Twenty years later: How a Kellogg class project grew into a global anti-hunger movement
At Kellogg, a good idea rarely succeeds alone. It gets picked up by a classmate, backed by a professor, funded by an alumnus — and if it's good enough, it eventually becomes something the next generation of students builds on. Twenty years ago, that cycle started for one idea in particular: a business plan to help Africa's smallholder farmers grow their way out of hunger.
Andrew Youn '06 MBA developed that plan with classmate Matt Forti '06 MBA in a Kellogg entrepreneurship course, rallying 140 fellow students to become the venture's first donors before either of them had a job offer to fall back on. By May 2006, with graduation days away, Youn faced a decision: assemble whatever conventional job path he still could, or bet everything on the idea he and Forti had built. Standing at Boston's Logan Airport, he chose the latter — skipping his own graduation ceremony to fly to Bungoma, Kenya, and launch One Acre Fund.
Today, One Acre Fund reaches 5.9 million smallholder farmers a year across 10 African countries and employs more than 10,000 full-time staff. Farmers enrolled in its full-service program — which bundles financing, farm inputs, training and market access — typically increase their income and assets by more than 35% in a single season. The organization's own founders trace nearly every stage of that growth back to one place: Kellogg — and to a network that has kept paying its success forward ever since.
“Kellogg is where I found my purpose in life. Our success is Northwestern’s success, and Northwestern’s success is our success.”
A conference, an internship, an idea
Youn's path to One Acre Fund started with curiosity, not a plan. An Abbott Labs guest lecture on global health during his first year at Kellogg pulled him toward a summer internship in South Africa, setting up HIV/AIDS clinics with the social enterprise BroadReach Healthcare — funded in part by the Kellogg school’s nonprofit internship program. A classmate suggested he extend the trip to rural western Kenya. There, Youn met two neighboring farmers whose lives had taken starkly different paths: one family was going hungry, the other had a surplus to sell. The difference wasn't effort. It was access to quality seed, fertilizer and the right techniques.
Youn returned to campus that fall determined to close that gap. He wrote to Professor Barry Merkin asking to enroll in Entrepreneurship and New Ventures, the capstone course of the Larry and Carol Levy Institute for Entrepreneurial Practice at Kellogg — even though the course wasn't designed with nonprofits in mind. Merkin agreed, moved by Youn's conviction. By December 2005, Youn and a team of classmates had finished One Acre Fund's first business plan. It went on to win first place at four national competitions, including Kellogg's own SC Johnson Award for Socially Responsible Business.
Classmates who became a nonprofit social enterprise
What happened next looked less like a class project and more like a startup finding its founding team. Forti, whom Youn had met on a Kellogg pre-orientation trip, took the lead on U.S. operations and built the “Sponsor a Farmer” program, asking classmates to give $20 a month — the projected cost of serving one farm family for a year. By graduation, those same 140 students had signed on as an early investment council.
Drawing on coursework from Professor Ben Jones' International Business Strategy in Non-Market Environments, Professor Liz Howard's Nonprofit Fundraising & Marketing and Professor Anne Cohn Donnelly's Board Governance class, Forti recruited an initial Board of Directors made up almost entirely of Kellogg classmates — nine in total, including Diana Lee, who named the organization. Rather than serving as passive advisors, board members took on operating roles in accounting, marketing and fundraising, freeing Youn to focus on the ground-level work in Kenya.
The turning point came in May 2006, when the Levy Institute invited Youn to pitch his plan to its board. “My goal is to eradicate starvation in Africa,” he opened. Institute co-founder Larry Levy still remembers the line: “He got to everybody's heart that was in the room.” The pitch secured One Acre Fund its first institutional grant, paired with a two-year Echoing Green Fellowship stipend — enough runway for Youn to move to Kenya full time.
An alumni network that kept showing up
If Kellogg incubated the idea, its alumni network built the organization.
In 2008, classmates Keech Combe MBA ’06 and Akshay Shetty MBA ’06 asked their wedding guests to donate to One Acre Fund in lieu of traditional gifts, a move the couple describe as a “no-brainer”.
Early supporters Becky and Lester Knight ’87 MBA took a trust-based approach, simply asking Youn what he needed most; their gift funded One Acre Fund's first truck, letting the team deliver inputs to remote farmers directly.
