Q&A with Jim Sorenson insight impactful

The goal of the Sorenson Impact Center is to provide students with experiential learning opportunities that introduce them to the field of impact investing and prepare them to incorporate positive social impact into whatever they do next. We caught up with the founder of the center, Jim Sorenson, world-renowned entrepreneur, business leader, and social innovator, to talk about how businesses can support social good and why the field of impact is so appealing to today’s students and young business leaders.

Where did the idea for the Sorenson Impact Center come from?

My father was an entrepreneur and medical device pioneer, and my mother was really a social entrepreneur. She cared deeply about children, education, and the arts and she found a way to integrate impact into those three things.

I had built a company around video conferencing technology, but we came up against the dot com bubble and it was really hard for young companies like ours to get capital. But I had a brother-in-law working for me at the time who was deaf, and he thought our technology might have an application in the deaf community. We used the existing technology to create a Video Relay Service, basically a real-time, Internet-based remote sign language interpreter. It was a game changer for the deaf community, giving them capabilities they never had before and we could grow and scale it faster because we were a for-profit company.

In that experience I learned, in an aha moment, that you could solve problems and improve society in a scalable, sustainable way using a for-profit model. By partnering with the University of Utah I realized we could create an impact investing ecosystem while also educating students about the impact investing space. The experiential learning we provide students through the Sorenson Impact Center has become an approach to investing with wide appeal.

What unique experiences does the Sorenson Impact Center provide for students to make an impact?

We have provided more than 500 students with an immersive experience working in a variety of ways to grow impact investing. They do research and meet with social entrepreneurs. They learn data science to measure and improve the performance of impact investing. They share stories of impact investing success to motivate and inspire others.

This isn’t something out of a textbook or a case study that is five years old. This is real life. We even have students who embed themselves with the companies we work with for a few months or a whole semester to help them solve problems and see their work first-hand. Students don’t only

How does the Sorenson Impact Center help students build confidence in their ability to make an impact?

These are real things that students are engaged in at the Sorenson Impact Center, so when they get into their careers or their next steps, they know what to do and what they can do. They know how to interface with entrepreneurs. They know how to solve problems. They know how to work on a team. Everything around the next corner is different from what was around the last corner, and this experiential learning provides them with such valuable preparation for that.

Outside of your involvement with the U, what are other ways you try to make an impact?

Through the Sorenson Impact Group we are continuing to support the mission of building the impact investing ecosystem. We have an asset management arm dedicated to investing in funds that are focused on overlooked areas of social impact.

For example, we are involved in a fund called Enable Ventures, that is dedicated to closing the disability wealth gap. We also have an advisory group that helps people interested in investing for impact find good investments.

The impact investing ecosystem has come a long way, with more than $1 trillion in assets under management and a 40% growth rate. If it continues to do that, you can imagine the impact it will have. And that impact will largely be on the next generation, which is why students are so interested in what we are doing. If we all work together and engage traditional capital from the market, we really can make a difference. That is the promise of impact investing. ■

The Center’s marquis partnership is with Ensign Global College in Ghana, where BHP helps administer the Health2Go program. Health2Go uses a distributed health model to take healthcare and resources to people where they are, rather than the other way around. The program also helps train community health workers with basic skills to treat uncomplicated diseases, and connects them to a more sophisticated clinical network when needed. Health2Go applies a business-informed franchise model to social interventions, Alder said, increasing the sustainability and scalability of vital community care.

Tan Le, a senior at the U studying Health, Society, and Policy, as well as International Policy, has a very personal connection to work that improves the delivery of healthcare. On Mother’s Day in 2016, when Le was 15 years old, his mother got violently sick. His dad took her to the emergency room only to be sent home with medication to control her nausea and no other diagnosis. When the medication did nothing to alleviate her symptoms, they took her back to the emergency room only to be sent home again.

On their third trip to the ER, Le’s mom was finally admitted to the hospital where she was diagnosed with Stage 3 stomach cancer. The physician was not culturally competent, Le said, and dismissed his mother’s request to incorporate some traditional Asian medicine from her Vietnamese culture into her treatment. Chemotherapy and surgery were the only options he offered. In addition to their cultural objections, Le said his parents were worried about the high cost of cancer treatment, even though they had insurance.

“The physician was really ‘my way or the highway,’” Le said. “My mom was forced to choose between her life and her livelihood.”

Le’s parents opted to return to Vietnam for treatment, where his mother passed away shortly afterwards. Le watched his mother’s funeral on Zoom, and spent the next several months unhoused, relying on the generosity of friends and acquaintances, while his dad stayed in Vietnam to get the family’s affairs in order.

