ONLINE EXCLUSIVE: Interviews with More Global Shapers

KALSOON LAKHANI
Founder & CEO, Invest2Innovate

Bred to Be a Doer
I grew up in a fairly atypical household. My parents, rather than push my siblings and me to become the quintessential “doctor, engineer, or lawyer” (the mantra of most other South Asian families), supported us in whatever endeavor we wished to pursue. We were encouraged to ask questions persistently, to push boundaries constantly. My father, a serial entrepreneur, would often start every story of success with a story of failure – making it clear that one was not achieved without first tasting the other.

I’ve often looked back on those memories and realized that my becoming an entrepreneur was not so much a choice as it was inevitable. I was bred to be a doer, from launching CHUP, or Changing Up Pakistan, a news blog that provides a more balanced perspective of Pakistan in the media in January 2008, to most recently starting my first company Invest2Innovate, or i2i, an intermediary that provides business services to early-stage social enterprises in emerging markets and connects them to capital.

My current start-up i2i was born from opportunity. As a Pakistani, I have seen how instability and volatility have not only ravaged my own country, but how those issues and subsequent media coverage have further damaged the investor climate. I decided to make Pakistan our i2i pilot market not in spite of these factors, but because of them.

I write this piece as I travel through Pakistan’s major cities, meeting entrepreneurs and potential partners along this journey. The hunger and drive to do more, to do something to change the environment around us are palpable. But i2i cannot just provide services to existing enterprises – we have to collaborate with others in order to help foster a better environment for social entrepreneurship – also known as the entrepreneurial ecosystem.

Social entrepreneurship, or market-based approaches to tackling poverty alleviation, can make significant in-roads in creating jobs, generating income, and providing a social/environmental impact. In Pakistan, the current need is to help entrepreneurs gain access to capital, mentors and resources to grow and scale their businesses. There is also a need to develop interactive and innovative curricula for potential entrepreneurs, design social innovation competitions and workshops to build capacity for this environment.

My favorite quote comes from a 1990s commercial for Apple, in which the narrator enthused, “…the people who are crazy enough to think they can change the world, are the ones who do.” I am a young female Pakistani entrepreneur. The facets of that statement are a mouthful. But at the end of the day, I strive to do something that is bigger than myself, to address a challenge in a fairly innovative way. I aim to stay hungry, to always listen, and to always find points of collaboration.

TYLER STUART SPENCER
Founder, Grassroot Project

Raising AIDS Awareness through Athletics
In 2006, as a 19-year old college sophomore, I left the U.S. for the first – a trip to South Africa inspired by an interest in wildlife management. The goal of my trip was to study environmental conservation, but my experience was shaped most profoundly by public health. Day-to-day life there was threatened by infectious disease, limited access to clean drinking water, and other symptoms of material poverty.

AIDS was among the top causes of death nationwide. I was shocked by the toll this preventable disease was taking on some of the communities I visited, where as many as one in four people was living with HIV. Moreover, I was alarmed by the reactions of those who became infected. I remember spending one late night counseling a friend who was deeply depressed because of a recent HIV diagnosis. The stigma around AIDS was so great that this young woman would have rather ended her life than sought support or treatment.

While AIDS was something no one wanted to speak of, it was hard to come by a conversation in which soccer wasn’t referenced. An athlete myself, I became interested in how the popularity of soccer could be used to address the taboo subject of HIV/AIDS. I found an NGO that was training professional soccer players to implement HIV prevention programs in many of the communities I visited. I spent three summers working alongside these soccer players to scale up prevention programs in a rural diamond mining town called Musina. It was an unreal experience to see how the use of athlete role models and an innovative games-based HIV prevention curriculum were transforming young people’s agency to fight back against AIDS.

AIDS is often a disease associated with Africa and the developing world. But in the US, HIV is a problem that is escalating in many of our cities. One in 20 people in Washington, D.C. – my hometown – was infected with HIV, a rate that is nine times the national average and higher than Senegal, Ghana, and Rwanda.

This is why I created The Grassroot Project, an organization run entirely by college athletes in D.C. that aims to use sports as a platform to stop to spread of AIDS. In 2009, I trained a group of friends and teammates to be HIV prevention educators. We ran 8-week HIV prevention education programs as part of health and physical education classes in D.C. schools. To date, our organization has grown from 40 Georgetown athletes working in three schools, to more than 300 athletes from Howard, Georgetown and George Washington University, working in 27 schools. Since 2009, we have educated more than 3,000 people to prevent new infections.

ERICA WILLIAMS
Senior Strategist, Citizen Engagement Lab

Sharing Stories of the Millennial Movement
I’ve devoted my career to using any means at my disposal – media, culture, technology, and politics – to support young people in creating the society of their dreams. From advocating for policies that directly impact young adults on Capitol Hill to building exciting online campaigns to working with celebrities and artists to encourage civic participation, I’ve spent the last few years encouraging and motivating young people 18-30 – my peers – to build and wield their power as a generation to make America more just, open and reflective of our ideals.

But young people right now don’t need much prodding to know that their voice and action is necessary. They are seeing a world that is crumbling around them. As new stats are released every day about the gloominess of their economic prospects, the reality that this is the first generation that is predicted to be economically worse off than their parents is frighteningly real. This is particularly true for the communities that are often underrepresented in national conversations about social change – people of color, low income and non-college youth. When I talk to these young people, living in neighborhoods with failing schools with parents displaced by foreclosure and limited access to higher education, the sense of frustration and disappointment is palpable. These circumstances, marked most notably by record high and persistent unemployment, are touching the cores of young people from all walks of life.

But what I love about this generation is that somehow Millennials still believe in the American dream – or rather, their ability to use their creativity, their skills, their passion and their identities to redefine it and make the evergreen myth a modern reality. Because of that, the key for my work now isn’t just to cheerlead young people into activism and civic engagement. Our sense of possibility and optimism is strong and our willingness to invest in our own communities and future is perhaps higher than ever. My job now is to provide relevant, modern and practical channels for that energy to have an impact. This involves fighting for a political system that is actually responsive to our needs and voices, contributing to a positive and accurate narrative about this generation, and promoting the creative tools and ideas that arise from this connected, diverse, digital native generation.

I share the stories of young undocumented immigrants who walked from Florida to DC for education policy, buoyed by a brilliant and savvy underground online network called the DREAMers. I share the story of a young woman marching into the next frontier of feminism and fighting street harassment with a million women across the globe and an iphone app through Hollaback; I share the stories of young people building a network of local microphilantrhopy circles and supporting innovative and beautiful projects with the Awesome Foundation. I share the young story of hip hop artists using viral videos to spread songs against police brutality and political oppression in Pittsburgh, PA, and Oakland, CA. And there are hundreds, even thousands more stories like those.

It is these stories that make me confident in our generation’s ability to transform the future. We are redefining civic participation to extend beyond voting and volunteerism and it is through these efforts that Millennial optimism and hope (coupled with a little bit of righteous anger and creativity) can shine through and usher our country into a bright and brilliant new day.