Expanding Good

Nonprofit enterprise has a new hub with the Turner Family Center for Social Ventures

From the Fall 2015 edition of Vanderbilt Business

Whether engineering a nutcracker to allow Senegalese women to press and sell a highly desirable nut oil or gathering market data on the need for an inexpensive gastric cancer test in the middle of Honduras, Vanderbilt students involved in Project Pyramid have proven the viability and value of social enterprise.

Now they’re moving it to a new level.

Students, faculty, dean and Cal Turner Jr. — Some of the faculty and then-students who worked on establishing the new Turner Family Center for Social Ventures met with Cal Turner Jr. to announce its launch. From left: Bart Victor, the Cal Turner Professor of Moral Leadership; Jake Hill, MBA’15; Kathleen McKissack, MEd’15; Anna Elizabeth Watt, BA’15; Cal Turner; Sarah Berhalter, MBA’15; Ellen Page, MBA’15; and Dean Eric Johnson.

The result is the Turner Family Center for Social Ventures, a new hub for coordinating social enterprise activities at Vanderbilt. The center, established with a $1.2 million gift over five years from the Cal Turner Family Foundation, seeks to go beyond the success of Project Pyramid and serve as a resource and thought leader for people from all Vanderbilt schools interested in combining revenue-generating businesses with social impact objectives.

Wish list

In spring 2014, Dean Eric Johnson asked Project Pyramid alumni to envision how the social venture curriculum, activities and resources at Owen might be expanded to maximize their impact on Vanderbilt students university wide and in the world.In response, the alumni proposed:

Initiating local and regional projects that address poverty closer to home
Expanding classroom offerings focused on businesses that create a positive social impact
Increasing student opportunities to work with global organizations dedicated to finding market-based solutions for alleviating poverty
Allowing more students to travel domestically and internationally each year to work on social ventures

They also suggested establishing an annual conference that would convene students, thought leaders and executives to share best practices and research on social enterprise, as well as adding to existing career service resources to provide additional internship and job opportunities for students across schools.

Students in meeting — Students brainstorm programming ideas for the 2015-16 year. Grace Fletcher, who is pursuing master degrees in the graduate school and the School of Medicine, and Matt Inbusch, a second-year MBA student.

With Johnson’s blessing, the alumni shared these ideas with philanthropist and business leader Cal Turner Jr., former CEO of the Dollar General Corporation and chairman of the Cal Turner Family Foundation. Turner is committed to community development and theological education and actively supports programs at Vanderbilt including the Cal Turner Program for Moral Leadership in the Professions. He’s also been an enthusiastic supporter of Project Pyramid since its start in 2006.

“Vanderbilt University is training future world leaders in business, religion, education, medicine and law,” Turner says. “Programs like Project Pyramid, and now the Turner Family Center for Social Ventures, allow them to take the knowledge and skills they’re developing in the classroom and apply them in the real world to effect positive change–especially in alleviating poverty. I am inspired by their passion for this work and gratified that this gift will help put those passions to work in sustainable ways.”

Peabody College graduate student Hattie Duplechain during a planning meeting.

Ethical awareness

This expansion of resources around social enterprise at Vanderbilt is a direct response to student demand, according to Mario Avila, MBA’12, a Project Pyramid alumnus who’s been hired as the Turner Center’s inaugural director (see sidebar).

“If you think about education as a business, then the students are the customers, and our customers are saying that this is important to them,” he says. “This push is coming from a desire among students to become good businesspeople and an awareness of how ethics should and will play into the decisions they make.”

That ethical awareness mirrors a shift taking place in the business world, says Avila, a former Owen Student Government president and founder of Contigo, a business designed to partner with companies to provide socially responsible consumer lending products.

“There’s a significant shift in the way we’re doing business, with consumers demanding transparency. They’re demanding that we focus on being good places to work, treating our employees the right way, and thinking about the good things that our profits can do,” Avila says. “The new center shows not only Mr. Turner’s excitement and investment in this area, but also that Vanderbilt is truly committed to educating students around these types of issues.”

