FMS – This Week @ MIIS

Greater Middlebury alumni community comes together in Nairobi

Carolyn Meyer Alumni Accomplishments, DPMI, FMS, Middlebury, MIIS Update, News, Summer Programs June 15, 2015

A June 9^th reception in Nairobi drew over 25 members from the entire Middlebury community including alumni from Middlebury College, the Middlebury Institute of International Studies at Monterey (MIIS), the MIIS Frontier Market Scouts fellowship, and the MIIS Program on Design, Partnering, Management and Innovation (DPMI).

The event was held at the Aga Khan Graduate School of Media and Communications in the 9 West building in the Westlands neighborhood of Nairobi, the site of the June 2-11 DPMI Kenya training. The group welcomed the wonderfully diverse group of DPMI Kenya trainees to the alumni community. DPMI Kenya participants in the June training hail from over seven different countries (Kenya, Nigeria, Niger, Venezuela, the Philippines, South Africa, and the US).

Highlights from the event include how effortlessly the group of alumni from different Middlebury backgrounds connected as well as the short speech made by guest of honor, Dr. Beryl Levinger, a Distinguished Professor and Development Policy and Practice Program Chair at MIIS. During Beryl’s speech, she likened what many alumni are doing in the development and social enterprise space to a quote from Thomas Edison on the process of inventing the light bulb, ‘I have not failed. I’ve just found 10,000 ways that won’t work. Beryl then told the group, “You fail many times trying to find the right approach. The common thread is that you are all here trying to make a difference.”

Group discussions at the event circled around the social enterprise and NGO sector in Nairobi, language learning and translation, as well as the standard griping (albeit not too bad) about Nairobi traffic. The event ended with everyone receiving a Middlebury Institute long-sleeved t-shirt in the signature Middlebury royal blue. “A color that seems to look good on everyone!” mentioned one alumna.

A bright orange sunset easily viewable from a all class wall on the 7^th floor of the 9West building was the breath-taking backdrop for a wonderful event filled with alumni from all backgrounds and nationalities sharing stories/experiences, making new friends, and reconnecting.

Asante Kenya! Here’s to doing it all over again in June 2016!

About the Author: Carolyn Meyer is Director of Immersive Professional Learning and Special Programs Within the MIIS Graduate School of Policy and Management.

Frontier Market Scout’s New Social Venture Connects World Cup Fans with Safe Accommodations in Rio

Anne-Marie Steiger asteiger@miis.edu careers, Featured, FMS, newsroom June 17, 2014

Favela Experience founder Elliot Rosenberg, who developed his social enterprise while participating in the Monterey Institute’s Frontier Market Scouts program.

What happens when a Frontier Market Scout meets the World Cup?

You get a social venture like Favela Experience – founded by Elliot Rosenberg, who holds a certificate in Social Enterprise and Impact Investing from the Monterey Institute’s Frontier Market Scouts (FMS) program – which connects the people of the favelas of Rio with World Cup fans seeking an authentic Brazilian experience and safe, affordable accommodations. Favela is the Portuguese word for slum.

“I am a huge proponent of FMS as it laid the foundation for the connections I needed to make to launch my enterprise,” says Elliot, who worked with Village Capital in Rio as part of his FMS placement in Brazil. Describing his venture, he says: “We’re like Airbnb for Rio’s favelas — and eventually the rest of the world!”

Affordable accommodations are hard to come by in Rio de Janiero these days as fans from around the globe assemble for one of the world’s most popular sporting events. Soaring hotel rates have logically led many inhabitants of Rio to explore the option of renting out part or all of their homes. The people of the favelas are no exception and Elliot’s social venture is helping to broker safe transactions for all. Favela Experience only operates in favelas with permanent police units, and hosts are recruited through trusted personal networks.

Elliot and Favela Experience have been featured in national and international media leading up to the World Cup, including the Christian Science Monitor, NPR, International Business Times, and the Guardian. He says none of this would have been possible without his incredible FMS advisors and the people he met because of his placement in Brazil. He has this message for Dean Yuwei Shi and other leaders of the program: “You are doing life-changing work for the Scouts, entrepreneurs and their beneficiaries, so I thank you for everything!”

