In the meantime, here are excerpts from some recent alumni submissions:
CARBON CREDITS + CLEAN WATER
At Ecofiltro, we’re a social product, but it has incredible environmental impact—because families no longer have to boil water to purify it. And so we reduce by 21 pounds a day the use of firewood usage in rural families in Guatemala. The Ecofiltro then produces a lot of what’s called carbon offsets because we have 170,000 rural families that are preserving 1,800 trees a day, which don’t get cut down.
Our program has excited companies like Microsoft, which wants to become the first carbon-neutral company. They started buying our carbon offsets a couple years ago. And it was really made special that the Chief Environmental Strategist of that company, Rob Bernard WG97, is also a Wharton MBA. I just am always amazed at all the Wharton MBAs that are out there, and they’re doing such incredibly creative, innovative work. I’m always surprised in a very good way, of how these Wharton folks are doing really special things. How they’re allowing a little social venture like mine in Guatemala to scale and to reach more poor families. It just makes it so much more special that there’s a Wharton guy behind it.
—Philip Wilson WG94, CEO of Ecofiltro
THE WHARTON EFFECT FOR ENTREPRENEURS
Wharton’s had so many different impacts on both my professional career as well as my entrepreneurship career, as I would call it. We’ve been given access to this wonderful network. In fact, a significant portion of the money we’ve raised for our business has come through this network. We’ve been given access to investors, which we probably wouldn’t have been given without this network.
In fact, we have access to professors that we took classes with, and we still have some of them as advisers and mentors. So it’s certainly a network that lives with you and breathes with you as you navigate your career and life after Wharton.
—Lalit Kalani WG11, co-founder of Bandar Foods
