When Investing Money Isn’t Enough: How Entrepreneur Saul Garlick Made a True Impact
When Saul Garlick was in elementary school, he took a trip to South Africa, and what he saw in the lives and experiences of the kids that were the same age as he was deplorable. No water. No electricity. No classrooms. Essentially, no hope.
So he put his budding entrepreneurial mind to work. While attending his high school in Denver, he started Student Movement for Real Change, and through his non-profit organization, he was able to generate over $10,000 towards the building of a school in that same South African village.
A few years later, while a graduate student at Johns Hopkins University, he returned to visit that school and saw that it was boarded up and in shambles. It was at that point that Saul realized that simply investing money in the problem wasn’t enough, so he put his entrepreneurial mind BACK to work, bought out his non-profit enterprise in favor of a for-profit enterprise, and Think Impact was born. Saul organized the best entrepreneurial minds and resources he could muster to not only determine the TRUE areas of need in the region, but the most effective ways to address these areas of need.
Since the launch of Think Impact, the program has grown throughout Africa, expanding beyond South Africa to Kenya, Ghana and Rwanda. And the scope has grown beyond simply building a school, to implementing enterprise education programs that enable the children of these areas to, in fact, help themselves through real innovation that addresses the needs of their people, be it the development of a rainwater catch system in Kenya or implementing a way to use cleaner charcoal in Rwanda.
On this episode, Saul joins Raja to discuss his story, and the inspiration behind Think Impact. You will NOT want to miss this discussion.
-Also, Raja talks with one of the foremost authorities on employment trends in metrics in the United States, John Challenger of Chicago-based Challenger, Gray and Christmas. John discusses the state of unemployment in the U.S., assesses where the jobs are (and where they will be), and previews the future outlook for employment in the U.S., as it pertains to the current economic recovery.
