In January 2025, I walked into the class not knowing what to expect. At this point in my career, I hoped for many things. I was an EPA scientist and policy regulator who jumped into entrepreneurship about 6 years ago. I had taken a huge risk and, at this point, realized that I needed more.
In just a short 2 weeks and 3 days, we visited 30+ socially responsible companies & non-profit organizations as part of the Global Executive Seminar, “Using Business for Good to Shape a Better World” at the Kroc School at the University of San Diego. Amazingly, the short period felt like 5 years of learning and 10 years of building relationships with key social impact professionals in San Diego. The experience was pivotal for many of us in our quest to build radical social, environmental, and responsible impact.
The visionary professors, Paula Cordeiro, Karen Henken, and Juan F. Roache, designed and developed this unique global seminar to inspire executives to rethink and consider innovative ways to create pivotal community impact. This required the commitment of our cohort to intentionally carve out time to learn, listen differently, and create mental capacity to change long-standing perspectives that don’t serve us anymore.
We started with a three-day-long class where we learned about social good organization models. With 14 of us in the cohort, we were a small group, but reflected a diversity of experts in the field, from large non-profit organizations to companies to solopreneurs. We came together because of a vision by Paula Cordeiro and our shared mission to make people and planet impact in an innovative way.
We started our safari learning in San Diego with a 3-day seminar in January 2025, taught by our passionate professors, to understand the background and landscape of social innovation and business for good. To reflect model examples, we visited two established manufacturing facilities in San Diego, Taylor Guitar and Dr. Bronners. Taylor Guitar, founded in 1974, is a premium guitar company selling high-end acoustic and electric instruments. The company strongly values people, artists, and the craft of guitar making, and this is evident with their commitment to their Employee Stock Ownership Program (ESOP). Dr. Bronner’s is a 100+ year old soap company known for organic, fair-trade soaps, and their sustainable and socially conscious practices, such as the commitment to a 5:1 salary cap ratio, where the executives’ salaries are no greater than 5X the entry level employees. Both of these purpose-driven and for-profit companies are model examples of business for good here in our hometown, San Diego.
Our journey continued to Barcelona and Rwanda, where we engaged in the most effective and transformational experiential learning journey that any of us in the cohort had ever experienced.
Like giddy students, we arrived in Barcelona, Spain, bright-eyed, ready to learn. Some of us shared an Airbnb in one of Barcelona’s most popular areas, Las Ramblas, where we relived the best parts of undergraduate dorm life, feeling cared for by a small group. Every morning, one of us would bring back fresh croissants, Spanish espressos, and even make quick omelets. Every evening, we would sit around the small kitchen table, share our observations, and hash out the differences between Barcelona and San Diego’s approach to building social impact and making a profit in a responsible way.
Traveling to Barcelona with my cohort gave me a unique opportunity to learn from my dedicated and highly accomplished executive peers, each having already made an impressive impact in their field. We all shared one thing in common, and that is to make big, hairy, audacious, game-changing social impact in San Diego and beyond.
In 5 days, we visited 15 socially responsible companies & organizations in Barcelona. You might wonder why Barcelona? And why we visited companies abroad, rather than those here in the United States. But...every minute was invaluable learning and growth, and I got to develop an “Outsider's Perspective” to better understand my “Home Perspective”.
It's funny because when we are familiar with our environment & community, we miss things that are obvious. We lose clarity, miss patterns, or have a harder time getting out of our "box" because we are too close to the issues. Sometimes, we become accustomed to the accepted values and perspectives that surround us, and we can't narrow in on the signal among the noise. Visiting social good organizations in Barcelona allowed us to hone our ability to ask ourselves the challenging questions, such as “why do we have seemingly bigger gaps in social good innovation at home?”. As we visited each of the 15+ organizations, our minds were stretched to think about how this situation is the same and different from what we see or experience at home. Just about every evening, our learning experience continues with debriefs, or conversations about how this would or wouldn't work at home. Of course, all of this was strategically designed by the amazing Paula A. Cordeiro, Juan F Roche, and Karen Henken.
Our learning visits took us to learn about Catalonia's Cluster Policy from Joan Martí Estévez, B Lab Spain from Elena Damiá Díaz-Plaja, business sustainability education at EADA Business School from Desirée Knoppen, and ESG practices in a corporate skincare and sunblock company at ISDIN.
We visited Skills4Impact, founded by Pablo Sanchez, to learn about an educational platform that offers faster access to learning about sustainability. One of the most exciting and impressive companies we visited was Ferrer, a medium-sized multinational pharma company manufacturing drugs. Ferrer made a drastic institutional change by changing from a profit-only company to a social impact company; they plaster their mission proudly on the office walls, “We Use Business To Fight For Social Justice”.
My company, Hey Social Good, is a social impact data company helping brands and manufacturing companies to affordably determine sustainable impact. Which is why the visit to Formació i Treball, a clothing collection and recycling facility, was particularly meaningful. As we wore our safety vests and put on big doll-like safety shoes, we walked through the large organization of multiple stations working to reduce textile waste. Seeing how a big organization can achieve its mission to offer work opportunities and convert textiles-to-waste-to-textiles to build apparel circularity offered optimism and trust in the future.
