African Studies Student Alissa Orlando Featured as Rising Star in "More Than 85"
African Studies student Alissa Orlando believes that earning a profit and doing good are not mutually exclusive.
Read Alissa's story in this week’s online edition of More Than 85, Smart Women Powering Positive Change Worldwide, a bi-weekly broadcast that features women who are powering positive change worldwide.
If you were invited to speak at Davos, what societal, economic, political, or environmental issues would you address?
I would love to speak about how organizations working towards positive change can leverage student talent. In my opinion, too many organizations do not take full advantage of student potential. University divisions of organizations such as UNICEF are focused primarily on advocacy and fundraising. However, advocacy and education initiatives rarely go beyond the surface level in discussions of unintended consequences, and the money raised by campus fundraisers is a negligible part of the organization’s budget.
I have seen amazing social change ventures developed and led by students. More…
Alissa is a senior at Georgetown University’s School of Foreign Service, studying African Studies and International Business Diplomacy. She is spending the summer working as a Summer Business Analyst at McKinsey & Company. She also enjoys working internationally and spent last semester studying post-conflict restoration and peace building in Kigali, Rwanda and Gulu, Uganda. While in Rwanda, she worked with the Private Sector Federation Tourism Chamber and Rwanda Development Board to conduct a skills assessment and provide recommendations on how to develop, recruit, and retain skilled talent for Rwanda’s tourism sector. Last summer, she received the London School of Economics Student Initiative Fellowship and the Human Conditions Grant to work with Dr. Victoria Kisyombe, the 2010 World Economic Forum’s Social Entrepreneur of the Year for Africa and the Founder and MD of SELFINA, a microleasing institution for low-income young women and widows in Tanzania.
