Acumen Fund Founder and CEO Jacqueline Novogratz will speak at 1:10 p.m. Thursday, Feb. 25, at Thunderbird School of Global Management. Her topic will be "Patient Capital for an Impatient World." The event is open to the media and general public.

Novogratz has led the Acumen Fund team since its launch in 2001, and under her leadership Acumen Fund has invested about $40 million in more than 35 companies serving 25 million low-income customers in the developing world (as of January 2010).

Prior to founding Acumen Fund, Novogratz founded and directed The Philanthropy Workshop and The Next Generation Leadership program at the Rockefeller Foundation. She began her career in international banking with Chase Manhattan Bank and she founded Duterimbere, a microfinance institution in Rwanda. She is currently on the advisory boards of Stanford Graduate School of Business, MIT’s Legatum Center, and Innovations Journal published by MIT Press. Novogratz serves on the Aspen Institute Board of Trustees and as a member of two World Economic Forum Global Agenda Councils, social entrepreneurship and water. She is an Aspen Institute Henry Crown Fellow, a Synergos Institute Senior Fellow, and was recently honored with the 2009 CASE Leadership in Social Entrepreneurship Award. She was recently named to Foreign Policy’s list of Top 100 Global Thinkers and Daily Beast’s 25 Smartest People of the Decade.

Novogratz is a frequent speaker at international conferences, including the World Economic Forum, the Clinton Global Initiative and the Technology, Entertainment and Design conference. She has an MBA from Stanford and a BA in Economics/International Relations from the University of Virginia. She is the author of the bestselling memoir, “The Blue Sweater: Bridging the Gap Between Rich and Poor in an Interconnected World.”

Acumen Fund is a nonprofit global venture fund that uses entrepreneurial approaches to remedy global poverty.  The group’s model focuses on delivering critical goods and services such as healthcare, water, housing and energy through the practice of investing small amounts of philanthropic capital combined with large doses of business acumen funding to build businesses.

Novogratz’s visit is part of Thunderbird’s Global Issues Forum Speaker series, which brings speakers from diverse backgrounds to Thunderbird. Members of the public interested in attending must RSVP to Barbara Stevenson at 602-978-7327 or barbara.stevenson@thunderbird.edu.

Members of the media are asked to contact Claire Ford at claire.ford@thunderbird.edu or 602-978-7498 if they are planning to cover the event. Thunderbird’s campus is on the southeast corner of 59th Avenue and Greenway Road. The presentation will be in the Yount Distance Learning Center.