By Caleb Taylor
UCA students were able to hear how ordinary people are able to create meaningful change in the world at the last ACRE Speaker Series event of 2019, on November 5.
Nan Doyal spoke about her book, Dig Where You Are, which introduces readers to seven people who have solved some of the biggest challenges facing our societies today.
From the slums of Mumbai, the villages of Tibet and northeast Thailand, the inner cities of Philadelphia and San Francisco, and a ghetto outside Stockholm, Dig Where You Are tells of an artist, a surgeon, a teacher, a criminologist, an economist, a community organizer and a general physician each of whom saw a way beyond suffering and injustice, took responsibility for the well-being of others and ended up transforming lives and communities across the world.
Doyal told UCA students one aspect that interested her about these seven people is how they used business enterprises to solve these challenges.
Doyal said:
They take no public funding. Everything they do is self-sustaining in one way or another. One of the guys in Thailand told me, ‘What we do is too important to depend on donors or even the government so we have to be self-sustaining to make sure our work continues.’ A number of them run businesses associated with what they’re doing and those businesses are actually a part of the model that makes it work.”
The event was part of ACRE’s Speaker Series at the UCA College of Business.
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