"I wonder what comes into your mind when you think of the word 'entrepreneur'," posits Sterling Speirn in his recent TEDx Talk at the University of Michigan. "I think of people like Ruth DeGolia, who, after a trip to Guatemala, started selling hand-crafted jewelry to her classmates back at Yale. Today her business connects artisans across 30 communities in Guatemala to retail stores and catalogs here in the U.S.; as a result, they make 4-5 times the income they would otherwise, and it enables them, for the first time, to send hundreds of their children to school."
Speirn, the president and CEO of the W.K. Kellogg Foundation, highlighted Ruth as an example of an entrepreneur in a talk entitled "Untapped Giving" about the crossover between philanthropy and enterprise. Speirn discusses the importance of prioritizing social returns in non-profit as well as for-profit investing. "We can find more bottom lines," says Speirn, "and in this way we can change the world."
