Guest Speaker: Wednesday, July 31, 2019
5:30 pm to 8:00 pm
Location: The National Club, Rooftop
Topic: Service Through Social Finance
Host: Andrea Tirone
Cost: Toronto Rotarians and Their Guests: A Lunch Ticket
Visiting Rotarians and Other Guests $55 Cash at the door
or ahead of time on credit card by calling no later than Tuesday
at 416-363-0604 or email: accounts@rotarytoronto.com
After completing his undergraduate at the University of Victoria, Mark decided to focus his career on the pursuit of solutions to the world’s most important problems. He worked for Engineers Without Borders Canada (EWB) for a year and a half on the agriculture systems team in Ghana and Zambia. After observing a critical financing gap, he co-founded Kulemela Investments, a first of its kind agricultural investment fund. The fund financed agricultural businesses with $10,000-$30,000 to increase the productivity of rice mills and poultry farms that offered markets to small scale farming households.
In 2015, Mark decided to fine tune his business skills to tackle social issues by pursuing a social impact-focused MBA at the University of Oxford’s Saïd Business School. Mark’s studies were supported with a Rotary Global Scholarship by Calgary Olympic Rotary Club (District 5360) in 2015-16 and he was hosted by the Rotary Club of Faringdon (District 1090).
Since graduating Mark has continued to work in social finance, mobilizing capital markets to address social and environmental issues. He worked as a non-partisan policy advisor at the Ministry of Economic Development’s “Social Enterprise Unit” for two years and structured Ontario’s first two social impact bonds. He is now consulting for the United Nations and developing an agricultural social impact bond in Zambia. He is also the co-founder of AgRI, an organization that supports farmers in the transition to more drought-resistant crops in the face of climate change.