Harvard Business School (HBS) has announced the 2024 recipients of the Horace W. Goldsmith Fellowships. Established in 1988 by the Horace W. Goldsmith Foundation and Richard L. Menschel (MBA 1959), a former director of the foundation and a limited partner at Goldman Sachs, to encourage students from the nonprofit and public sector to attend HBS, these fellowships enable the School to award $10,000 to a select number of incoming MBA students for each of their two years in the MBA Program.
Beginning with the Class of 1990, 267 incoming students have received the fellowship. Recipients of the award have served in leadership roles in nonprofit and public sector organizations and demonstrate a strong commitment to continued career paths in these areas. New recipients are invited to participate in events with current and former recipients as well as local social enterprise leaders in an effort to create a network of individuals committed to working in social enterprise.
The 2024 Goldsmith Fellows are:
Princess Aghayere. Princess is co-founder and director of finance for Rebound Liberia, a nonprofit organization dedicated to empowering young Liberian women through basketball, digital training, and college and career prep programs. Over the past two years, she also worked as an investment associate at ICA Fund, a nonprofit venture capital fund that uses investments to address the gender and racial wealth gap. She said, “Through the fellowship, I will immerse myself in a community that is deeply aligned with my core values, particularly those emphasizing leadership and innovation in social enterprise.”
Matthias Argenyi. Matthias began his career at Garde Capital, where he designed and built an ESG strategy to support mission-aligned clients. He then spent three years at Social Finance, scaling an impact investment in Anchorage, Alaska to become the state's largest permanent supportive housing program, and designing and launching an impact fund-of-funds to mobilize passive charitable capital. With an interest in designing a fund to develop and scale affordable housing, he noted, “I’m excited to learn from other fellows and explore opportunities for collaboration across other systems, including policy, healthcare, and criminal justice.”
Keemia Azvine. Keemia, who is pursuing a MS/MBA in Biotechnology Life Sciences, comes to HBS after five years at Cancer Research UK (CRUK). At CRUK’s innovation engine Cancer Research Horizons, Keemia commercialized promising academic research through partnerships with the life sciences industry, leading the negotiation of two $25 million oncology research funding deals and spearheading the commercial development strategy for several cancer therapies and diagnostics. “While at HBS, I aim to maintain patient impact as my priority as I explore innovative ways to engage the private life sciences sector in tackling global health inequity,” she commented.
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Laura De Giorgis. Laura is coming to HBS from Kenya, where she worked for One Acre Fund, leading operations serving nearly 1 million farmers. Her most recent responsibilities included building a stronger ‘know your customer’ process and credit score model to better assess and accommodate the risk associated with serving low-income customers. She previously worked at Accion International in business development supporting several high-impact grants from institutional partners. “I am pursuing an MBA to more effectively be able to design and finance scalable, impactful, and profitable solutions to socio-economic and environmental challenges in Africa,” she explained.
Isaac Goldstein. Isaac has focused his career on K-12 and higher education. He first worked at EY-Parthenon, partnering with school districts, universities, and edtech investors, to address learning loss and operating deficits. He then joined Great Minds, where he designed a service model of educator support that leverages on-demand and community-based learning in schools to ensure high-fidelity instruction, and he led the operationalization of the new service model nationwide. Isaac remarked , “For me, the Goldsmith Fellows will be the community where I start building the coalition and ideas needed to close the learning gaps in this country.”
Benjamin Horwitz. Ben co-founded Causeway, a robo-advising platform for charitable giving. When Causeway was acquired by Charity Navigator, he joined as their first vice president of business development and New Ventures. At Charity Navigator, he led investment strategy and developed their “Innovation Fund,” focused on funding the next generation of philanthropy technology. Ben also forged Charity Navigator’s first partnership with the private sector, resulting in thousands of first-time donors to racial and gender equity. “With the support of the Goldsmith Fellowship, I hope contribute to a community of practitioners dedicated to innovating and scaling social change interventions,” he said.
Danno Lemu. A joint degree student at HBS and HKS, Danno’s career has spanned housing and community development. At the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he modeled drivers of economic disparities for low- and moderate-income communities across the U.S. As a grassroots community organizer, he advocated alongside such communities, creating Washington, D.C.’s first-ever $10 million Black homeownership fund. Most recently, as a consultant with HR&A Advisors, he crafted policies promoting housing development and economic growth for historically underinvested neighborhoods. Danno said, “HBS provides the opportunity to turn my vision for community-driven urban development into an actionable, scalable business model.”
Jasmine Segall. Jasmine comes from the International Development Finance Corporation, where she projected and monitored the economic impacts of more than $6 billion of emerging market investments in sectors such as infrastructure, agriculture, and financial inclusion. Previously, she worked at the US Department of Commerce to help implement technical assistance programs focusing on energy in over 30 countries. She also served as a Peace Corps volunteer in Costa Rica, expanding a microfinance institution and launching a women’s textile cooperative. “I see a HBS education as key to strengthening my understanding of business as a lever for social good,” she said.
Sankalp Shanker. Sankalp comes to HBS from Dasra, an Indian venture philanthropy nonprofit that has channeled $400 million to over 1,500 nonprofits. In his role in the founder's office, he set up teams and data-driven processes to drive global growth and position the organization as India’s thought leader in the Global South. Sanklap also conceptualized Dasra’s impact dashboard and secured institutional funding to provide Dasra catalytic capital to grow by 200 percent in next five years. He said, “This community would facilitate the exchange of innovative ideas and best practices, enhancing my approach to addressing complex social issues in the Global South.”
Emilie Umuhire. Emilie brings six years of experience in multiple roles at One Acre Fund. She helped the organization meet their diversity commitments in recruitment by increasing the percentage of senior hires being African nationals; and led a team to ensure that the organization’s talent strategy prioritized the career growth and development of over 10,000 staff through accessible and meaningful training tailored to employee needs. “HBS will equip me with the skills I need to enhance my organizational leadership skills and expand my network of social impact leaders to start a talent incubator program in the future,” she said.