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Jessica Shortall - Uzbekistan
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Jessica Shortall, Peace Corps volunteer in Uzbekistan (2000-01), is the Founder of Catalyst Strategy Advisors in London, where she advises businesses on how to operate for the social good while making a profit. She previously founded The Campus Kitchens Project in the US.
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Jessica Shortall has social entrepreneurship in her blood and it shows in this podcast interview from London. She defines social entrepreneurship and speculates on why it currently is more recognized and supported in the UK than in the US. She also explains the route that brought her to start a consulting firm to advance social entrepreneurship by advising businesses on how to operate for the social good while making a profit. She is upfront about her desire to guide companies that can "change the world.”Jessica tells us about her early desire to "shave her head and join the Peace Corps," a wish she confided to her parents at the age of 10 years. She says that she never shaved her head, but she did join the Peace Corps and worked in Uzbekistan where she made substantial impact on the village where she worked and on the Ministry of Education.
She was placed in the far eastern region of Uzbekistan where she conducted community development projects and taught English. She became very involved in her small host town, founding an English library, organizing an empowerment-themed summer camp for teenage girls, and developing a primary English curriculum for the country's Minister of Education. Her Uzbek host family have become life-long family members—in addition to laughing at her stumbles through Uzbek culture, they treated her like one of their own, and taught her Uzbek, a bit of Russian, and some Soviet-era drinking songs of questionable taste.
This podcast ranges over Jessica's founding The Campus Kitchens Project in the US, now operating in 10 cities, to her winter working with Mother Theresa in Calcutta, to her time at Oxford as a Skoll School in the Said Business School MBA program, to her thoughts on social entrepreneurship in the US and the UK and lessons she has learned that can benefit social entrepreneurs worldwide.
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