Richard A Webb 

Richard A. Webb is president and founder of ProWorld Service Corps, a US based social enterprise which matches the development needs of poor communities with the growing demand for volunteer travel.

Born in Lima, Richard became a professional soccer player in Hong Kong, Peru and Sweden after graduating from Vassar College with a BA in History. Following a brief but rewarding soccer career, he went on to pursue his interest in development work with Visions Service Adventures – a US-based organisation that utilizes volunteers to meet the development needs of poverty-stricken communities. This experience helped to shape the model upon which The ProPeru Service Corps was built in 1998, the first of the six country sites that constitute ProWorld’s hybrid organisation.

Richard decided to do an MBA because he felt he needed a sound knowledge base in order to continue to grow his enterprise responsibly. He heard about the Skoll Scholarships from a former employee and Skoll Scholar, Keely Stevenson, and decided to apply. “Despite having been a social entrepreneur myself for some years before attending the programme, the actual term ‘social entrepreneurship’ and the amazing things happing globally in the sector were all quite new to me,” he says. “The programme was a revelation and an introduction into a community that I did not know existed.”

“The professors and the coursework were enormously stimulating and satisfying,” Richard says of his year in Oxford. He found the Entrepreneurship Project that forms a compulsory part of the course particularly rewarding. Richard together with a small team of classmates looked at the viability of a fair trade chacaca brand, a project that involved visiting small producers in remote parts of northern Brazil and interviewing individuals in the supply and sales chain in New York and London.

After graduating, Richard returned to his company and spent two months using his newly gained skills to assess where the organisation was and to plot a course for continued growth. “My time as a Skoll Scholar helped me to think more strategically and understand the benefits of diversifying our risk through by broadening our business activities,” he says.

For the future he plans to demonstrate that volunteer travel can and should strive to create greater good in the communities in which that travel takes place. He is also working on a government, private sector and NGO initiative that harnesses the opportunities of carbon markets to finance unprecedented investment in the rural poor of Peru.