Entrepreneurial Schulich graduates among Corporate Knights’ Top 30 Under 30 Leaders
TORONTO – Thursday, March 26, 2015 – Schulich School of Business is pleased to announce that Klaudia Olejnik, BBA’09, MBA’14, founder of thegoodcorp.com blog; Adam Camenzuli, iBBA’10, founder of KARIBU Solar Power; and Afzal Habib, iBBA’10, founder of Kidogo; have been selected by Corporate Knights magazine as among the Top 30 Under 30 Sustainability Leaders.
Olejnik, who works as a sustainability manager for PricewaterhouseCoopers Canada, founded thegoodcorp.com blog about corporate social responsibility. Camenzuli founded KARIBU Solar Power, which employs an innovative consumer-focused product and business model to deliver solar power to the world’s poor. Habib gave up a six-figure job in Canada to move to Africa to start Kidogo, which delivers high-quality, affordable early childhood education in poor communities in the developing world.
The Top 30 Under 30 Sustainability Leaders were chosen from more than 90 individuals across Canada who had been nominated. Judges for the Top 30 Under 30 included:
Vicky Sharpe, former CEO of Sustainable Development Technology Canada;
Scott Vaughn, president and CEO of the International Institute for Sustainable Development; Steve Sage, vice-president of sustainability and innovation at project sponsor Kruger Products; Brad Zarnett, founder and director at Toronto Sustainability Speaker Series; and Tyler Hamilton, editor-in-chief of Corporate Knights magazine and an adjunct professor of environmental studies at York University.
“The Schulich School of Business is very proud of these recent alumni who have earned the right to be included among Corporate Knights’ Top 30 Under 30 Sustainability Leaders,” said Andrew Crane, the George R. Gardiner Professor of Business Ethics and Director of Schulich’s Centre of Excellence in Responsible Business. “These young people are superb examples of the calibre of entrepreneurial and sustainability-minded business leaders graduating from Schulich.”
Excerpts from Corporate Knights’ “Top 30 Under 30” (April, 2015):
Klaudia Olejnik has already proven herself as a leader in the field as sustainability manager at PricewaterhouseCoopers Canada (PwC). After joining the consultancy in 2013, she completed her MBA at York University’s Schulich School of Business with a focus on sustainability. Her blog, thegoodcorp.com, helps consumers make informed decisions and guides businesses as they develop their own corporate social responsibility strategies. Klaudia has become a trusted source of advice for emerging leaders interested in pursuing careers in corporate social responsibility. She speaks frequently at universities about trends in the field and hopes to start a national dialogue around sustainability issues in Canada.
An Ontario native, Adam Camenzuli was first exposed to Tanzania on a yearlong stint with Street Kids International, where he learned Swahili and established a strong passion for social enterprise. After graduating from York University’s Schulich School of Business, Adam and three classmates began brainstorming ways to help take advantage of Africa’s growing economic clout. Leveraging both familial and personal familiarity with Tanzania, Adam and his team focused on the dangerous and unhealthy reliance that local households had on kerosene, which they burned in the evenings as a source of light. The team started work on an alternative: a simple solar lamp. After leaving his high-paying banking job in Toronto, Adam co-founded KARIBU Solar Power and became its executive director. The company sells solar lamps on a rent-to-own basis through small franchise operations spread through the country.
He had a six-figure salary at the Boston Consulting Group, where he advised Fortune 500 clients, but Afzal Habib was looking to inject more meaning into his work – and he did exactly that. Afzal quit his job in Canada, moved to Africa, and in just one year turned what many considered a crazy idea into Kidogo, a thriving, fully functional social enterprise with 22 staff. The company’s mission is to bring high quality, easy-to-access and affordable early childhood development (ECD) programs to poor developing-world communities. It does this by setting up full-service “hubs” in targeted communities that employ certified teachers and host up to 80 students. Those hubs, once embedded in a community, provide training, marketing and curriculum support for micro-franchised “spokes” created by locals in smaller, nearby villages. The first pilot hub in Nairobi broke even in less than a year.
About Schulich
Known as Canada’s Global Business School™, the Schulich School of Business in Toronto is ranked among the world’s leading business schools by a number of global surveys. Schulich’s MBA program is ranked #1 in the world by Corporate Knights, the world’s largest circulation magazine with an explicit focus on Corporate Social Responsibility, and #2 in the world by the Aspen Institute (a Washington, DC-based leadership think tank) in global surveys that identify which schools are doing the best job of preparing future business leaders for the environmental, social and ethical complexities of modern-day business. Schulich’s MBA program is also ranked among the world’s leading schools by The Economist, Forbes, Bloomberg Businessweek and CNN Expansión. The Kellogg-Schulich EMBA program is ranked #1 in the world by The Economist, and #1 in Canada by the Financial Times of London. For complete ranking details, please visit www.schulich.yorku.ca.
For more information, please contact:
Beth Marlin
Public Relations and Media Relations Strategist
Schulich School of Business
905-717-6278
bmarlin@schulich.yorku.ca