Nathan Cryder ‘06
Executive Director, Global Gain and Nash-Brighton Project
“I entered the Patterson School following a year in Cyprus and four years with tech start-ups, intent on learning how to use the business skills I acquired working in the technology sector to help the poor. I imagined myself working at a large development NGO or in the UN system, until Iwas inspired in my studies by the recent social entrepreneurship literature. This set me on an entirely new path, still focused on development and inequalities, but committed to working at a small, cutting-edge, highly-entrepreneurial organization. Little did I know that I would have the opportunity – while in my final semester at the Patterson School – to set up and run a new NGO focused on health and development projects in India.”
India
“In 2006, I joined two Indian physicians to found the non-profit humanitarian organization Global Gain. Our shared vision was to assemble a social entrepreneur organization that could develop and spread blueprints for social change. We focused first on underserved populations in India, creating an innovative model to help eradicate exploitative child labor from India’s poorest villages and to ensure children were enrolled in school. The ‘adaptive blueprinting’ we established in Rajasthan has now been used by Ashoka (the network of social entrepreneurs) in other parts of India and Africa, successfully spreading creative ideas developed in one geographic region to another where they can be adapted to yield the greatest impact.”
Jamaica
“My current top priority is the Nash-Brighton Project, an effort to address the dire poverty and sense of hopelessness that marks the village of Brighton in Saint Elizabeth Parish, Jamaica. This project fuses elements of Greg Mortenson and Muhammad Yunus. We are building a new community center and pre-school, but also setting up a microfinance operation to breathe economic vitality into a community that has known precious little. If all goes according to plan, small loans at low interest rates should enable poor village residents to become entrepreneurs and advance steps to make Brighton a self-sustaining tourist destination. This could become a model for similar villages across the Caribbean.”
“International development is my passion. Although Jesus said we will always have the poor with us, projects such as these can at least make the number of poor smaller.”
In 2012, Nathan Cryder turned his talents to improving state government and is now serving as senior policy advisor to the Auditor of Public Accounts of the Commonwealth of Kentucky.