“That experience really planted the seed to work on healthcare reform,” Le said. “My story is just one of many. I am just one of many who fell through the cracks of our healthcare system. That needs fixing no matter how long it takes.”

After coming to the U on a full-ride scholarship, Le looked for ways to pursue his passion for healthcare reform outside of just his major. When he heard about the chance to work as an intern for BHP he decided to go for it, even though it was something he had never considered before.

“It was very much outside of my comfort zone because I had never even thought about Ghana before,” he said. “But it was also such a great opportunity to learn because it was so out of my comfort zone.”

During his time in Ghana, from May to June of 2022, Le’s work focused around supply chain management. That was also outside his area of expertise, he said, but he learned quickly that part of any healthcare reform effort is a functioning economic system that can deliver goods and services where they are needed. This became especially clear during the COVID-19 pandemic, he said.

“I realized the value of a supply chain and how an efficient supply chain will make for an efficient system,” he said.

Coming from a social science background, Le came to appreciate the role that business and business principles can play in social change.

“There are a lot of social needs and there is a desire to address those needs, but there is always a business component,” he said. “This made me see there is an ethical and moral goal to help people, but there also needs to be the money to make change. I’ve always been apprehensive of the influence of business in healthcare, but I saw there is a way to do that ethically.”

The experience also opened Le’s eyes to the breadth of global healthcare, and the opportunity different countries and systems have to learn from each other, maximize everyone’s strengths, and celebrate diversity and differences instead of forcing everyone into the same model. Established healthcare systems in rich countries don’t have all the answers, he said, and true reform will require ethical leadership, community-based organizing, and centering the voices and experiences of local leaders and experts all over the world.

“Those lessons are really valuable for me,” Le said. “Moving forward it’s made me more willing to go learn from these undeveloped systems. For me to even start working on healthcare reform I have to be in the trenches myself. I very much want to be a part of burning down these inequitable systems.”

That type of broad thinking is exactly what BHP hopes students will gain, Alder said, whether in Ghana or down the street through projects like the West Valley Community and Health Center in Salt Lake City. No matter where the students or the projects are, the question is always the same: how do we help people stay healthy and prosper?

Part of answering that question is understanding the causes and factors that are limiting health and prosperity, and this is where another business principle comes into play. Through a partnership with the Map the System program at Oxford University, BHP is training students to apply business mapping models to social problems.

Liesel Madrian, a senior studying Health, Society, and Policy, was a member of the first team from the U to participate in Map the System at Oxford. Her team was tasked with uncovering the top causes of the shrinking of the Great Salt Lake. They put the lake at the center of their map, and then conducted research and interviews with experts to define the problem accurately and find the best solution.

The team discovered that while personal water consumption and global climate change are most often cited as reasons the Great Salt Lake is shrinking, water diversion for agricultural use was actually the biggest culprit. Correctly identifying the issue meant the team could map a more impactful solution, Madrian said, and developing that problem-solving skill was her key takeaway from the experience.

She was able to put it into practice almost immediately when she traveled to Ghana as a program coordinator with BHP in 2022.

“The biggest barrier to successful, sustainable problem-solving in developing countries is understanding the problem correctly and empowering local people to solve it,” she said.

Part of her work in Ghana was conducting health resource inventories –working with nurses, families, and local politicians to map their own system of healthcare resources and identify what concerns there were, what resources already existed, and what gaps needed to be bridged.

“For a lot of the students I talked to it was the first time they experienced the reality of trying to make an impact on a community,” Madrian said. “It was so amazing to see that and be able to speak to people and do it in the right way.”

Issues of global health and inequities can seem overwhelming, Alder said, but through the programs and experiences offered at BHP students learn to break them apart, solve one thing at a time, and then see how their small part impacts the greater whole. The cross-disciplinary approach of the center also helps students see a broader application for their skills and experiences.

“This starts to change the mindset of students from, ‘Here’s what I don’t know,’ to ‘Here’s where I’m building capacity and here’s what I bring to the table,’” Alder said. “I think of us in many ways as a producer. Our job is to face a challenge and then produce and pull together resources to apply to these really sometimes tricky problems.”

Ultimately, Alder said, the BHP approach is the perfect blending of the goals of its founders, Elder Robert C. and Dr. Lynette N. Gay. Bob believes in innovation, Alder said, and making the best use of the resources available, while Lynette believes that if those innovations and resources don’t improve peoples’ lives, they are wasted.

It’s also an approach that pairs well with the desire of the current generation of college students and young leaders to put their time and effort towards things that make a tangible, positive impact and address some of the inequalities they have experienced.

Said Alder: “They want to have a role in what happens in the world.” ■