He majored in marketing and, as a senior, put his skills to work in his hometown of the Bronx as a founding member of the student-run Fordham Business Development Collaboratory. The group, launched in June 2020 and now comprising more than 70 members, assists local businesses in the areas of finance, compliance, technology, and marketing. Santiago said he used that undergraduate experience to help land a job in the associate program at Ogilvy, a New York City-based advertising and marketing agency, where he’s been working since September 2021, soon after he graduated from Fordham.

Was there a Fordham course that really had a big influence on you and where you are today?
There’s a few courses I’d say that really shaped my time at Fordham. My freshman year I took Composition II, and just being in a course where all I did was write—and [the professor]gave us topics that were fairly open ended, so I was able to really put my own thoughts into the writing—cemented to me, “Hey, writing and talking, this is what I want for a living.”

A few marketing courses that I took were really valuable to me. I think one that really stuck out to me was my Global Marketing Sustainability course. When it comes to sustainability, not just talking about environmental sustainability, but sustainability in the way of “How does this affect the supply chain?” it really makes you consider whatever business decisions you’re making: How do they actually affect the world, not just the bottom line in profits?

Were you involved with any other academic programs at Gabelli?
The Gabelli School’s Consulting Cup is a very valuable experience for any student who studies business at Fordham. It gives you the simulation of working with a real corporate team, and I can say that the amount of emailing and creating deliverables and research that we had to do for the Consulting Cup—I’m not going to say it’s completely like working right now, but it’s similar. Having to email upper-level people [at the companies we were studying], cross-communicating within your own team, and finding solutions—it’s such a valuable experience for anyone who wants to go into any sort of business.

What activities were you involved with outside of the classroom?
I was a part of [ASILI], the Black Student Alliance—I was the president my senior year. I did a lot of stuff with the CCEL, the Center for Community Engaged Learning, including but not limited to GO! projects [to South Africa]. And then I was involved in History Makers my sophomore year going into my junior year, which was a program where you mentor and teach kids about social justice things and give them the context of the history in the Bronx.

You worked with the Fordham Business Development Collaboratory. Could you tell me about that experience?
The Fordham Business Development Collaboratory was amazing—shout out to my friend Rich [Shrestha, a senior at Fordham College at Rose Hill and economics major] for that one because that was a great idea he came up with, and it actually really translates to the job that I do now.

Being someone from the Bronx, that was really valuable because I was able to work with people who are from where I’m from, and I understand what the needs are for a lot of people. We were able to use Fordham resources, and not necessarily money resources, but intellectual resources—we have a plethora of students who are more than capable of being able to help people. It’s actually funny because it comes a little bit full circle: I’m in a rotation of programs at my job, and my first assignment is in the consulting group because they had seen my resume, and were like, “Hey, you do the Fordham Business Development Collaboratory. We think this would be a great match for you to continue to develop those skills.” So that was a really nice thing, that I was able to leverage the experience that I had and also that that experience benefitted others.

Can you tell me a bit more about the work you’re doing now?
I’m working for Ogilvy. It’s a subsidiary of a bigger advertising conglomerate called WPP, which is based out in London. I’m working in what’s called the associates program at Ogilvy—it’s a rotation program, where every six months for 18 months they’ll be placing me in different departments to work and give me exposure to different opportunities such as in account management, production, user experience, data and analytics. Ogilvy works with a lot of big clients—one of their biggest clients right now is IBM; they’ve had a long-term relationship for decades. It’s a pretty prestigious company when it comes to the advertising space, and I’m grateful to be there.

Interview conducted, edited, and condensed by Kelly Prinz, FCRH ’15.

We connected with some of the countless Rams bringing people together to repair and lift up their communities.

A Pro Runner Blows the Whistle on Abusive Training Culture

In 2013, at age 17, Mary Cain was one of the top runners in the world, the youngest U.S. athlete ever to compete on a World Championships team. But soon after joining Nike’s elite Oregon Project to train with head coach Alberto Salazar, her health and her promising pro career deteriorated.

Her coaches forced her to lose weight, which led to the loss of her period for three years and stress-related injuries, including five broken bones, Cain said.

