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Stephanie Tolk - Mali
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Stephanie Tolk, Peace Corps volunteer in Mali (1998-2000), taught rural children how to protect their natural resources, taught nutrition classes and ran fruit tree grafting workshops with farmers. She recently founded The Pangaea Project to empower youth from low-income families to become globally aware, local leaders.
CLICK on the player to listen to this eight minute interview, or on the link below to download the audio file to your desktop.
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Stephanie served in the Peace Corps in Mali, where she was a Natural Resource Specialist, teaching environmental education to village children and doing side projects that the villagers needed.
She joined the Peace Corps after traveling abroad with AFS in high school and spending Semester at Sea in college (Semester at Sea is a program in which students live and travel on a large sailboat and visit and stay in ten countries during the semester).
Semester at Sea was a jolting experience for her because she would spend days with very poor people, then go back at night to a luxury ship.
Stephanie Tolk started The Pangaea Project, an unusual endeavor that empowers Portland’s at-risk youth to become local leaders with a global perspective, a 10-month program that includes a month outside the U.S. They learn about the social justice components both locally and through "change makers" – people who are making a difference in the world.
This year they visited Ecuador. They traveled all over the country, met change makers there and visited development projects to learn lessons and techniques that might actually work in Portland.
They also lived with local families and completed a service project, getting immersed in the culture and developing the empathy they need to understand the country they are in. Many of these kids are very at-risk, but we see a lot of leadership potential in them, Stephanie says in this interview. Most of them, she adds, would never have a chance to travel outside the U.S.
She is a true social entrepreneur herself and trains future social entrepreneurs in the Pangaea Project. She thinks a social entrepreneur recognizes a need in a community and innovatively tries to address it and create social change. There are lots of people re-inventing the wheel to correct social problems –but true entrepreneurs try something different.
Her advice to other entrepreneurs: “Keep plugging away to manifest your dreams.”
CLICK on the player above to listen to her interview.
