Making a Global Social Impact
True Pani participated in the 2016 InVenture Prize and will compete in the 2017 Global Social Venture Competition regional finals at Georgia Tech.
On Friday, March 3, the Institute for Leadership and Entrepreneurship (ILE) in the Scheller College of Business will host the U.S. Eastern Regional Finals of the Global Social Venture Competition (GSVC).
Teams from Georgia Tech and other prestigious universities from the eastern region of the U.S. will compete for two spots in the competition’s global finals, to be hosted at the University of California, Berkeley later this year, with 16 other teams from eight other regions around the world.
Four of the 20 teams that were selected for the Eastern U.S. Regional Finals are based in Atlanta, and three include students from Georgia Tech. Charityvest (a more efficient and transparent system for charitable giving), Hema Therapy Predix System (an affordable anemia diagnostic and monitoring service), and TruePani (an in-home water purification system for rural India) have members affiliated with Georgia Tech, and honorCode’s (web-development curriculum for K-12 schools) co-founder is a Georgia State University graduate.
Other participating universities include Yale University, the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Columbia University, the University of Pennsylvania, and Brown University.
The competition’s mission is to transform ideas into businesses with real-world social impact. It was started by students at UC-Berkeley more than 15 years ago and provides young social entrepreneurs with mentoring, access to a network of experts and impact investors, and $80,000 in startup funds. Georgia Tech is Berkeley’s main partner in the Americas and hopes to bring the Global Finals to Atlanta next year.
“GSVC was a natural fit for us,” said Dori Pap, faculty advisor for GSVC at Tech and assistant director for ILE. “We have a great pipeline of teams through our Ideas to Serve Competition, and Georgia Tech has the reputation of being at the leading edge of technology and innovation that improves the human condition, so it’s easy for us to recruit teams from top schools in our region.”
In past years, GSVC participants have addressed social and environmental issues including sanitation (Sanergy, MIT), access to water (TOHL, Georgia Tech), solar power (d.light, Stanford), the fight against malaria (FASO Soap, Burkina Faso), and affordable nutrition (Revolution Foods, UC Berkeley).
The GSVC organizing team at Georgia Tech is led by MBA students at the Scheller College of Business and is supported by ILE and the Ray C. Anderson Center for Sustainable Business, with funding from Gray Ghost Ventures.