“You don’t go from losing weight to breaking bones in two days, right? There’s usually this long period of time where there’s this physical deterioration,” Cain said at Fordham’s ninth annual Sports Business Symposium, held virtually on March 25. “Throughout the day, I just was more prone to having silly things, like headaches, to just being more hungry, to being a little bit more irritated as a result, and to just being visibly fatigued.”

She began to dread the sport she had loved since fifth grade. Her physical, emotional, and mental health began to spiral downward. She developed an eating disorder and began to cut herself and have suicidal thoughts.

“What once had been something that came naturally to me, this beautiful experience … suddenly became a slog,” Cain said. “The longer that I was in this really circular system, the more my body broke down.”

Cain completed one year at the University of Portland while training with the Oregon Project before transferring to Fordham’s Gabelli School of Business, where she earned a bachelor’s degree in 2019. After moving to New York, she kept training with the Nike project until 2016.

In a November 2019 video piece for The New York Times, Cain said the all-male coaching staff, led by Salazar, did not include a certified sports psychologist or certified nutritionist, and that Salazar had tried to put her on birth control pills to lose weight and harmed her mental health by berating her and humiliating her in front of her fellow athletes.

“Women in sports are treated harsher when it comes to body image,” she said during the Fordham symposium in March. “And I believe the reason is mostly societal—the expectation to be a lighter weight is more attached to [women’s] looks and their meaning. And it’s this really toxic culture that I think permeates professional sports.”

After Cain’s story came out, many other women supported her claims, including Kara Goucher, an Olympic distance runner who had trained under the same Nike program. Salazar denied the allegations of abuse, but several weeks before Cain’s story was published, he received a four-year ban from the sport for doping violations, and Nike had already shut down the Oregon Project.

In January 2020, Nike completed an internal investigation of Cain’s allegations of abuse, and her story helped Nike identify initiatives to “do better in supporting female athletes,” including increasing the number of women coaches in sports and investing in scientific research into the impact of elite training on women and girls.

Today, Cain is the New York City community manager for Tracksmith, a running apparel company. She runs professionally as a member of USA Track & Field and continues to call for reforms, including having teams provide mental health counselors and sports psychologists who are separate from the coaching staff.

She said her goal in sharing her story is to make sure that no other athletes, particularly female athletes, have to go through the suffering she did.

“I hadn’t known that the situation was bad until somebody [told me], ‘That is bad. That shouldn’t happen to you.’ It’s normalized,” she said.

“I realized I didn’t want any other person out there to … be self-loathing, beat themselves up, and have this incredibly negative experience because they were under an emotionally abusive coach and almost didn’t know it.”

—Kelly Kultys, FCRH ’15

A Gun Violence Survivor Works to Heal Social Divisions

Lamont Young knows something about forgiveness and bridging interpersonal divides.

In 1993, he almost died after being shot seven times in the chest—point blank—by an acquaintance who was high on PCP. But he later found the strength to forgive his assailant, and in doing so, he was inspired to pursue a lifelong path of helping others.

That path eventually led him to the Graduate School of Education, where he earned a master’s degree in mental health counseling in 2018.

Then he made a career move that led to a personal transformation. He went to work with UNITE, a national initiative co-founded by Special Olympics Chairman Timothy Shriver that seeks to help Americans overcome divisions, and he gained a new perspective.

“I went in with this psychological approach to addressing the human condition and suffering caused by racism and discrimination. I had a burning desire to promote human dignity and shed light on segregation and dehumanization, but I was so caught up in my head trying to find ways to address this,” he said.

“Once I met with the UNITE team, I had a spiritual awakening. I started to address them not from my mind or from my heart, but from my spiritual background. It was transformative to understand that in spite of it all, we have to love, we still have to forgive.”

Young and his mother, Glenda, are featured in The Call to Unite: Voices of Hope and Awakening (Penguin Life/The Open Field), published in March. The book contains an interview with them conducted by Shriver, who knew Young from a young men’s group he once led in New Haven, Connecticut.

“A mother who raises a son who can take on the hardscrabble and often fatal streets of New Haven and not only come through it but come through it with forgiveness and an open heart—that’s a mother I want to learn from,” said Shriver, who spoke about the power of personal transformation at Fordham’s 2019 commencement ceremony, where he received an honorary doctorate.

