I grew up in a small town in
the Midwest.
My older brother had a number of
neurological difficulties.
And to watch how he was treated,
I just from a very young age,
understood that there were people
in this world who are born into
circumstances that make
life much more difficult for them,
I also continued to be sort of
shocked that there were things that
I was told I couldn't or
shouldn't do because I was a girl.
And I think that sort of set the
tone for me to really understand
deeply from an early age that there
are people who are disadvantaged
through no fault of their own.
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I started in 1978, and
I think at that time maybe 20,
22% of the class were women.
It was still unusual for
me coming from such a baseline of
understanding about business,
about power, about how the world
works, I had never understood that.
And the subtext of the business
school was, I began to understand.
It was in the air and
that was enormously valuable for
me for whatever I might want to do
in my life.
Project Redwood is an organization
open to Andy GSB alums,
who are interested in working
together with other GSB alums on
the issue of global poverty.
And it came into being because
we're all at our 25th reunion,
which is kind of a big thing and
it was awesome.
And there are probably 150 people
in the room, and you're just
sitting there based in the sense
of there is great work that can
be done, that these individuals
have stepped forward and done.
I kept looking around and see if
somebody's going to stand up and
say, we gotta do something here
together as a class.
Nobody did.
So I finally did, I'm still
the girl in the front row.
And I said, we're 25 years out from
our career, we have extraordinary
access to financial resources,
to power, to contacts.
What if, what if, we as a class,
decided that we would band together
and create some kind of an entity
that would work to make the world
a better place?
And that was the spark that created
Project Redwood.
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We look for
the best projects where dollars
are leveraged to help whomever
lift themselves out of poverty.
What I've been involved
with is called Hero Women Rising.
It's in the Democratic Republic of
Congo.
And it was
founded by an extraordinary woman,
many years ago, who created
a school where women, regardless of
what education level they
have coming in, can learn a trade.
These are women who then
can go out and
begin to earn money on their own.
We support farming communities.
We provide support to about 60
organizations around the world so
far today.
Because we are MBAs,
we do analyze this.
And it's pretty clear that we've
helped almost a million people
across the globe lift themselves
out of poverty at this point.
The student body at the GSB is now
highly attuned to entrepreneurship
in the social space, and
doing work to help make
the world a better place.
I mean, it's really just part of
the air they breathe now.
A number of those current students
have joined us, and boy,
do we need and want them?
And besides,
they're going to be the leaders of
Project Redwood in 30 years, and
we needed them to start now.
I think most of the entrepreneurs
that we fund and
the organizations that they create,
I think those will endure.
But I also think there's always a
new generation coming up behind it.
It seems to be a kind of
basic human instinct.
Aside from all the ones
that we know about that aren't so
admirable, there's also one about
that human impulse that so many
people have to make things better,
not so much for themselves,
but for the people
that they see around them.
That's going to endure.
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I'm Carol Head,
co-chair of Project Redwood.
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