And these days, Martini, the Gabelli School of Business’ executive-in-residence, shares them every five weeks with students at the Social Innovation Collaboratory’s Lincoln Center and Rose Hill offices.

The meetings aren’t always easy to arrange, as he flies in from California for them. But Martini, who made a $1 million gift last year to the Collaboratory, said the trek is well worth the time.

“Students here are great listeners. They want to hear from people who’ve run big companies and done startups,” he said during a visit in December.

“I love to share knowledge because really, that’s how I did what I did. I asked a lot of questions, and I had a lot of great mentors.”

Martini has a deep well of experience to tap into, as his business career has been long and varied. In 1998, he succeeded his father as president of Bergen Brunswig Corporation, a pharmaceutical distribution company that his grandfather Emil Martini founded in 1947.

Learning From Mistakes

When Bergen Brunswig merged with Amerisource Health Corporation in 2001, the company was worth $2.5 billion. Martini said he was proud to have overseen a successful merger (last year AmerisourceBergen, as the new company is known, employed 20,000 people), even though he only stayed on with the new company for about a year.

“We ran the business from the bottom up. We really believed that empowering associates closest to the work was the smartest thing we could do as leaders.,” he said.

After he left AmerisourceBergen in 2003, Martini raced cars for a few years. But the 2008 housing crisis inspired him to throw his hat back into the ring with TAAC, LLC (Troubled Asset Acquisitions Company), which he co-founded in 2009, and COVE Financial Group, which he founded in 2011. The firms acquired foreclosed homes in California and helped homeowners secure credit to buy them. Neither ultimately survived, but Martini said students can learn from their demise.

“I love to talk about the mistakes we made that we thought were great ideas at the time,” said Martini, who is now a private investor and the president of Martini Vintage, LLC, which restores vintage cars.

Social Innovation: A Reset Button

“I also get to see what students are up to, and that gives me some insight as an angel investor. I don’t need to run these companies, and I don’t need to make a zillion dollars. I want these students to be empowered to do things because I’m pretty sure they’re on the right track for pushing the reset button for business.”

Martini credits his interest in hitting the “reset button” for social innovation in business to his Fordham mentor, Gabelli School professor James A.F. Stoner, Ph.D., who introduced him to the concept of an Ashoka Changemaker Campus.  When Fordham earned the designation in 2014, it joined 25 other universities and colleges around the nation dedicated to change through social innovation.

It’s led Martini to support student efforts like those of Fordham College at Rose Hill senior Olivia Greenspan, the co-founder of TILL, a community-based real estate development company that aims to transform the old brownfield sites into viable properties.

During Martini’s visit in December, a team of students working under the auspices of the collaboratory was discussing ideas on how to promote financial literacy to Bronx residents. Max Lynch, a senior majoring in finance at the Gabelli School, said he had a savings account opened for him when he was in the first grade, so it was something he took for granted.

“In my junior year, I learned that there were people who didn’t even have access to bank accounts. Building savings since I was so young has helped me, and I’d like that for other people as well,” Lynch said.

Empowering Students

Lynch credits the Social Innovation Collaboratory with convincing him that upon graduation, he will eschew a traditional Wall Street career.   

“I want to do something that will have an impact on the world… I think I’m going to find my way into my own thing,” he said.

“Brent has allowed me to realize that that’s feasible.”

For Arlinda Berdynaj, GABELLI ’18, who was recently hired as the collaboratory’s innovation project manager, financial literacy resonates deeply. Her parents sometimes relied on pawn shops to get by when she was growing up in the Bronx neighborhood of Norwood; she said she wants to help others avoid that kind of situation.

Martini’s contributions have made it possible for the collaboratory to send Berdynaj to two conferences: Opportunity Collaboration Global, a summit focused on global poverty and injustice, and Social Capital Markets, which brings together impact investors, social entrepreneurs, and organizations aiming to create global change.

“Those were incredible opportunities, given that I just graduated and I’m looking to get into the field. I got to meet tons of people, I felt really inspired, and I still keep those connections,” she said.

Martini sees himself as the Social Innovation Collaboratory’s biggest cheerleader. In addition to meeting with students, he meets with the deans of Fordham’s other colleges to see how the collaboratory can support them. He’s also in regular contact with Z. George Hong, Ph.D., who, as Fordham’s chief research officer, is supervising the collaboratory’s dispersal of $100,000 for faculty-driven research.

Listening and Changing Together

But it’s the students who fire Martini up most, and he said he’s learned as much from them as he thinks they’ve learned from him. In fact, a conversation with three female students last spring led Martini to experience a profound change of opinion of the Black Lives Matter movement.

“My natural reaction was, they all matter. Why is it that black lives matter? I resisted,” he said.

To get him to understand, the young women told him a story about a man and a woman who worked for the same company, were the same age, and lived in similar neighborhoods. One had a white daughter, the other had a black daughter. When the black woman asked the white man whether he ever thought about his daughter when she left for school, he said he thought about what she might be learning, but otherwise he didn’t give her much thought. But the black woman experienced things differently.

