It’s not easy to catch up with Jacqueline Novogratz, even when she is headed our way. I dial in to a conference call and I’m immersed in something like the soundtrack to Blade Runner. “I’m sorry,” she apologizes. “I’m at the airport in Dubai, and it’s pretty chaotic.”
Novogratz is the founder of The Acumen Fund, a non-profit global venture fund incorporated in 2001 with the goal of using “patient capital” to change the lives of millions living in poverty around the world. Described as a “third way” bridging classic entrepreneurial investment and pure philanthropy, patient capital is used to fund projects geared toward the social good that involve risk and no promise of short-term reward.
It’s been a stunning success—one company providing water systems in rural India leveraged a $600,000 Acumen Fund investment in 2004 to a $30 million concern today—and a testimony to the lessons that Novogratz learned in her youth, which she writes so eloquently about in her book The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World.
Novogratz started her career out of college as a banker with Chase, where she was groomed for Wall Street-style success. But her work and her heart led her away from New York. “I was mostly working in Latin America during the debt crisis, and particularly in Brazil, saw that there was really no place for low-income or even lower-middle income people at the banks, and it seemed that the banks would do really well lending to people who were starting businesses, but just didn’t have a ton of resources. It definitely was a decision that was made fairly quickly, I would say, in terms of seeing the opportunity and the disparity coexisting, to at least try and see if there might be a way of extending banking services to low-income people.”
On an early trip to Africa, Novogratz saw a young boy wearing a blue sweater that was far too large for him—one that looked familiar. Approaching him, she communicated her wish to see the inside of the collar, where she found her own name written on the tag. More than 10 years ago, back in the United States, she’d donated the sweater to charity. The message was clear. “I think it’s the journey of life… a life that is committed to something bigger than one’s self, which I think is the journey to meaning and happiness.”
Novogratz went on to create a bank in Rwanda. The Blue Sweater was originally meant to be about the genocide, but her work creating Acumen pulled her in a different direction. “It was too out of sync with where I was. The real story was this trajectory of learning about poverty and learning about better ways of solving poverty.”
JACQUELINE NOVOGRATZ
What’s Next Lecture Series
Thursday, Oct. 19, 7:30pm, UCSC Music Recital Hall
Tickets $8 adv/$15 door (students $2/$5) at www.whatsnextlectures.com