The Kellogg Career Management Center connected Youn to agribusiness executives Carol and Mike Anderson, who in turn introduced him to CF Industries CEO and Northwestern Trustee Steve Wilson ’70, MBA ’74 — a relationship that continues today, with CF Industries as lead sponsor of One Acre Fund's annual Chicago gala. That gala, first held in 2007 at a restaurant owned by the Levy family, has aised more than $10 million between 2015 and 2025, making it Chicago's largest annual event supporting global causes.
The Kellogg alumni magazine captured this dynamic as early as 2011, describing One Acre Fund as flourishing under the “Kellogg effect” as alumni-to-alumni introductions repeatedly solved the organization's hardest operational problems — from fertilizer sourcing to capital structure.
Faculty got involved in their own ways, too. Professor Harry Kraemer featured Youn in his 2011 book From Values to Action and has since pledged all of his speaking fees and book royalties — roughly $300,000 a year since 2015 — to the organization. In 2018, then-Northwestern President Morton Schapiro invited Youn and Forti to address the full university Board of Trustees, opening doors to leaders in fundraising, insurance and global affairs.
Many other members of the Northwestern and Kellogg networks have become anchor supporters of One Acre Fund: Northwestern Trustee Muneer Satter and Kristen Hertel; Former Associate Dean for Corporate Partnerships and Career Management Roxanne Hori; Northwestern Life Trustee and Kellogg Global Advisory Board member Bon French ’75, ’76 MBA; and Northwestern Trustee Steven Cahillane ’87 and Tracy Tappan Cahillane ’88.
The results speak for themselves: One Acre Fund grew from 38 farm families served in its 2006 pilot to more than 5.9 million today, with a projected 6.4 million by year's end. In 2010, the organization received the Skoll Award for Social Entrepreneurship, along with a $765,000 grant that Youn said would “help raise our visibility and attract new supporters.”
A legacy that keeps reproducing itself
The story didn't end with One Acre Fund's growth — it became a template. In 2014, Trustee Chris Combe ’70 and his family established the Youn Impact Scholars program, which today supports a network of 130 Kellogg changemakers working in social impact. Through that network, Forti learned of the MacArthur Foundation's Catalytic Capital Consortium, which selected One Acre Fund for its inaugural 2020 cohort.
Northwestern alumni have joined One Acre Fund's own ranks, too. Emilie Umuhire ’18, who first read about the organization as a freshman, went on to lead its recruitment efforts in Rwanda, her home country. And in January 2025, Ada Osakwe ’11 MBA was named the organization's Board Chair.
Youn and Forti have started paying that support forward directly, too. Through the Impact Scholars program, they've mentored leaders like Saumya, co-founder of Kheyti, a venture deploying greenhouses to help smallholder farmers in India — the same cycle that built One Acre Fund, now nurturing someone else's idea.
Today, roughly 80% of Kellogg's student body takes part in social impact coursework each year through initiatives like the Social Impact & Responsible Leadership Specialization, launched in 2015 with more than 34 courses. The school backs that commitment with real capital — including a $75,000 award for new social entrepreneurs and loan forgiveness programs designed to let graduates choose mission-driven careers without the weight of student debt.
What it takes to build the next One Acre Fund
Reflecting on what made this possible, classmate Akshay Shetty points to two ingredients: senior leadership willing to measure success by impact rather than revenue, and a culture that rewards collaboration over competition. “It's usually a lot more competitive than that,” said Becky Knight, of typical MBA programs. “I think Northwestern drives a collaboration that is unique.”
One Acre Fund now aims to generate $1 billion in annual financial gain for 10 million farm families by 2030, alongside a billion cumulative trees planted. Youn is direct about where the credit belongs.
“When most people think of higher education, they think about academics, and professors and students ... but in our experience, Northwestern and Kellogg are about creating tangible and immediate benefit in human society, he says. “Universities have this incredible power to create global social change, on some of the world's most pressing problems.”
Twenty years after a phone call changed the course of his career, Youn's story remains one Kellogg points to as proof of what a business school ecosystem — coursework, classmates, faculty and a lifetime of alumni goodwill — can build when it rallies around one idea. And, 20 years later, it's still circling back to build the next one.