Decrease font Decrease font
Decrease font Decrease font
Enlarge font Enlarge font
Enlarge font Enlarge font

Thunderbird grad Andrew WulfThunderbird student Andrew Wulf received more than just a diploma on graduation day May 2.

He and three friends he met in the Peace Corps also received second prize in the 2008 Social Innovation Competition at the University of Texas.

More than 1,200 students representing 97 colleges and universities competed to produce the "most compelling new idea to change the world."

Wulf’s team took the $7,500 second prize for developing Planting Empowerment, a business that aims to reduce deforestation in Panama by creating financial incentives for rural landowners to participate in sustainable timber production.

"You can’t tell a farmer to conserve the rainforest when he’s got a family to feed back home," Wulf says.

Planting Empowerment recruits U.S. investors to lease land in Panama. The company then plants, harvests and sells the timber over a 25-year investment cycle.

Wulf says half the profits go back to the community through projects such as aqueducts and bridges.

He says his friends in the Peace Corps developed the business plan while they worked together in the Darien region of Panama.

"They thought there must be an economic incentive for poor landowners to break the cycle of slash-and-burn agriculture destroying the rainforest and rich biodiversity of the Darien," Wulf says. "They also saw how the communities did not share in the huge profits generated by the logging companies hauling old growth trees out daily."

Wulf says he came to Thunderbird in 2006 with the business plan in mind and helped refine it with his partners using techniques he learned in his global management classes.

Wulf’s partners include Chris Meyer, who just finished a master of arts at John Hopkins University; Damion Croston, who attends Ohio University; and Andrew Parrucci of Washington, D.C.

"It feels great to have somebody say our idea can work," Wulf says. "The judges saw our idea and saw that it’s scalable – not just in Panama, but outside Panama."

Two students from the University of Virginia won the $50,000 grand prize for developing a system that uses rice husks as fuel to generate electricity in rural India.