Compassionate capitalists: young social entrepreneurs merge values and business savvy to change the world

National Catholic Reporter, May 30, 2008 by Kris Berggren

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You might call University of Dayton senior Lori Hanna an accidental entrepreneur. The mechanical engineering major recently won the $10,000 top award in the University of Dayton's business competition for her project to build portable solar-powered medical equipment sterilizers.

Her project has blossomed into a nonprofit technology assistance company, Salud del Sol, whose test business, producing a sun-powered medical sterilization device, could be a tremendousboon to health-care providers in remote rural communities.

"I've never worked with anything business-related before," said Hanna. "It has gotten so much bigger than I thought it would be, but it's so exciting."

She is an example of the fast-growing culture of "social entrepreneurs," people who apply technological and business skills to humanitarian projects. Social entrepreneurs bring creative management and marketing into the dogooder territory long inhabited by social workers, activists and others trying to bring about change.

Hanna's idea for medical equipment began when, through the University of Dayton's ETHOS program (Engineers in Technical, Humanitarian Opportunities of Service Learning), she spent two summers in Totogalpa, Nicaragua, as a volunteer with local nonprofit Grupo Fenix. There she was assigned to test and promote solar box cookers, which use the sun's energy to cook food.

A local leader learned that Hanna had worked for a Cincinnati medical device company and showed her a prototype solar autoclave used to sterilize medical instruments, which had been constructed several years ago by another student but never funded. Hanna saw "honors thesis" written all over it. She enlisted other engineering and business students to help her refine the product's design and develop a business plan for its production. They tinkered with software that will collect weather data in order to determine how well a cooker will perform in a location on a certain day, entered the project into the University's senior design clinic in order to ret-me the prototype, and created the prize-winning business plan.

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More than tycoons

Although Americans have always admired entrepreneurs, those tenacious go-getters with a sixth sense for the next big thing, today's 18- to 24-year-old "millennials" "are more likely to admire--or become--social entrepreneurs like Hanna, who find their rewards in the intersection between doing well and doing good. You might call them compassionate capitalists.

They are a far cry from fat cat tycoons we love to hate, from railroad magnate James J. Hill to real estate wunderkind Donald Trump, from captain of industry Andrew Carnegie to style-setter Martha Stewart. But that doesn't mean they aren't on the cutting edge of business trends or that they lack interest in making money.

Lucas Weingarten, 31, is a DePaul University MBA student who has volunteered as a consultant to New Orleans nonprofits and has entered a business development competition there sponsored by JPMorgan Chase, the financial investment giant. His proposal is a green business park. "People wonder, 'How can you say you are serving society and you are getting rich off of it?' That might be a little myopic. Not that I want to get rich off it, but you absolutely have to be profitable."

Chris Campbell, already a business owner at 22, also has his eye on that dual prize: making money while doing good. Campbell, a marketing and public relations major at DePaul University, just launched a business, GreenWerks, Inc., providing ecofriendly contractor and remodeling services in the Chicago area. "I really think going green is going to be the next industrial revolution for the U.S. economy, as it's begun to be in the [United Kingdom]," he said. Campbell says he's a born entrepreneur. "Ever since a young age, I have always been the one mowing the neighbor's lawn or having the lemonade stand," he said. He credits his studies, including ethics and a class in sustainable lifestyles, with helping to sharpen his focus to a business aimed at creating solutions "that are cost-effective and for the greater good."

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Catholic colleges on board

There is no question that entrepreneurship in general is a robust sector of the national economy. And social entrepreneurship, in particular, is as hot as Hanna's solar box cooker.

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"It is a whole new field," said Fred Kiesner, who holds the Conrad Hilton Chair in Entrepreneurship at Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles and has been a professor there since 1974. "It's not as big as I think it's going to get."

Young people "have a different attitude about corporations and their role in society," said Paul Buller, a professor of management and director of the Hogan Entrepreneurial Leadership Program at Gonzaga University in Spokane, Wash. "They have always been idealistic and wanting to change the world. I see a hunger for the social enterprise idea."

Gonzaga and other Catholic universities are joining a host of secular schools in providing programs to support compassionate capitalists, in fact, three of the top 10 undergraduate programs in entrepreneurship for 2007 and five of the top 25 are Catholic colleges and universities, as are three of the top 25 graduate programs, as rated by the Princeton Review and Entrepreneur magazine.