New Lab Empowers Student Entrepreneurs

Full-Time MBA student Laura Odette Garcia has long dreamed of starting her own social venture. Before Booth, she worked at Citibank in Mexico for six years, helping small and midsize businesses with loans.

“I saw 50-year-old businesses struggling to develop their financial statement or understand how their credit line worked,” she says. Some companies had previously fallen victim to predatory loans. Garcia also saw her entrepreneur mother struggle with finances for businesses she ran, including a coffee shop and gym. Garcia wanted to help these business owners succeed.

Hanna placed Garcia in the group working with Heather Ibrahim-Leathers and Global Fund for Widows, a New York–based nonprofit working to economically empower the world’s 350 million widows. Garcia and her teammates helped Ibrahim-Leathers fine-tune the launch of her organization’s new impact investment fund, created to help raise more capital to scale Global Fund for Widows’ microbanks around the world.

“Working with Heather showed me how one person can change the future of entire communities,” Garcia says. “It inspired me to pursue a path that I believed wasn’t possible and gave me the tools to understand how to scale a nonprofit to make it attractive for investors. After this project, I feel empowered to help underserved women in the United States improve their financial access.”

Garcia created the venture Pre$tanda, a digital platform that provides educational resources and microloans in the form of lending circles to Latin American women business owners. The platform is based on a “tanda,” a rotating savings and credit association model trusted among Latin American communities.

“Everyone pays in, and everyone gets a payout as a loan,” Garcia says. “It’s kind of like jump-starting these businesses in the loan world. I’ve had this idea for such a long time, but I didn’t know where to start. The course gave me a lot of structure.”

She hopes to run pilot programs in Chicago with minority-owned businesses over the next six months. Ultimately, Garcia envisions that businesses working with Pre$tanda will use the experience to get larger loans from banks.

Garcia’s classmate, Full-Time MBA student Laurene Amoit, worked with Native Renewables, which installs off-grid solar and battery storage for Indigenous homes that have no access to electricity. Based in Flagstaff, Arizona, the social venture has powered nearly 80 Hopi and Navajo homes with solar to date.

Amoit and her teammates worked with Native Renewables founder Suzanne Singer to rethink and streamline the venture’s operations to deliver off-grid solar energy to Native families in the United States in a more cost-effective way.

Weekly course exercises as well as mentorship from Singer gave Amoit the tools she needed to create her own venture supporting underserved communities. Matricare is a platform that matches Black, American Indian, and Alaska Native women with maternal healthcare professionals of color throughout their pregnancy. The goal is to reduce discrimination and ensure women’s voices are better heard by providers they trust.

Amoit grew up in Kenya, where approximately 7,700 women die each year from pregnancy-related complications, according to the Center for Global Health and Development. The problem is also significant in the US, where the CDC estimates Black women are three times more likely to die from pregnancy-related causes than white women.

“The biggest thing is not being believed when you say ‘I’m experiencing pain,’” says Amoit, who previously cofounded MamaTips, a Kenya-based maternal healthcare company. “Pregnancy is a very intimate thing, with ups and downs, and you want to feel like you’re very comfortable with your team.”

Course guest speaker Nasser Diallo, founder of Clinic+O—which brings primary-care services to low-income communities in Guinea—got Amoit thinking about how Matricare could translate to Africa. “He opened my eyes,” she says. “Entrepreneurship is not necessarily geographically bound.”

Amoit is continuing to work through the logistics of her own endeavor and researching medical privacy requirements. It’s work she’s better prepared for following lessons and guidance from Diallo, Singer, Professor Hanna, and her classmates.

“I highly recommend this course for anyone interested in social entrepreneurship,” Amoit says. “It’s a great chance for you to meet a lot of like-minded people who are interested in contributing to good in the world.”

A modified version of this story appeared in the Fall 2024 print issue of Chicago Booth Magazine as “Training Student Change Makers.”