In her first semester at Princeton, a seminar on the international politics of AIDS in Africa provided “an awakening . . . the severity and complexity of health crises in southern Africa was something I knew very little about, and the seminar kind of blew the lid off for me,” she said. “Our incredible professor not only presented new information and new perspectives, but he also taught differently, demanding that we become agents of change. Every week, it wasn’t just ‘learn this’ or ‘read this,’ but ‘tell me what you have done.’ Being told that I could actually create change, and that I would be held accountable to do just that, was incredibly motivating and inspiring.” During her junior year, while pursuing her major in the Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, Eliza had the opportu-
then received a Princeton fellowship to work for the International Rescue Committee (IRC) in Guinea (“definitely not Africa Lite”), a small nation which had received hundreds of thousands of refugees from the civil wars in neighboring Sierra Leone, Liberia, and Cote d’Ivoire. With the IRC, she worked on health education programs and assisting unaccompanied minors who had crossed the borders and lost their families. “By the time I got to Guinea in 2005, the refugee camps had become so entrenched, it was as if they were permanent mini cities, yet they remained largely isolated from the surrounding Guinean towns, and the dynamics between the refugees (who were receiving significant amounts of international aid) and local Guineans (who were not) were complex,” she said. “I saw how
Eliza applied for a pro bono fellowship in the New York office of Orrick, Herrington & Sutcliffe, a global law firm focused on technology, energy, and finance. As the firm’s pro bono fellow, she began to build a practice working with nonprofits and companies in the social enterprise field, as well as with the investors and foundations who were funding these companies. After twoand-a-half years as the fellow, she transitioned into the firm’s corporate group to ensure that she was getting exposure to transactions in the traditional market as well as in the impact space. A founding member of the firm’s impact finance practice, Eliza said she loved supporting the innovation and impact of clients who were tackling the broad challenges associated with poverty around world. “Impact investing is investing with an intentional focus on creating posi-
» Impact investing is investing with an intentional focus on creating positive
social impact ... The positive impact for low-income consumers is not simply a nice ancillary effect; it’s the driving motivation of the company.
nity to study abroad in London, Prague, or Cape Town. “My father was like, ‘OK great, Prague or London.’ And I was like, ‘South Africa!’ As he says, I’ve been ignoring his advice for decades.” Working on a children’s healthpolicy task force in Cape Town, she volunteered in clinics and taught health education classes in Cape Town’s townships. “Cape Town is incredibly beautiful—idyllic Table Mountain sloping down to beautiful beaches and the ocean—but it’s a place of massive contradiction, with tremendous poverty and challenges associated with the legacy of apartheid that the country is still working through.” She came away from the semester feeling that she’d only scratched the surface of what she could learn about the complicated issues of poverty and health in southern Africa, describing her Cape Town experience as “Africa Lite” because it was so comfortable. She
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difficult it is to find solutions for refugees whose lives have been uprooted for so long, even when their home countries have returned to a relative level of peace.” A determination to find solutions became a compass for her career. She attended Harvard Law School with the goal of pursuing human rights legal work. But after her second year, the vision of what she hoped to accomplish had become clouded. She spent a summer working in Cambodia fighting human trafficking, but felt powerless in a way she never had before. As a tool for combating human trafficking in Cambodia, the formal legal system seemed minimally useful. While frustrating and saddening, the experience was “a key inflection point for me in realizing that traditional legal approaches might not allow me to have the impact I was seeking.” After graduating from law school,
Fall 2017
tive social impact,” she said. “For me, an impact company is a company that is purposefully trying to solve a problem that affects low-income populations by offering a product or service to alleviate that problem and improve lives. The positive impact for low-income consumers is not simply a nice ancillary effect; it’s the driving motivation of the company.” After a year in the legal department at Acumen, a venture capital firm that invests in companies that combat global poverty, Eliza joined its U.S. investing team, Acumen America. As a portfolio manager, she said, “Our job is to find the most dynamic and compelling entrepreneurs who are committed to tackling poverty here in the U.S. by narrowing inequality and gaps of opportunity—and to finance them and help them build their companies. “I think I have the best job in the world.” —Nichole Bernier