Top photos from left: Helping construct ponds for a nonprofit’s tilapia breeding operation in Latin America; doing Mani+ field research about producing a locally sourced, peanut-based product to combat childhood malnutrition in Guatemala; and visiting Senegal to investigate more effective ways to press oil from balanite nuts.

Driving Social Change

Mario Avila, MBA'12

Mario Avila received his MBA from Vanderbilt three years ago, but when he returned to the school in late July as director of the new Turner Family Center for Social Ventures, it seemed—at least for a moment—that no time had passed.

Mario Avila, MBA’12

Avila says stepping back in the school brought a flood of memories of the long days and late nights he clocked while earning his degree. Perhaps it’s a good thing he can still put himself in the students’ shoes. In turn, budding social entrepreneurs would be well-served to follow his example.

After getting his bachelor’s degree at Dartmouth College in 2004, Avila went to work in talent management at Campbell & Company, a national consulting firm headquartered in Chicago that focuses on nonprofit clients. His deep interest in microfinance and the role it can play in alleviating poverty led him to seek out business school.

“I came to Vanderbilt with the notion of starting a business focused on helping people gain access to the right types of financial products to start to build their credit history,” Avila says. He developed his idea with guidance from Bart Victor, the Cal Turner Professor of Moral Leadership and founding director of Project Pyramid; Jim Schorr, adjunct professor of management and CEO of the national Social Enterprise Alliance; and Germain Böer, professor of accounting, emeritus, and director of the Owen Entrepreneurship Center.

“These faculty members helped me understand how to make sure you’re measuring your business growth as well as your social impact—how you start to do those metrics,” Avila says.

In addition to serving as president of the Owen Student Government Association and as a member of the Latin Business Association’s executive board, Avila was a project management intern for Project Pyramid, the trans-institutional Vanderbilt student-run program dedicated to ending global poverty. Working in Guatemala, he helped design and implement housing solutions for more than 150 families. He received the school’s 2011 Clarcor Leadership Award, which recognizes students for having a positive impact on the Owen community, and was named a fellow of the Cal Turner Program for Moral Leadership in the Professions for 2011-12—all the while working on his own social venture.

Avila enlisted a dozen Vanderbilt classmates to work on various projects for his business. He also received a coveted Sohr Grant, a $25,000 award for Vanderbilt MBA student startups underwritten by AIM Healthcare co-founder Jim Sohr, BE’86, MBA’90, and his wife, Leah. Avila used it all to form Contigo Financial, a socially responsible consumer lender headquartered in Nashville. In under a year, Contigo was acquired by Emerge Financial Wellness, and Avila became CEO of Emerge, in charge of leading the organization’s strategic vision, mission and social impact.

When he was tapped to serve as the inaugural director of the Turner Family Center for Social Ventures, Avila knew he could rely on his Owen experience for his new role.

“I’m not far removed from my time at Vanderbilt or from how I interacted with my classmates across the different schools—some of whom I ended up hiring,” he says. “I hope to help the current batch of students as they continue to build the Turner Family Center and help other departments within the university gain a better understanding of what social enterprise is and how business truly can drive social change.”

In addition to matching students with opportunities, the new center will provide a valuable consistency to social enterprise work at Vanderbilt, Avila says.
“Project Pyramid put us on the map—it got students excited about the work,” he says. “The Turner Family Center for Social Ventures will be the consistent thread that ties together the knowledge and experience acquired by students from year to year.”

Avila hopes the center accomplishes something else as well.

“Social ventures can be difficult work because you’re addressing some of the toughest issues,” he says. “So I’ve told the students, ‘Let’s have fun. Not only are we building sustainable organizations that are doing really good things and making an impact, but let’s have fun while doing it.’

“Making money while doing good is fun—a lot of fun,” he says.