So you want to change the world? There’s a school for that.
While working in the apparel industry, 34-year-old Tylea Simone was horrified to find that many of the clothes we wear every day are borderline hazardous for our health. Simone, who grew up in Teaneck, NJ, helped companies “do just enough right to stay beneath regulators’ radars, but not enough to keep consumers out of danger. It got to the point where I couldn’t both do my job and sleep at night,” she says.
Finally, in 2007, she’d had enough. That fall she enrolled in graduate school at New York University for business, and won a highly coveted fellowship in the Reynolds Program in Social Entrepreneurship. The program, founded in 2006, was created to train and support a new generation of leaders in public service by offering course work, networking opportunities, and experiences to help them turn world-changing ideas into reality. Last year, the program accepted only eight students from the more than 1,000 who applied.
If it sounds like a lofty ambition, it is. The program, which doesn’t offer a degree, instead educates the select group of graduate students in social entrepreneurship and finance basics while connecting them with business superstars, career coaches, mentors and more.
“Reynolds students are driven to make a positive, sustainable and measurable change in the world,” says Gabriel Brodbar, executive director of the Reynolds Program.
The program’s alumni have gone on to create ventures such as the Dinner Party, a national movement of 20- and 30-somethings who gather at potluck suppers to talk about life after loss; and Myers Produce, which buys fruits and vegetables from small Vermont farms and sells them to wholesalers in NYC and Boston.
Of course, some ideas carry more weight than just dinner and veggies. For Anurag Gupta, his goal is to completely end racial bias by 2040.
“Our race determines how we are treated in this country’s health care, education and criminal justice systems,” says the 31-year-old Brooklyn resident who graduated from NYU School of Law and the Reynolds Program in 2011.
Gupta was contemplating quitting law school before he found the Reynolds Program. “I wanted to be part of a community that was changing the status quo in the world, and I wasn’t finding that, so I figured, why waste the time and tuition?” he says. But once he was admitted into the program, Gupta found opportunities to meet change-makers such as Supreme Court Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Anthony Kennedy, and former Secretary of State Colin Powell.
His company, Be More America, trains organizations and individuals about unconscious bias, which he defines as “ingrained habits of thought that lead to errors in how people perceive, reason, remember and make decisions in their personal and professional lives.”
“The Reynolds Program didn’t smash my ideas. Instead, we talked about how we could make them happen.”
- Tylea Simone, founder of Thundress
Lauren Servin, on the other hand, has a more international approach.
The 31-year-old was an undergrad at the University of Vermont when she met several classmates who, years earlier, had been among the “Lost Boys of Sudan,” a group of 20,000 orphaned children who trekked 1,000 miles across the African desert to escape the rebels who had killed their parents and raped their sisters.
“I couldn’t believe that while I was eating sugared cereal and watching TV as a kid, these boys, without moms and dads, were literally running for their lives, looking for refugee camps and safety,” she says.
Servin’s company, Di Lorén, works to bring about opportunity and change in East Africa by producing beauty products using oil harvested from a tree native to the area. The company creates jobs for illiterate women who do the harvesting, and a portion of the proceeds supports education for local girls.
“What drew me to Reynolds was that there was a group of people who shared my way of thinking, who weren’t willing to let it be, and who were doing amazing things,” she says.
For Simone, her fellowship at the Reynolds Program educated her on the business skills that she lacked and inspired her to bring positive, sustainable change to the world.
After graduating in 2009, Simone went on to launch Thundress, a female-friendly underwear free of the toxic chemicals that most fashion brands use on their products. She credits NYU for giving her the toolkit she needs for to run her business.
Says Simone: “The Reynolds Program didn’t smash my ideas. Instead, we talked about how we could make them happen.”