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Our Stories

Common Thread

Common Thread is a social enterprise based on the intuition of joining skilled yet underemployed women with interested business partners and customers. Common Thread’s cooperative approach help to enfranchise entrepreneurial women by engaging their existing tailoring skills and enabling them to participate in computer literacy courses so they can maintain partnerships with foreign customers for their products.

The idea for the Common Thread cooperative was conceived when founder Kathryn Dickens was a Peace Corps volunteer in Maroua, the Extreme North Province of Cameroon. During conversations with community members, it become clear that a cooperative could serve as a way to promote economic development by increasing women’s participation in the formal market.

Kathryn joined forces with Jacob Hipps in 2007 to participate in a social enterprise business plan competition sponsored by the Institute for Social Innovation, which provided them with start-up capital. They continue as partners working towards increasing start-up funding to bring Common Thread products to retail stores.
 

Epic Change

Inspired by a volunteer trip to Tanzania, Heinz College alumna Stacey Monk, MAM 2000, and Sanjay Patel created Epic Change in 2007. They realized the power of the local stories they heard during their journey, and believed that they might be a potential means to raise funds to support the impoverished communities they visited and others like them across the globe. Epic Change helps people in need share their “epic” true stories in innovative, creative and profitable ways to help them acquire the financial resources they need to create positive “change” in their communities.

Read more about Epic Change and Stacey’s work.
 

GTECH

GTECH, or Growth Through Energy and Community Health, began as a master's project for Andrew Butcher and Chris Koch, who were attending Heinz College. The company's unique strategy links urban redevelopment with environmental sustainability. GTECH aims to accomplish this lofty goal with a three-pronged approach: reclaiming blighted urban land, planting renewable bio-fuel crops, and providing community growth through job training.

The following video, From Blight to Bright: Reclaiming Marginalized Land in Pittsburgh by My Story, Our World Productions provides an overview of the GTECH's work.

 

 


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Tell us Your Story!

Heinz College would love to hear about the social enterprises are alumni our involved with and how you are putting socially innovative ideas into action.

Please share your story with us by emailing Kristin Niceswanger.