“She said, ‘I don’t rest easy in my mind again, all day long, until my daughter comes back in the door, because I just don’t know that she’s coming back in the door,’” Martini recalled.

“And in that moment here, I had tears in my eyes. These kids changed how I related to that world.

“I said to them, ‘Thank you, I get it. I’ll never be the same.’ Those kids wrote me the next day, and they said, ‘You know what inspires us? When we see a 50-plus-year-old successful man listen to us and change.’”

With a recent $1 million gift, Brent Martini, GABELLI ’86, has ensured that those efforts will grow exponentially.

“This will be, and can be, core to who Fordham is, in my humble opinion,” said Martini, a former president of the pharmaceutical firm AmerisourceBergen and current owner of vintage car dealer Martini Vintage LLC.

“I’m driven to make Fordham as great as it can be. I’m not sure why I take it so personally, I just believe there’s lots of good people doing good things, and I have the privilege of participating in it fully.”

Carey Weiss, director of the collaboratory, a university-wide initiative managed by the Gabelli School of Business, said Martini’s gift is the largest it has received to date, and is a bona fide game changer.

“It puts us in league with peer Changemaker Campus institutions around the world that have also been suitably resourced in ways that we have been emulating, and we can now express in our unique way.”

A Network of Changemakers

Weiss said the collaboratory was conceived by Fordham’s late provost Stephen Freedman in 2014 as part of the process for designation as an Ashoka U Changemaker Campus. In receiving that designation, Fordham joined a network of 25 other universities and colleges around the nation that are helping change the world through social innovation.

At the time, Ashoka’s review team expressed concern that Fordham had social impact projects happening everywhere, but lacked connectivity between initiatives. Weiss said the collaboratory takes all of that faculty and student thought leadership and turns it into practice, with measurable impact and outcomes for society.

The collaboratory’s programming, which was at the outset offered only to Gabelli School students, has in the last three years expanded to include students at Fordham College at Lincoln Center and Fordham College at Rose Hill students as well. And since 2015, faculty from five of the University’s colleges have participated.

Now, thanks to Martini’s generosity, the collaboratory is poised to expand to make an even greater impact.

Thinking about the Next Generation

Martini previously funded the chair in global sustainability occupied by Gabelli School of Business professor James M. Stoner, Ph.D., and has served as executive in residence at the Gabelli School since 2015. He became interested in environmentally sustainable and inclusive business practices in 2011, when he decided to reenter the job market with COVE Financial Group, a lease-to-buy real estate business that he ran for four years. He credited Stoner, with whom he’d stayed in touch over the years, with bending his ear to talk about sustainability and social innovation.

“That’s kind of the way Jim’s always been with me. Give me something to think about, and then wait for me to think about it. This time around, he also had a hook, which was, ‘You have a young daughter, right? So while you’re building a new business, it would be appropriate to really think about the world that you’re creating, the business you’re creating, and the environment you’re impacting,’” he said.

“So, he really planted the seed around me to learn more about these topics.”

An example of an initiative the collaboratory has spearheaded is Sustainable Business Foundations, a course at the Gabelli School where students could, for their midterm, work in teams to identify a real-life problem for either BMW’s new fleet of electric vehicles or the city of New Rochelle, and design a sustainable solution. Social innovation has also been embedded in the Ground Floor, an introductory course that every first-year undergraduate student at the Gabelli School takes. And a new course, Impact Investing, was recently unveiled for junior and senior finance majors.

Weiss said Martini’s gift will allow the collaboratory to build out its infrastructure so it can serve other colleges and centers in the University. That includes more physical space that can accommodate students who want to plan events such as its Our Story gatherings, the second of which will be held Nov. 12. It will also increase opportunities for research and new coursework.

“With a better understanding of our own university, who the players are, and what the needs are, we can build this out to serve a much broader section of community,” she said.

“What we’ve needed is more funding for professional staff, for faculty involvement—particularly research and curriculum development—and also for student leadership.”

Eliminating Barriers

Weiss said part of the beauty of focusing on social innovation is that it provides a common theme on which seemingly disparate disciplines around the University can find common ground, allowing faculty and students to break out of the “silos” that are common in many large organizations. One initiative that the University will be launching soon is a GiveCampus Campaign, which will be spearheaded by the Fordham Fund, and will be dedicated to raising awareness and funds across all units of the university, including the collaboratory, for social innovation activities.

Martini said he’s excited to not only be a part of building out the collaboratory, but also to have a front row seat to the action. Although he lives in Laguna Beach, California, he visits New York City every five to six weeks, and says spending time with the students is the richest experience he has these days. Helping to provide them with innovative spaces to work in is his way of thanking them.

“I believe spaces are critically important, not just as symbols, but as places where people come together and do work. At any given student leader meeting today, you would see 25 kids jammed into a room,” he said.

“But you’d see a couple hundred kids if you could actually ask everyone involved in the social innovation collaboratory, in one shape or form, to all come to one space at one time. That, to me, is incredibly exciting. It’s just begun.”