As Kenyan mother once said, “My dreams don’t look exactly like I thought they would when I was a little girl” (nd). Jacqueline Novogratz, a modern philanthropist, understands this better than most. A typical American girl, she found herself in Africa, helping women with no voice in their world. She never planned for this growing up, but her leadership, determination, and new way of looking at the world was in her from the beginning.
The only part of her childhood foreshadowing her future accomplishments was a blue sweater that she loved as a child. Ironically, it had two zebras and Mount Kilimanjaro on the front, although she didn’t even know about the mountain at the time. Being ridiculed out of wearing the beloved sweater, she gave it to Goodwill, only to find it a decade later on a little Kenyan boy. As Novogratz remarks:
It may have first to a little girl in the United States, then back to Goodwill once more before traveling across the ocean, most likely to Mombasa, on the coast of Kenya…It would have arrived after being fumigated and packed into 100-pound bales along with other pieces of cast-off clothing…The bales would be sold to secondhand clothing distributors, who would allow retailers to discard the useless pieces and buy what they thought they could sell. (2009, p. 3).
It was a wonder that the sweater came to Africa, and in a way, it was a wonder that Jacqueline came, too.
After college, Novogratz got a job at Chase Manhattan Bank that was her dream-come-true. The job had her travel all over the world, learning how each economy worked and see how the bank’s loans impacted people. This is where she found her heart for the poor. More specifically, she found it in Rio, Brazil. There “…to write off mill...
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...Most of the women working there had been killed, and some of her closest friends had been put in jail.
Works Cited
Acumen Fund. (2013). Jacqueline Novogratz. Retrieved from http://acumen.org/people/board/jacqueline-novogratz/
Bryant, Adam. (2012). When Humanity and Audacity Go Hand in Hand. The New York Times. Retrieved from http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/30/business/jacqueline-novogratz-of acumen-fund-on-pairs-of-values.html?_r=0
Novogratz, Jacqueline. (2009). The Blue Sweater. New York City: Rondale Incorpation
Novogratz, Jacqueline. (2010). Jacqueline Novogratz: Philanthropist. Retrieved from http://www.ted.com/speakers/jacqueline_novogratz.html
Petrilla, Molly. (2013). Q&A: Jacqueline Novogratz, founder and CEO, Acumen Fund. Smart Planet. Retrieved from http://www.smartplanet.com/blog/pure-genius/q-a-jacqueline- novogratz-founder-and-ceo-acumen-fund/9393
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