Alumnae Affairs

Featured Event

2010 Adventures Speaker

7:00pm, October 20, 2010
Peace College Campus

Jaqueline Novogratz

The 2010 Adventures Speaker is Jaqueline Novogratz, author of The Blue Sweater. She is the is the founder and CEO of Acumen Fund, a nonprofit venture capital firm that invests in entrepreneurs bringing affordable and sustainable healthcare, water, energy and housing to low-income communities in the developing world. She will be on the Peace College campus in October to discuss her auto-biography and the experience she has had understanding and fighting global poverty. Hear her story.

About The Author

Jacqueline has led the Acumen Fund team since its launch in 2001. Under her leadership Acumen Fund has invested $40 million in 44 enterprises serving over 30 million low-income customers in South Asia and East Africa (as of February 2010).

Prior to Acumen Fund, Jacqueline Novogratz founded and directed The Philanthropy Workshop and The Next Generation Leadership program at the Rockefeller Foundation. She began her career in international banking with Chase Manhattan Bank and founded Duterimbere, a micro-finance institution in Rwanda.

Jacqueline currently serves on the Board of the Aspen Institute as well as the advisory councils of Stanford Graduate School of Business and MIT’s Legatum Center. She is an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow, a Synergos Institute Senior Fellow and has received honors including Ernst & Young’s 2008 Entrepreneur of the Year Award, the 2009 CASE Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award and AWNY’s 2009 Changing the Game Award.

Jacqueline is a frequent speaker at international conferences, including the World Economic Forum, the Clinton Global Initiative and TED.

Jacqueline has an MBA from Stanford and a BA in Economics/International Relations from the University of Virginia.
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About The Book

The Blue Sweater is the inspiring personal memoir of a woman who has spent her life on a quest to understand global poverty and to find powerful new ways of tackling it. From her first stumbling efforts as a young idealist venturing forth in Africa to the creation of the trailblazing organization she runs today, Jacqueline Novogratz brings us a series of insightful stories and unforgettable characters — from women dancing in a Nairobi slum, to unwed mothers starting a bakery, to courageous survivors of the Rwandan genocide, to entrepreneurs building services for the poor against impossible odds.

She shows, in ways both hilarious and heartbreaking, how traditional charity often fails, but how a new form of philanthropic investing called “patient capital” can help make people self-sufficient and change millions of lives. More than just an auto-biography or a how-to guide to tackling poverty, this book challenges us to grant dignity to the poor and to rethink our engagement with the world.