We visited many more sites, and one last one that truly stood out for me was visiting Mondragon’s MCC’s Otalora Training Center. From the minute we stepped off the bus, we breathed something different from this mountain shangri-la. The Mondragon Company is a large cooperative with 93 subsidiaries, and each one is an independent cooperative designed to create good work and clear social benefits for the worker-owners. Sitting on the plane back to San Diego, I felt empowered by the amazing businesses that use business as a means to make a beneficial impact on people and the planet.
One of the most impressionable experiences I’ve ever had in my life is this soul-restorative journey in Rwanda. Rwanda is a landlocked country located smack in the middle of the African continent, and until recently, had only been famous for its gorillas and the devastating 1994 genocide that completely debilitated the country and its citizens. I knew about the country-wide ban on single-use plastic bags in Rwanda, but even that did not prepare me for a visit to one of the most progressive and forward-thinking countries in the world. Rwanda is coined the “Singapore of Africa”, due to its financial independence, business potential, and large, professionally trained workforce.
Dr. Cindy Lin at Zipline Drone & Delivery Logistics
Since the 1994 Genocide, Rwandan leadership and its people worked persistently to lift themselves out of the dark and set out a plan to build a country full of hope, growth, and warmth. In a very short period, Rwanda went from generating an average annual household income of $200/yr (20025) to $1200/yr (2025). This 8% GDP growth rate is just an example of what we witnessed in our short time visiting and speaking with local entrepreneurs, social enterprises, and government entities in Rwanda. In one week, we visited with 20 organizations and leaders who shared their hopes, dreams, and progress towards building social innovation, financial independence, and new business opportunities for just about any individual.
We started our journey first to the Kigali Genocide Memorial to understand the people, history and culture. This set the stage for understanding more viscerally just how much a group of people can accomplish when committed together to a shared vision. We sat in awe during lunch and discussion with Dr. Odette Nyiramilimo, who rose to fame for her part in helping Tutsis escape during the Genocide. We were all riveted by her personal stories during the Genocide and then her subsequent role as a former Senator to the Rwanda Parliament, to help a broken country pick itself back up and build with joy.
Traveling on a bus along a hillside dirt road to Abahizi showed us the beauty of creating social enterprises. Abahizi is a B-Corp certified Cooperative of 300+ women who share ownership of a manufacturing facility making bags and purses for luxury brands like Kate Spade and Coach. In the same day, we visited a mining company. As an environmentalist who used to work for the US Environmental Protection Agency, I certainly did not have a positive outlook on mines. But a tour and presentation of Trinity Metals shifted my perspective because we met a sustainability manager who thought long and hard about how best to ensure the economic viability of his country, and protect his country’s environment from over-harvesting and mining pollution.
Dr. Cindy J Lin and Prof Karen Henken at AziziLife
The visit to Zipline rocked my world! Zipline is a drone company delivering much-needed blood and medical supplies in minutes to all the hospitals in Rwanda. Rwanda is known as a country of 1,000 hills, and that means just about every road is hilly, and transportation of blood and medical supplies to its most desperate patients can take hours and days. With Zipline, they’ve accounted for the country’s geographical terrain and deliver medical supplies in minutes. This was innovation operating at its highest purpose.
We are a cohort of 12 executives, and every single one of us is working in an organization where we are trying to create and expand social impact in our community. As we see the challenges in our own country with funding, environment, and social justice issues, we felt deep, beautiful, heartwarming hope when we visited Handspun Hope. A social enterprise focused on empowering at-risk Rwandan women to become agents of change in their own communities with training and jobs, these artisans create beautiful handcrafted textiles, apparel, and wool-shaped animal goods. After our tour of how yarn is washed, dyed with plants, spun, rolled, and used to make sweaters and little adorable gorillas, we each couldn’t wait to buy a few items as souvenirs and gifts. But something happened next that surprised every single one of us.
While my little bag of goodies was getting rung up, I heard some clapping and stomping outside, and I quickly grabbed my bag and rushed outside the store, located in the front of the handicraft and training production compound. There, I saw over 100 artisan women singing, clapping, and dancing as our professors and colleagues each took out the purchased items and showed them proudly to the women who made the handicrafts. When it was my turn to do it, I felt a powerful rush of emotion, and tears rolled down my face. I looked across at Professors Paula Cordeiro and Karen Henken, who started to dance with the women. I turned and looked next to me, and I saw the same feeling in my colleagues. We all felt the genuine joy that flowed to us in their songs. We couldn’t speak or understand Kinyarwanda, but we heard the women’s songs of elation at seeing us celebrating their beautifully made crafts with respect. This experience has bonded all of us together that transcends time.
Truthfully, I can say that this Global Executive Seminar has transformed me in ways I never imagined. Before this seminar, I questioned why things didn’t work and why, even with good people and good hearts, it seems like we aren’t making progress. Now, I understand deeply that not only does social impact and innovation require work, effort, and grit, but it also must have community and trust to glue everything together.
Learn more about the Global Executive Seminar here.