Alumni Profile: Different Dream

Anish Malpani, BBA ’12, dropped his corporate job in New York City to work for a nonprofit fighting poverty in Quetzaltenango, Guatemala

By Jenna Sharp

Anish Malpani followed the path he thought he was supposed to follow: After growing up in India, he attended college in the United States, studied business and made good grades, landed a corporate job and was promoted, and moved to New York City.

“The experience I had was amazing,” Malpani says. “I did everything from big transactions to corporate finance to internal operational finance, restructuring, and launching verticals. And I really lived the New York life. I enjoyed the fruits of my labors.”

But as time went by, the satisfactions of “conventional success,” seemed less and less important. “I was starting to feel that my life didn’t have a purpose,” Malpani says.

So, after five years in the corporate world, he decided to pursue a different path.

With minimal knowledge of the language or the people, Malpani moved to Quetzaltenango, Guatemala, to work for the nonprofit Alterna Impact. “I plan to spend the rest of my life fighting poverty and working on poverty alleviation through economic empowerment and the power of social enterprise,” Malpani says. “At Alterna, I’m leveraging the experience that I had in corporate America to make a difference in the world.”

Since beginning his new job last year, Malpani has helped local entrepreneurs find their financial footing, including the initiators of a telemedicine enterprise connecting doctors to rural Guatemalan towns lacking access to health care, using a version of Skype. And he’s doing it all in Spanish, a language he studied only briefly in college.

But he’s not stopping there: Malpani plans to spend time in Africa next, with hopes to eventually end up back home in India.

“In the end, if the company is small or big, a social enterprise or non-social enterprise, everybody needs finance, right? I have that skill to offer,” says Malpani. “Making this life change is the best decision I’ve ever made and I’ve never been happier, never been more content.”

This article appeared in the fall issue of McCombs magazine. Click on the link to see the full issue.