Five weeks ago on May 24, we graduated from Harvard Business School with the Class of 2018. We moved out of our apartments and headed to Jackson, Mississippi for a weeklong training with Freedom Summer Collegiate. After training we drove to Meridian, Mississippi to teach a month-long summer class on Business and Entrepreneurship to high school students at the Meridian Freedom Project. [...]

The goal of the Harlem Children’s Zone (HCZ) is to break the cycle of intergenerational poverty in Harlem. It offers a tightly woven pipeline of wraparound, cradle-through-college services to children, families, and the community, all within a 97-square-block zone in Harlem. Currently, HCZ has 861 students in college, a 97% college acceptance rate, and 20+ programs that serve over 13,000 students and over 14,000 adults in Harlem. My role is as an advisor to the COO (who is an HBS/HKS grad). Under his guidance, my projects have included working on a strategy to support coordinated enrichment efforts across seventeen afterschool sites, piloting a STEM initiative for elementary and middle school classrooms, and providing strategic recommendations to strengthen our academic case management model, which has supported thousands of students on the path to college and career readiness. [...]

Mentoring is one of oldest ways that people have found to connect with each other and be changed in the process. Here are two strangers – not bound by family and in fact often intentionally matched due to their differences in history and circumstance – who nevertheless connect and, more than that, are transformed by the experience. Especially in a world that seems so divided by difference, it feels remarkable that such connections can occur at all. But they do – over and over again. [...]

When I was 12-years old, my parents took me to visit the rural village in Gujarat India where our family originally came from. The children we met there were filled with spirit, and yet were running around barefoot, poorly nourished, and out of school. It felt unfair to me that I had more opportunities than them just because I grew up in Canada. I didn’t have the vocabulary then, but I knew it just wasn’t right. Since then, I have become acutely aware of the millions of children around the world who face limits because of where they were born or how much their families earn. Many days, this feels daunting. [...]

As outlined in a recent post about Alumni for Impact’s first year, approximately 12% of all HBS alumni are working in the social sector (i.e., nonprofit sector, the public sector, or for-profit business with a social mission). Over the course of the last year, we have crisscrossed the United States and met with hundreds of these alumni, each of them committed to creating a positive impact in their communities and in the world. Their activities range from starting an impact investing fund to help agriculture businesses in India, to creating a platform for more effective and transparent community dialogue, to helping schools develop better tools for teaching elementary schoolchildren math. [...]