Shriver said the book’s common thread is that when we treat ourselves and others with dignity, we unlock potential, even during disagreements.

“This is hard emotional, spiritual, political work,” he said. “If you want a quick solution, this is the wrong place. But if you want the best solution, there’s only one way, and that’s to unite.”

In addition to conducting research on dignity and respect for UNITE, Young works with people experiencing homelessness in New Haven at Columbus House and provides psychotherapy at Reliant Behavioral Health Community Service.

And he has learned about some new dimensions of forgiveness. “You can transgress against yourself by not forgiving yourself for some of the things that you haven’t done or some of the time you haven’t spent with your loved ones before they left this Earth,” he said. “I found that very powerful, to understand how to love and forgive yourself in the midst of turmoil and grief in order to free yourself.”

—Patrick Verel, GSAS ’15

A Nonprofit Leader Rescues Food Waste to Relieve Hunger, Promote Community

As the president and CEO of Community Solidarity, Jon Stepanian runs the largest vegetarian hunger relief program in the country. It’s a nonprofit he hopes doesn’t exist in a generation or two.

“When we started, we wanted to build a structure where we could theoretically put ourselves out of business in the communities where we operate,” Stepanian said. “We want to make sure that there’s going to be no need for us in 30 to 40 years if the community itself can take care of these needs.”

Based on Long Island, Community Solidarity rescues food from being wasted at supermarkets and farms and distributes it to people at food shares across four locations on Long Island and one in Bedford-Stuyvesant, Brooklyn. Each area, he says, is at risk of being a “food desert,” where fresh, nutritious, affordable food is hard to find.

“We rescue food waste because it’s common sense—it’s cheap to do it. But on a more philosophical level, on a more economic level, this is why people in our communities are struggling. We see it as a fundamental problem in our system that’s making people in our community poor and hurting people overseas and also destroying our environment by producing large quantities of stuff that we don’t need,” he said.

“We’re trying to rescue a small portion of that waste and repurpose it for something good, like feeding our neighbors, but we’re also trying to expose the problem.”

Stepanian knew he wanted to focus on helping local communities after graduating from Fordham. As an undergraduate, he studied history and political science—and an internship at the United Nations and a stint working at the American Civil Liberties Union gave him perspective on working within the intergovernmental and nonprofit sectors. Shortly after college, he and his friends started a Food Not Bombs chapter on Long Island, occasionally setting up a food distribution table on weekends.

Before long, he realized he needed to create a more sustainable structure to keep the food distribution going. Community Solidarity, with its 501(c)3 nonprofit status, was born out of this realization, although Stepanian said that a nonhierarchical structure was important from the outset.

“When we decided to become a nonprofit, we said we wanted no lines of demarcation between who can volunteer and who can get food,” he said. “We wanted to make it so you wouldn’t be able to tell if someone’s volunteering or in need or both.”

In a 2018 TEDxNYU talk, Stepanian talked about what he called “the myth of scarcity,” and how a communal response can not only address hunger but also help to create a deeper sense of belonging among neighbors.

“We’re also trying to raise awareness by saying that we will, in 10 years, be the largest hunger relief organization in the country, and we’re doing it for a thousandth of the price that the food banks are doing it, all because of this waste,” Stepanian said.

“This is how abundant that system of waste is. We want to make it eye-opening for people.”

—Adam Kaufman, FCLC ’08

A Familiar Face Offers Financial Literacy Training to Fellow Women of Color

As a young woman growing up in Brooklyn, Felicia Gomes-Gregory knew she wanted two things: to attend Fordham University and to work as a computer scientist. She achieved both.

But now, more than 30 years later, Gomes-Gregory is focused on something new, which she calls her passion project: Heels and Higher Achievement, a nonprofit that empowers women and people of color by helping them learn about finance.

Her path to forming the nonprofit started in 2016, when she received what she calls a blessing in disguise. After a decades-long career at various financial firms in New York City, she was laid off from Neuberger Berman, an employee-owned investment management firm.

She asked herself what she would do next. “In my heart, I’ve always wanted to … get more women involved in technology or finance, and especially women of color, because I never saw anybody that looked like me—or not enough of it,” Gomes-Gregory said.

