Overview
The Tucker Foundation realizes that its alumni play a pivotal role in the
continuing success of the Foundation. We would like to recognize both those
alumni who continue to serve or provide service opportunities in their
communities as well as those who continue to provide support directly to the
Tucker Foundation itself. As well as providing continuing information on our
alumni in the community, each month we will profile one specific alumnus/a who
truly embodies and exemplifies the Tucker model.
I think a key part of education and certainly central to the
undergraduate experience, is actually finding out about yourself. And you
spend many, many years thinking about ideas and defining yourself in
terms of ideas. And I think the Tucker Foundation provides opportunities
in which you get to really confront those ideas with reality. And I think
that definition really is in a sense the definition of who you are as a
person.
My involvement with social enterprise really came through being invited
to be on the board of a non-profit called Accion International… Accion has
pioneered micro finance around the world. It sees its mission as
responding to global poverty, and doing so through providing loans and savings
and other financial services for the poor that would have no access to
otherwise. It does it through institutions that it helps set up and grow
on the ground. Last year that network reached about two million active clients,
and dispersed about $2 billion in loans. Average size under a thousand
dollars…I thought this was one of the few effective responses to poverty that I
knew of … I left KKR and Wall Street to go to Accion. I think as I look back, a
lot of the values and the things that were important to me were of course
defined when I was an undergraduate at Dartmouth. And defined in the
programs that I participated in at the Tucker Foundation.
—Michael Chu ’68
|
Skip to main content
