Nonprofit founder speaks on success

Greg Forbes Siegman, philanthropist and Internet entrepreneur, spoke at Frist Campus Center Thursday afternoon about The First Thirty, a recently-published inspirational book by Jillip Paxson that recounts the story of a Princeton-reject turned social entrepreneur.

Seigman runs the 11-10-02 foundation, a nonprofit that raises scholarships for students from working-class Chicago neighborhoods by selling milkshakes for $10,000 each. He is also founder and CEO of IdeaList Enterprises, an Internet startup that oversees a number of business websites.

Siegman said in his lecture that he did not always intend to be a philanthropist, yet his parents held high expectations for him.

His father gave him the middle name of Forbes, after Malcolm Forbes '41, in an attempt to inspire him to attend Princeton and become a successful businessman.

He was rejected from every university he applied to.

He entered Tulane University, however, where Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke's Louisiana gubernatorial campaign roused a spirit of social consciousness in him and he began to volunteer at local public schools.

After sophomore year he transferred to Northwestern University, seeking a more elite college. There, he gave up everything but academics, and though he graduated first in his class, he learned that prestige was not enough.

Though his father wanted him to join corporate America after graduation, Siegman had decided to be a teacher.

After a year of substitute teaching in struggling Chicago public schools, he sabotaged the job interviews that he promised his father he would attend. At one, he told the interviewer he would bring working-class children to board meetings. At another, he jumped rope. At a third, he juggled bagels.

He returned to teaching.

Siegman began his first nonprofit after he took two black 10-year-old students to brunch. At the upscale restaurant, a white woman moved her purse away, "as if they had already stolen something," he said.

Although Siegman now wonders whether it was actually racism, he was so angry at the time that he started The Brunch Bunch to bring students from the working-class, largely black neighborhood of Cabrini-Green to brunch at what he said was "literally the other side of the tracks."

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The 11-10-20 foundation was inspired by a night at a diner when Siegman met a homeless man who recognized him from newspapers, and toasted his work by drinking Siegman's milkshake.

The nonprofit that Siegman founded afterwards holds gala dinners which end in Siegman inviting the audience to a local diner for milkshakes.

He extended the same invitation at the University yesterday, inviting students to join him at Thomas Sweets.

Siegman's visit to campus was organized by Kris Ekdahl '07, who worked with the 11-10-20 foundation during high school, and supported by the Entreprenuership Club, which awarded Siegman a Social Entreprenurship award yesterday.

"I've been trying to get [Siegman] to speak here ever since I came to Princeton," Ekdahl said. "He's not someone you'd read about on the front page of a newspaper, but he has an equally compelling story. This is about using entrepreneurship skills in a different way."