s about engaging the local people to solve their own problems and taking an empathetic approach to problem solving,” Van Kirk said. “Being directly involved with the communities is where the real value of social entrepreneurship is going to come from.”
Business administration major Jill Loniewski said that hearing Van Kirk speak made her want internship with the organization.
“I think they’re giving students an amazing chance with this program. It’s not just the normal study abroad anymore,” Loniewski said. “It’s all about empowering people, like putting a seed in the ground and watching it grow.”
Acosta said that though it took a lot of work to create IBSG and to petition the Social Entrepreneur Corps for membership, it was worth it.
“It all really pays off when you actually get students to go and do meaningful work in other countries,” Acosta said.
Social Entrepreneur Corps internship informational meeting
Thursday at 5 p.m.
Jackson Student Center
in the Anderson School of Management
Email Roxanne Blair at rmcblair@unm.edu for more information