MIIS Launches New Center on Social Impact Learning with Funding from Cordes Foundation

Anne-Marie Steiger asteiger@miis.edu Business, development, Featured, FMS, MBA, newsroom, research May 12, 2014

Frontier Market Scouts participant Whitney Hales (MBA/MAIEP ’14, right) with cacao farmers in Belize, where she worked in summer 2013 as part of the Maya Mountain Cacao project.

On May 12, the Monterey Institute announced the establishment of a new Center for Social Impact Learning (CSIL), which will bring three existing programs together under a single umbrella:

The Institute’s Frontier Market Scouts program, which provides graduate students from MIIS and other schools, as well as mid-career international professionals, with an intensive two-week training program followed by a six-month internship designed to prepare them for careers in impact investing and social venture management;
The Ambassador Corps, which will provide undergraduate students at Middlebury College and other schools with ten-week in-field learning experiences in development and business in underdeveloped and emerging economies; and
The Development Consulting Program, which will engage MIIS students as team members on projects initiated by some of the most reputable consulting firms to provide pro-bono consulting services to nonprofit organizations.

The latter two programs were created by the new center’s director, Jerry Hildebrand, who most recently headed the Global Center for Social Entrepreneurship at the University of the Pacific. Hildebrand was previously the CEO for 17 years of Katalysis Bootstrap Fund, a microfinance organization that provides training, technical assistance, and credit to non-governmental microfinance institutions in Central America. His decades of work in grassroots economic development began in Peru, where he served as one of pioneering Peace Corps volunteers in the early 1960s.

“The opportunity to create a groundbreaking Center for Social Impact Learning at MIIS is truly an enviable task,” said Hildebrand. “The MIIS faculty have already laid the foundation of a rigorous academic program, to which we will add a compelling and innovative experiential learning component. Students will be equipped with a practical problem-solving skill set that will be field tested throughout the developing world.”

The new center plans to develop an active research program on management issues in social venture and impact investing, leveraging existing experiential and professional learning programs. Managing the research program and the academic programming for CSIL is Dr. Yuwei Shi, dean of Graduate School of International Policy and Management at MIIS, who also founded the Frontier Market Scouts program. CSIL also expects to collaborate closely with Middlebury College’s Center for Social Entrepreneurship (CSE), which integrates social entrepreneurship and liberal arts education. According to economics professor Jonathan Isham, the CSE’s faculty director, “MIIS and Middlebury College students should celebrate this grand news. Jerry Hildebrand is one of the true leaders in social entrepreneurship education. My CSE colleagues and I look forward to building opportunities with Jerry and Yuwei, on behalf of students on both coasts.”

“This new venture is unique among the many social entrepreneurship programs in existence today,” noted Monterey Institute President Sunder Ramaswamy, “in that it is designed to serve the full spectrum of budding social entrepreneurs, from undergraduates to graduate students to young professionals. CSIL will offer them not only valuable learning experiences but also seamless transitions from one stage of professional development to the next as they prepare for careers in the social impact investing field.”

The Center for Social Impact Learning will be supported by a generous grant from the Cordes Foundation. The Cordes Foundation was created in 2006 by Ron and Marty Cordes following the sale of Ron’s company, AssetMark Investment Services. One of the major focuses of the foundation’s philanthropy continues to be supporting social entrepreneurship education. The foundation also funds the Cordes Innovation Awards given each year by Ashoka U; the Monterey Institute’s Frontier Market Scouts program won a Cordes award in 2013, and Middlebury’s MiddCORE program was a winner in 2014.

“We are excited to be a seed funder of this groundbreaking new initiative, which aligns our mission with the commitment of MIIS and Middlebury to equip the next generation of leaders in social entrepreneurship,” said Ron Cordes.

The center will formally launch at MIIS effective July 1, with related academic programming beginning in fall 2014.