She kicked off Heels and Higher Achievement (HHA) in 2018, determined to make financial literacy fun while giving a voice to those in her community who are empowering young women in tech, finance, STEM, media, or “whatever it is that they want to do,” she said. “I wanted to create a forum so that people can speak, but mainly speak about financial education.”

That first year, she conducted in-person workshops at schools, churches, and “anywhere anyone would hear me,” Gomes-Gregory said. She’d speak about basic financial literacy concepts and invite people to schedule a complimentary financial review—a kind of “GPS of your money,” she said, “to make sure you can stop working for money at some point and [let]money work for you.”

She also launched an ambassador program to give young girls opportunities to network with professionals and serve their communities through volunteer work. But COVID-19 meant pivoting to online events and workshops in 2020.

In April, HHA sponsored its second annual series of online workshops for Financial Literacy Month, including, for the first time, programming for men. “[Because] of all of the things that were happening in the Black community— between George Floyd, the social issues, COVID—men need to talk, too,” she said.

The digital programming has gone well, she said. She’s hoping to launch a YouTube channel and resume in-person events soon.

“I’m learning that self-care and self-preservation—from a financial, physical, mental, and spiritual [standpoint]—are so very important,” she said. “And I didn’t learn this until I was 50. So, now I’m teaching all of the young ’uns. ‘Take care of yourself first. You’re important.’”

—Sierra McCleary-Harris

Students Share Their Expertise with Bronx Businesses

When the pandemic upended everything in March 2020, Rich Shrestha was working on a research project about consumer behavior in the Bronx. As the economy went into a tailspin, his mind went back to his childhood in New Haven, Connecticut, where his father ran a Subway franchise for a decade.

“I saw him always grinding away every day, putting in 12-hour days. So, I can sympathize with the small business owners who are trying to survive in the age of COVID,” he said.

Shrestha, a rising senior majoring in economics at Fordham College at Rose Hill and a member of the University’s Social Innovation Collaboratory, reached out to friends he thought might be interested in helping small businesses.

Diontay Santiago, then a senior majoring in marketing at the Gabelli School of Business, was one of those who answered the call. In June 2020, they launched the Fordham Business Development Collaboratory. The student-run group, comprising more than 70 members, is split into teams that assist clients with finance, marketing, compliance, technology, and communications. Students offer their advice free of charge, relying on lessons they’ve learned in classes. They also conduct research, develop industry reports, and create case studies and videos for Bronx businesses.

For Santiago, who graduated from Fordham in May and had served as president of ASILI, the Black Student Alliance, the group has been a way to lift up the borough he has called home his whole life. “Doing this sort of thing weds the school to its actual geographic location and allows it to give back to the community it’s inhabited for the last two centuries or so. So when Rich presented me with the opportunity to work with him, I jumped at it.”

The group’s clients have included restaurants, nonprofits, a software company, and an insurance firm. In addition to word-of mouth and its website (fordhambdc.org), the group has connected with clients through the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation.

Sadibou Sylla, the interim director of Fordham’s Social Innovation Collaboratory and an adjunct professor at the Gabelli School, said that all who contribute to the group personify what it means to be a “changemaker.”

“They understand that it is only in serving all that we serve ourselves,” he said, “and that business is nothing but an instrument for helping society.”

Shrestha is optimistic that the group will live on long after he and his classmates graduate.

“This is an opportunity to gain an understanding of the community you’re in, and how we can be a better part of it and better neighbors,” he said. “I think a lot of students are starting to realize how important that is.”

—Patrick Verel, GSAS ’15

Do you know a Fordham “Changemaker”?
Who are the unsung Rams working to foster collaboration and change in your community? Tell us about the people whose stories you’d like us to share. Write to us at [email protected].

“I was 8 years old when he first bought it, so I saw him always grinding away every day, putting in 12-hour days. So, I can sympathize with the small business owners who are trying to survive in the age of COVID,” he said.

“I saw on my social media channels that friends of mine had parents who were suffering, and they were doing things like advertising for them on Instagram.”

