![\"10506704_10206802350356977_3176935032062115106_o\"](\"http:\/\/blogs.scu.edu\/pdavid\/files\/2015\/04\/10506704_10206802350356977_3176935032062115106_o.jpg\")
<\/a><\/p>\nI entered Santa Clara with dreams of being a neuroscientist. I wanted to understand the brain in order to help others. But my first year made it very clear to me that I was not cut out for the hard sciences. After three quarters of feeling as though I was putting in twice the effort for half the results, I knew a change had to be made. I had found that I was fascinated by business and economics, but I was hesitant to make it my major. I did not wish to have a career dedicated soley to making money. I felt there must be a way to do business that was about more than profit maximization; I soon found start-ups that believed the same.<\/p>\n
Looking back, I realized I had seen inclusive business done successfully twice before I even arrived at Santa Clara but I didn\u2019t have a language for what they were doing. The first was Kiva.org. Thanks to a Kiva gift card, I was introduced to the micro-finance site. I watched Jessica Jackley\u2019s Ted talk and connected immediately to her struggle. Even though I was in high school, I found myself craving a kind of service that went beyond blind charity. Later the next year I saw this in action.<\/p>\n
The summer of my Sophomore year of high school I went on a service trip to East LA to visit Homeboy Industries. Homeboy was electric with hope and an infectious sense of compassion. They were a business, there was no doubt about that, but they valued people more than profit. I knew Homeboy was on to something but I lacked the language for what that was.<\/p>\n
Jump forward to the summer after my Freshman year. I found myself working at a Start-up Chocolate company in Portland along side a founder who couldn\u2019t be less interested in profit. \u201cIt\u2019s about the experience\u201d she would say as we stood in Whole Foods aisle handing out samples to customers. That summer I was introduced to entrepreneurship and a different kind of business. I was hooked. Despite my initial fear of the business world, I had stumbled on these bands of revolutionaries working very hard to change the way things are done. It\u2019s no wonder that the next summer I did the same. I discovered a granola start-up (the food niche wasn\u2019t intentional) who started their business for an unusual reason. The two childhood friends started a company called San Franola after one of the founder\u2019s father found himself on the brink of some major health issues. Staring down the barrel of the American trinity of diabetes, high blood pressure, and cholesterol, the founder\u2019s father radically reinvented his diet. A part of this was to reverse one of his favorite snacks, granola, into a true tool for better health. The two friends weren\u2019t opposed to making a profit but what they wanted even more was to change the way Americans approach snack food. I had surrounded myself with unreasonable entrepreneurs before I even heard the term social entrepreneurship.<\/p>\n I always had a very different view of economics than some of my more conservative classmates. I refused to accept that capitalism must be a system of winners and losers. This was informed by the week and a half I spent in El Salvador during high school. I had seen the damage that untempered greed had done to that country and for most of the people I met people, not profit was the most important thing in life. Later, when I began reading about Mohammad Yunus, I connected with his vision for a world without poverty, and I truly believe it is possible.<\/p>\n Now with this perfect storm of unreasonable mentors and a compassionate philosophy of economics, it seems odd that my choice to take a course in social entrepreneurship was fairly random. While searching for an elective to round out my schedule, I picked up the class nearly at random. I knew after the first day that this class would shape me. It was as if I had finally found the phrase I had been searching for all those years. Not only that, but there was a whole pantheon of unreasonable men and woman who not only believed what I believed, but has acted on it. Professor Koch\u2019s course introduced me to brilliant visionaries, and also to the GSBI which had existed right under my nose all these years.<\/p>\n For me, this fellowship is the culmination of a several year long vocational journey. This fellowship is the intersection of unreasonableness, entrepreneurship, and social justice.<\/p>\n Jobs require an interview; vocations require a journey. My journey to social entrepreneurship has been one of conflict between my interests in social justice and entrepreneurship. Until very recently I rationalized that these two passions to be mutually exclusive and that pursuing one would mean compromising the other. I felt that there must be a … Continue reading <\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n<\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"