MIIS Team Reaches Finals of Regional Hult Prize Competition, Makes Key Connections

Anne-Marie Steiger asteiger@miis.edu development, DPMI, Featured, FMS, IPS, MPA, newsroom, social_change March 14, 2014

From left: Maria Kovell (MPA ‘14), Amitay Flores (IPS ‘14), Amanda Boyek (IPS ‘14), Natalie Cox (MPA ‘14), Amy Ross (MPA ‘14)

A team of Monterey Institute students—Maria Kovell (MPA ‘14), Amitay Flores (MAIPS ‘14), Amanda Boyek (MAIPS ‘14), Natalie Cox (MPA ‘14), and Amy Ross (MPA ‘14)—made their mark at the Hult Prize regional competition last weekend in San Francisco, and left the competition with something at least as good as a win: a path forward for their innovative project.

The team first beat hundreds of competitors to win a place in the 2014 Hult Prize Regional Finals in San Francisco, then proceeded to wow the judges there, who selected them as one of four teams (out of 47) to advance to the final round of the regional competition. The other three finalists came from the Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT), the Hult International Business School in San Francisco, and the Wharton School of Business at the University of Pennsylvania.

The 2014 Hult Prize Challenge, a collaboration with the Clinton Global Initiative, was to design a sustainable business model addressing non-communicable disease in urban slums. Executives from Intel, IDEO, Google.org, EMC and Matternet were represented on the judging panel that supported the Monterey Institute team and voted them into the final round. The team was encouraged by the reception their idea received and plan to move their venture, Salud2, forward after graduation in May with a pilot in Mexico. They will be meeting with people from some of the organizations they connected with at the competition and are also exploring options with MIIS faculty and staff.

“It was an energizing experience for us. MIIS coursework and programs like the Frontier Market Scouts (FMS) and the Development Project Management Institute (DPMI) opened our minds and pushed our thinking to the level required to tackle today’s most complex problems,” says Amy Ross. The team sincerely thanks the MIIS faculty that supported them along the way and would like to congratulate the MIT team that moved forward from the San Francisco Regional Finals and will present their venture at the Clinton Global Initiative in September.

Class Transforms MIIS Student’s Concept of International Development, Opens Up Career Opportunities

Anne-Marie Steiger asteiger@miis.edu abroad, development, dream-career, FMS, IPS, newsroom February 21, 2014

Xiao’ou Zhu (MAIPS ’14) in Sri Lanka on her Frontier Market Scouts field assignment.

Xiao’ou Zhu (MAIPS ’14) says she has always been interested in international development work, but that she had a very narrow view of what that meant until she came to the Monterey Institute. Her view before could best be described as a “brick and mortar” view of development involving official development assistance (ODA) and infrastructure support. That all changed when she took Professor Nukhet Kardam’s Development Theory and Practice class; “it opened a window into the possibilities of international development,” says Xiao’ou.

“For me the most interesting lessons were connected to sustainability and the importance of community involvement,” says Xiao’ou, who along with two other students from the Development Practice and Policy program, Sarah White (MAIPS ’13) and Abdul Khabir Mirzakhail (MPA ’14), worked on a proposal for a small-scale irrigation project in Ethiopia for a non-governmental organization. “It was a perfect team,” Xiao’ou says happily, explaining that they each brought different expertise and experience to a project they all believed to be applicable to their future careers.

More recently, when Xiao’ou applied for a very competitive internship at the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, she included their paper as a sample of her work. “I was thrilled when they contacted me and said they were very impressed with the paper!” She was offered a management role in a World Bank agriculture project in China but could not accept, as it would have meant a six-month commitment and she wanted to complete her studies at MIIS. Instead, she decided to join the Frontier Market Scouts program and work on a summer project in Sri Lanka.

Xiao’ou’s decision to decline the internship surprised officials in the Chinese Ministry of Agriculture, but they continued to be interested in her work and contracted her to work on a research project for them while in Sri Lanka. “So I ended up with two simultaneous internships!” Xiao says, adding that she is working on the deliverables for the ministry as part of a directed study with Professor Wei Liang.