Shrestha, a junior economics major at Fordham College at Rose Hill who’d been working with Fordham’s Social Innovation Collaboratory, reached out to friends he thought might be interested in helping small businesses. Diontay Santiago, a senior majoring in marketing at the Gabelli School of Business, was one of those who answered the call.

A Student-Led Initiative

In June, they launched the Fordham Business Development Collaboratory. The new initiative, which has a core group of 10 or so students, is split into teams responsible for assisting clients in the areas of finance, marketing, compliance, technology, and most recently, communications. Students offer their advice free of charge, relying on lessons they’ve learned in classes.

For Santiago, who is also the president of ASILI, the Black Student Alliance, the business collaboratory is more than a way to burnish his resume. It’s also way to lift up the borough he has called home his whole life.

“When you’re living in the community, you can see firsthand the debilitating effects of certain things, and you want to do everything you can to alleviate it and use all the resources that are at your disposal,” said the native Bronxite.

“Doing this sort of thing weds the school to its actual geographic location and allows it to give back to the community it’s inhabited for the last two centuries or so. So when Rich presented me with the opportunity to work with him, I jumped at it. This is something that not only looks good on a resume and is a good experience; it’s relevant to my home and my people.”

The collaboratory currently has eight clients, ranging from restaurants to small independent merchants to nonprofit groups. In addition to word-of-mouth referrals and an intake form on its website, the group has also connected to clients through the South Bronx Overall Economic Development Corporation.

Helping a Restauranter Increase Brand Awareness

One of their first clients was Seis Vecinos, a Central American restaurant in the South Bronx. Omar Canales, who opened the restaurant eight years ago with his cousin and expanded into a larger location four years ago, said the pandemic had forced him to “kick into overdrive” efforts to increase brand awareness and promote popular dishes such as its papusas. They met with the Fordham students three times over Zoom this past summer.

“I was able to get a different angle how we can better present ourselves online, through search engine optimization and our social media. I also got some extremely helpful pointers when it comes to the main splash page on our webpage,” he said.

He said he appreciated technical advice such as slowing down the transition between photos on the main page of the restaurant’s website.

“They also did their own analysis comparing us to our neighboring restaurants, in terms of how and where we can improve our search. Using more Latin American keywords, or using Latin food keywords, or emphasizing more of our menu items, so we appear even higher up, or just as high as other establishments that are offering the same dishes that we are,” he said.

Canales said it’s hard to point to any one suggestion that has driven growth, given how chaotic times are for restaurants these days. But he said the FBDC team’s suggestions have improved the experience of customers, which is ultimately what matters most.

What It Means to Be an Agent of Change

Sadibou Sylla, adjunct professor at the Gabelli School and interim director of Fordham’s Social Innovation Collaboratory, said that Shrestha, Santiago, and all the students who contribute to the FBDC personify what it means to be a “changemaker.” The idea, which Fordham embraced when it joined the Ashoka network of schools, is to tackle societal problems through an interdisciplinary approach.

When the pandemic hit, Sylla convened the students he’d been advising into a COVID-19 taskforce. One of the ideas that came out that group’s meetings was the FBDC. The idea resonated in a special way, he said, because Fordham was founded to educate immigrants in the Bronx community, and today, the majority of businesses in the Bronx are owned by immigrants.

It’s also win-win because students gain real-life experience that they wouldn’t get in a classroom.

“I tell students, when you graduate, the most important question you’re going to answer in your job interview is, ‘What is so unique about you? What’s your story?’” he said.

“And the story is not that you went to Fordham and had this major and had this GPA. The story is you created a structure that helps small businesses to overcome the challenges of the pandemic.”

Working with Shrestha and Santiago was very easy, he said.

“They understand that it is only in serving all that we serve ourselves They understand that business is nothing but an instrument for helping society.”

Shrestha said that after a burst of activity over the summer, the group slowed down when classes resumed in the fall and everyone had less free time. Now though, he feels they’ve reached an equilibrium both in membership and clientele, and he’s optimistic that it will live on after he and Santiago graduate.

“This is an opportunity to gain an understanding of the community you’re in [as a Fordham student], and how we can be a better part of it and better neighbors,” he said.

“I think a lot of students are starting to realize how important that is, especially after all the things that happened this summer.”